At the frontiers of everyday life

Abstract Today’s neoliberal cities are particularly hostile and abusive in spaces of reproduction, exerting great urban pressure on various strategic areas to continue conquering new capital. This chapter seeks to understand life on the margins of cities by embracing the domesticity of five migrant women who share a precarious socio-economic situation in a sewing workshop in the Les Roquetes neighbourhood, on the outskirts of Barcelona. Often, margins are places of repression, dispossession, and urban violence, but they can also be places of an underlying everyday resistance, and this way of conceiving marginality becomes essential for those who inhabit them. The combination of qualitative research methods—life stories, semi-structured interviews and participant observation—with more experimental ones—women’s self-documentation with disposable cameras and go-alongs—has allowed a better understanding of the complexities of living and surviving in these margins. They have generated a narrative in the first person, and hence, they have revealed the people in their care, their struggles, their imaginaries, informal support networks, the precarious housing and work situation, their routes, and the uncertainty that crosses their lives. Ultimately, the aim is to show to which extent the invisibility of the visible is invisible in today’s cities.