City & Society最新文献

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.

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.