City & Society最新文献

This article draws on ethnography with active supporters of the comunas (communes) in Quito to critically engage with the theory and politics of the right to the city. Communal activists—mostly affiliated with the Indigenous movement—forcefully claim rights to the democratic production and appropriation of space advocated by right to the city theorists, as they promote communal self-management and the authority of communal assemblies over urbanization processes. At the same time, they have had little use for their constitutionally guaranteed right to the city. In carefully laying out the points of convergence between Lefebvrian right to the city theory and communal struggles, I also identify its limits and contradictions, especially: (1) the tension between “the collective power to reshape the process of urbanization” and the fixed forms and meanings of “the city,” and (2) the tension between achieving the “right to centrality” through promoting participation in a concentrated urban center or through the multiplication of centers. A critical theory of urbanization should account for these tensions and for the diversity of political responses to them.

The protagonist of Lefebvre’s “Right to the City” is the citaden, a citizen-denizen whose rights are produced through residency and incumbent contributions to everyday urban life. Yet, in the shantytowns of Lima where people have long believed that residency generates rights, what it means to “do residency” (hacer vivencia) is itself contested. Drawing on twenty-one months of fieldwork in the Limeño shantytown of Pachacútec, Peru, I show that “inhabitance” is a multidimensional construct and that the relationship between inhabitance and rights to spatial appropriation and political participation is a primary source of conflict, generating questions about community belonging, democratic representation, and the moral status of property transfers. Far from neatly resolving the inequalities generated by capitalist property relations, this case demonstrates that Lefebvre’s “right to the city” entails many of its own questions: What actions constitute residency? Do people have differential rights based on differential contributions to community life? And can rights to space be earned, leading to tenure security, or must they always be actively performed? As Peruvians answer these questions in the course of building their cities and their lives, they illuminate the ambiguities and challenges inherent in realizing the “right to the city” in Latin America's urban peripheries.

Mexico is in the midst of a major urban transformation. State-subsidized mortgage credit has facilitated the emergence of an affordable housing market and transformed the urban periphery into vast tracts of tiny concrete “social interest” housing developments. Easily available credit has allowed millions of Mexican workers to pursue the cultural and moral imperative to possess “patrimonio” by becoming homeowners. Patrimonio can be understood as a kind of inalienable possession tied to gendered notions of the family, inheritance, and economic security. Yet ballooning mortgage debts associated with these homes inverts the promise of patrimonio, turning the home into a source of economic instability and insecurity. I argue that this paradoxical situation derives from the convergence of different logics for understanding a home’s value—as patrimonio, as social good, and as financialized commodity. The mortgage contract reconfigures the patrimonial desires of homeowners into a vehicle for marco-economic growth and a source of private profits. Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic field research in Mexico City and Cancún, I highlight frictions in the meanings of home as a cultural imperative, social good, and financial commodity that arise in the context of its mobilization as marketized commodity in contemporary urban Mexico.

This article takes into consideration the importance of the concept of right to the city in Mexico City politics and raises three main questions: How have center-left governments adapted the concept according to their own interests, in a neoliberalizing context marked by mandatory repositioning of planning and capital? How has the right to the city been taken up and modified by diverse social organizations aimed at influencing the production of urban space? To what extent has the concept, despite manipulations and misunderstandings, proved to be politically useful in bridging differences between government agencies and social movements? I focus on the social life of the concept. I suggest that its widespread dissemination has not meant its trivialization. On the contrary, the concept has taken on greater sociological complexity. It was not turned into a fixed concept, rather it became both a field of contention and a tool enabling political encounters.