Everyday scalar politics: navigating insecurity in the competitive city

This contribution asks how urban inhabitants (trans)form their everyday practices in the face of insecurity in Neoliberal Urbanism. Based on the analysis of interviews conducted in the Southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, which has seen enormous rises in property prices, short-term rentals, and numbers of tourists, I argue that urban dwellers adapt to asymmetrical manifestations of insecurity through care networks and adapted mobilities, and such everyday practices sometimes turn into more collective, political practices. By combining feminist perspectives on everyday practices in austerity, relational geographies, and work on everyday responses to insecurity, I develop the notion of "everyday scalar politics' to offer a relational reading of city-dwellers' practices in the competitive city. The concept highlights that those not participating in formal governance decisions, do enact political agency, and reach beyond their neighbourhood and the local state, unsettling assumptions of passivity.