ABSTRACT
Speed is fundamental to shaping visions of the modern city and of contemporary urban life. Notions of speed and acceleration have produced distinct conceptualizations of gentrification as a route to city sanitization and beautification. In this chapter, I examine what speed looks like from the margins, when seen through the struggles of young women in the urban peripheries who are coping with the precarity of working in the city, while negotiating deeply entrenched gender power relations within the home. By examining how speed is conceptualized through the trope of the “smart safe city” and what this means for those living in the digital and urban margins, I examine how a negotiation of time becomes fundamental to those left in the margins of gentrification.
