City & Society最新文献

I attend to the dialectics between precarity, urban sociality, and digital technology (le numérique) in Kinshasa. Tech engineers, and those aspiring to become one, dream of solvent futures. They share a desire to leave various forms of precarity behind and attempt to produce new urban futures by means of tech skills and digital technologies. Especially the lack of trust in urban others is considered a problem solvable with mobile phone applications and other kinds of software. Kinois tech inventiveness draws on an interpretation of the city as a social space of entrapment. The proposed solutions consist of a strategy that I call “short-cutting” of social relations, a method that involves replacing a human intermediary with a machine. Unfortunately, tech capitalism sets its own traps for Kinshasa’s tech engineers. The very particular forms of precarity from which these ingénieurs want to escape are perpetuated in the digital sphere; would-be digital innovators remain trapped.

In Cairo, tombs provide shelter to generations of displaced Egyptians who invest energy and resources toward transforming cemeteries into societies. Drawing on ethnographic research carried out with informal tomb residents between 2008–2013, this article explores entanglements of life and death through three women’s case studies. Through an examination of what residents call “living-death,” I show how experiences of precarity make dying an integral part of living. Although scholars have discussed communities of “living dead,” my research in a cemetery illustrates this concept in an almost literal way, and demonstrates that women’s bodies, homes, livelihoods, and relationships are embedded in processes of death, dying, and decay. My analysis shows that negotiations and contestations over various linkages between life and death—including health, heritage, and housing—are central to experiences of precarity. I engage the nuanced ways these tensions play out and highlight the creative strategies women have cultivated to survive in a space of death.

This article discusses the changes in Visionário, a favela located near the affluent neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, to assess the effects of the Sports Mega Events (SMEs) on the political and economic conditions in the favela. Following Harvey’s (2005) description of “accumulation by dispossession,” several authors have highlighted that the UPP policing program, implemented before the SMEs, was part of neoliberal efforts to colonize favela territory with the prospect of future gain. Visionário has witnessed two consecutive policing programs (GPAE and UPP) in the past twenty years. Both were aimed at disarming the drugs-gang members who attempt to rule the favela by force. The ethnography in this article shows that both policing programs started ambitiously, yet gradually police officers withdrew and gang members reoccupied strategic positions in the favela. As a result, residents learnt to deal with ongoing territorial shifts in a highly dense urban space and with the liminal presence of police officers. In my analysis, I argue that in terms of neoliberal strategies to accumulate favela territory by dispossession, this case suggests a failure, and I analyze the struggle over favela territory as the outcome of contradictory forces connected to global neoliberalization.

The rapidly expanding Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa is very much the product of urban precarity. Indeed, most people only end up there after having exhausted other options. Striking, however, is how residents have, in recent years, discursively and materially constructed the suburb as an idyllic urban place in the making, so much so that Inhapossa has become one of the most coveted neighborhoods in the area. This article proposes an ethnographic reflection on urban precarity that draws on theories “from the South” and extends the notion of suburb to the shifting urban edge in Mozambique. It examines how local land struggles have created new opportunities for people from very different backgrounds, and whose lives became entangled in unexpected life-enhancing ways, to craft better futures for themselves and their families. Locating the transformative potential of urban precarity in the work of attuning one’s aspirations with one’s circumstances, it shows how the suburb—a space of aspirational compromise—can become a space of aspirational achievement.

This article provides an introduction to the theoretical and substantive issues raised by the four articles collected here and places them in the context of the evolving debates over right to the city in the Latin American region. We assess some of the commonalities and differences between the articles, with regard to the right to the city as both a language of struggle and a theoretical framework. We also consider the rapidly changing context of the right to the city in the region and possibilities for future research and action.

Brazil’s City Statute enshrines the “right to the city” and the “social function of property” in its constitution. Brazilian scholars, however, identify barriers to achieving the law’s agenda. Broader debates regarding the right to the city suggest the concept has been overextended beyond meaning, and that formalization of the right to the city betrays its radical Lefebvrian roots. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in Rio de Janeiro when widespread forced evictions were being carried out prior to the city’s hosting of the 2016 Summer Olympics. Based on observations within eleven housing occupations, and sixty interviews with participants, leaders of social movement organizations, and local politicians, the article argues that the “constitutionalization” of the right to the city and the social function of property formed the basis for the politicization of dispossessed urban residents. The social function of property was a particularly salient concept for capturing the injustice of the planned relocation of the displaced poor to the urban periphery, while countless buildings sat underutilized in the city center.