The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi

Abstract

become homeowners. Street marches and assemblies are insurgent mobilization practices while pobladores wait for the right to the city, characterized by demanding homeownership in their neighborhoods of origin without being displaced. At the same time, housing movements engaged on an institutional level by constituting comit es de allegados (state-regulated housing committees) and applying for housing subsidies. Indeed, “the poor engage subversively with state programs, transforming state-regulated assemblies into right-to-the-city organizations” (p. 85). Through his ethnographic work, the author identifies that the pobladores’ identity is an ethical and political matter. By describing the pobladores’ engagement in the housing struggles, the author proposes a shift from the traditional perspective of pobladores as a unified identity based on a class-territory category of the urban poor. Moreover, the author recognizes effort-based narratives where “pobladores operated as an assemblage of political and moral obligations by individuals to the community" (p. 123), which determines who has the right to have rights within and outside of the organization. Similarly, P erez reflects on how pobladores reformulate their demands by struggling for a life with dignity, not as a matter of “subhuman” living conditions (p. 155), but rather to be recognized as a political and social producer of the space, empowering communities to decide on their own lives. The Right to Dignity is a book that questions planners and housing policymakers on how urban governance and housing programs are established today. P erez’s reflections are an invitation to address the limitations of transforming the urban debate toward a democratized perspective of planning and to grasp an opportunity to involve communities in the city-making process. Indeed, the book contributes to reflecting on the role and recognition of pobladores and housing movements in the actual urban contexts of neoliberal policies, understanding that there is not a romanticization of the action of the social movements but rather a new moment on the social and political characterization of housing activists in Chile. Moreover, the recognition of pobladores as a housing movement that does not rely upon self-building construction but contests for recognition, fighting the policies of displacement and segregation, struggling for the right to stay put. It also contributes to scholarship of the Global South, where housing policies via a subsidy system are expanding; at the same time, social movements are empowering themselves to achieve social recognition. Likewise, the Chilean case can be relevant for those studying the transformation of social movements today, their linkage with the historical and genealogical past, and how it affects the identification and narratives of the movements today. As an ethnographic work, the book provides insight into how the transformations of housing policies and social movements are directly intertwined. Moreover, considering the social uprising of October 2019 in Chile, where neoliberal policies were questioned by the most massive social mobilization in decades, scrutinizing the role and transformation of pobladores and housing activists should be at the center of the housing and planning discussion today.