Cities from Scratch edited by Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero

8/13/2019 Cities from Scratch edited by Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero

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CITIES FROM SCRATCH

Tseng Proof 2013.11.14 10:10 9385 Fischer Cities From Scratch Sheet 1 of 301


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CITIES FROM SCRATCH

BRODWYN FISCHER, BRYAN McCANN

,

AND JAVIER AUYERO, EDITORS

Duke University Press Durham and London 2014



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2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paperypeset in Arno Pro by seng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataCities from scratch : poverty and informality in urban Latin America /

Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, and Javier Auyero, editors.pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index. 978- 0-8223-5518-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

978- 0-8223-5533-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Slums Latin America. 2. Urban poor Latin America.3. Marginality, Social Latin America. . Fischer, Brodwyn M.

. McCann, Bryan, 1968 . Auyero, Javier.4050.5. 5 58 2014

307.3364098 dc23 2013025655



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Emilio Duhau, one of Mexicos leading urban sociologists,

passed away on August 13, 2013. His contribution to thisvolume is but a small example of the rigor, originality, and

optimism that characterized his extensive work on informality,

poverty, and urban space. His voice will be sorely missed.



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CONTENTS

Introduction Brodwyn Fischer

1

One A Century in the Present ense: Crisis, Politics, andthe Intellectual History of Brazils Informal Cities

Brodwyn Fischer 9

wo In and Out of the Margins: Urban Land Seizuresand Homeownership in Santiago, Chile

Edward Murphy 68

Tree roubled Oasis: Te Intertwining Histories ofthe Morro dos Cabritos and Bairro Peixoto

Bryan McCann

102Four Compadres , Vecinos , and Brderes in the Barrio:

Kinship, Politics, and Local erritorialization in Urban Nicaragua Dennis Rodgers

127

Five Te Informal City: An EnduringSlum or a Progressive Habitat?

Emilio Duhau 150



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2 Brodwyn Fischer

a normative vision of the modern cityscape. Te settlements photogenicmisery allows them to serve as potent symbols in polemical global debatesabout poverty, capitalism, race, and state failure. Te instant identication

of these settlements with the subaltern makes them the natural locale forradical critiques of the powers that be. But the very proximity to hot- buttonissues that makes the informal city so attractive can also distort and obscureit. Te symbolic value of informal cities usually lies in their dysfunctionalityand capacity for resistance. But poor informal cities largely survive becausetheir inhabitants are so adept at making these places function, in ways thatusually link their fates to established networks of power and prot. Portraitsof the informal cities that focus only on their pathologies, or their trans-formative potential, can easily miss their constitutive role in extant urbancultural and power relations, the settlements functional vitality in the hereand now.

Te second paradox is embedded in the informal cities dual role asglobal phenomena and intensely local social formations. At rst glance, the

worlds informal cities can seem disconcertingly similar, a planet of slumsthat share striking physical characteristics and are universally character-ized by poverty and subcitizenship. Most settlements originate in roughlysimilar patterns of invasion, negotiation, or petty proteering, and some

form of populist political practice usually both sustains and marginalizesthem. Residents usually create intense networks of exchange, commerce,and small-time credit, and varying degrees of violence and exploitation cancoexist with expressions of community solidarity.

It is easy enough to link those features to global economic, cultural, politi-cal, and environmental transformations and to end up discussing the slumas if it were an epiphenomenon of global history, the inevitable symptomof our interconnected pathologies. And yet the thing that informal citiesaround the world hold most in common what brings them into existenceand allows them to survive is their entrenchment in intensely local dy-namics. Te settlements similarities are pragmatic, not determinant, andeach depends on unique constellations of needs and intricate local relation-ships. Te local rootedness of informal cities renders most generalizationsabout them fanciful, easily belied by one or a thousand divergent experi-ences. At most, one might say that the global informal city is also the rawestform of local self-expression, the space where literal and gurative faadesthin away, revealing more transparently the relationships of power and cul-

ture that dene each locality.



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Introduction 3

Te chapters that follow engage vital global issues, and none binds theinformal city exclusively to its local context. All are informed by the rich ex-tant literature on global urban poverty, to which many of these authors have

contributed. But these particular chapters share a commitment to building both sociopolitical theory and generalizations about the informal city from

the local context outward. Te resulting volume is both a fractured portraitof Latin Americas informal cities and a multifaceted argument about thenature and consequences of urban informality itself. Why concentrate only on Latin America? Tese chapters portray infor-mal cities that come into being and survive in a particular historical con-text, where global economic and political trends have played themselvesout in specic and patterned ways. U.S. inuence has been more pervasiveand direct here than elsewhere. Te interplay of populism and authoritari-anism has chronologically overlapped with intensive rural-to-urban migra-tion, and debates about democratization have granted an unusually centralplace to questions of law and urban citizenship. Race, caste, and religionhave been politicized loosely in most of contemporary Latin America, andunderstandings of urban social inequality have grown from regionally par-ticular schools of urbanism and social science. Perhaps as important, thisis a region where global twenty-rst-century fears about gang violence and

state failure have often coincided with palpable political and economicprogress: dystopic terrors coexist with deep optimism and (in most places)unprecedented political openness. Tese chapters do not posit the existenceof a specically Latin American form of urban informality, but they collec-tively suggest that regional dynamics are at least as important as global onesin helping to shape the informal city.

Within those regional boundaries, the contributions range over broadgeographical, methodological, and theoretical territories. Urban informalityis by its nature an interdisciplinary theme, and we make no claim to com-prehensive coverage. Economists will nd relatively little quantitative work,geographers may wish for more frequent references to the spatial turn, andcultural scholars may desire a more studied focus on the literature, theater,cinema, and music of informality. Many of our chapters acknowledge theseelds contributions, but the selections mostly move through history, an-thropology, and sociology, united by a common concern with local and his-torical embeddedness. We begin with Brodwyn Fischers chapter on the intellectual history of

Brazilian and Latin American shantytowns from the late nineteenth cen-



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4 Brodwyn Fischer

tury to the 1970s. Juxtaposing a critical reading of shantytown literature with insights from recent historical research, Fischer examines what has

been gained and lost from the persistent presentism of shantytown studies,

arguing for approaches that tether the informal city less rmly to contem-porary crises. Fischers chapter also provides an intellectual and historicalcontext for the rest of the volumes selections. Edward Murphys chaptertakes up the historical thread in Chile of the 1960s, where he demonstrateshow shantytown residents tied their demands for housing to national moraldiscourses about the importance of home and family. In the hands of Mur-phys pobladores (low-income urban residents), demands for housing rights

were radical in form, and in claiming belonging for neighborhoods usuallydismissed as nests of social marginality. But these struggles expanded ratherthan overturned prevalent languages of morality and decency; the pobla-dores ght for urban rights was part and parcel of a broader struggle to de-fend home and family against the corrupting effects of homelessness andpoverty.

Te next two chapters take on a more recent historical period at Latin Americas two geographical and sociopolitical extremes by examining the

evolution of informal settlements in Nicaragua and Brazil from the 1970sto the present. Bryan McCanns chapter on the interlaced histories of two

adjoined Rio de Janeiro neighborhoods, one formal and another informal,illuminates the shifting practices, politics, and cultural alliances that at oncetie these locales together and maintain the boundaries between them overtime. McCann also draws attention to the larger ebbs and ows that shapedthe informal citys local dynamics during this period: the inclusion of rightsto the city in campaigns for democratization and broader citizenship, thecorrosive impact of the drug trade, and the shifting strategies and aims ofchurch groups, s, and politicians. Dennis Rodgerss chapter on Mana-guas La Sobrevivencia settlement, drawing on decades of ethnographiceldwork, explores the shifting interaction between neighborhood dy-namics, political currents, and transnational transformations. In Rodgerssnarrative, La Sobrevivencias fate is inexorably tied to national and worldevents: the rise and fall of Sandinismo, the economic devastation of the1980s and 1990s, and the growth of neoliberalism, drugs, and gangs. But thecommunitys destiny is also negotiated from the inside out, on the basisof shifting patterns of community solidarity, conict, and territorialization.

Emilio Duhaus chapter on Mexico City strikes a more optimistic note

on the evolution of informality in Mexico City during roughly the same



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Introduction 5

period. Duhau is less concerned with the internal politics of Mexico Citysinformal neighborhoods than he is with their impact on larger, spatial pat-terns of urban inequality. Drawing on decades of demographic and socio-

logical research, Duhau demonstrates the fundamentally progressive work-ings of Mexico Citys informal city the ways in which it has promotedcertain forms of social mobility and urban integration while actually less-ening socioeconomic segregation over time. Ironically, Duhau argues that acurrent shift toward a more formalized production of low-income housingruns the risk of increasing segregation and marginalization. In this way,Duhau highlights the functionality of the informal city over time and callsinto question the empirical basis of the current drive toward state-led for-malization.

Te collections last four contributions focus on single places in the veryrecent past. Bryan McCanns annotation of photos taken by Rio de JaneirosRato Diniz evokes the interconnectedness of formal and informal life, thedaily routines and cultural and economic dynamism that animate poorneighborhoods, and the palpable physical improvements that are now asmuch a part of the informal city as the pockmarked scars of urban violence.Sujatha Fernandess chapter on Caracass Alameda theater explores the re-habilitation of a once-iconic neighborhood cultural institution. Like Dennis

Rodgers, Fernandes is concerned with radical political change and with theinterplay of local, national, and transnational forces in a poor neighbor-hoods most intimate spaces. In the theaters history, she nds memories ofleft- wing cultural radicalism, rehabilitated by a community alert to Chvez-era opportunities and then co-opted by political hacks. But in Fernandessrendering, Chvez-era events are mediated and shaped by shifting patternsof local identity and cultural solidarity their immediate impact as muchhomegrown as imported.

Mariana Cavalcantis chapter, like Bryan McCanns, focuses on the borderlands between the formal and the informal. In Cavalcantis case,those borderlands become crucibles for the very concepts of the favela andthe formal city. Trough intensive ethnographic exploration of real-estatepractices and movement from the favela to the formal city (and back again),Cavalcanti portrays a liminal space in which the formal-informal divide is atonce inconstant and vital, shaping inhabitants spatial and social practiceseven as the poles that this frontier mediates are constantly redened.

Te collection ends with Javier Auyeros chapter on the Buenos Aires

neighborhood of Flammable, a space where a ruinous combination of



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6 Brodwyn Fischer

industrial misconduct, governmental half measures, and local paralysis hasleft residents in a netherworld of physical suffering and constant expecta-tion. Tis chapter, a follow- up to Auyeros coauthored book on the same

topic, opens up polemical questions about the long-term impact of povertyand environmental poisoning on a communitys capacity for effective self-determination. More broadly, the text highlights the political nature of theinformal city, the degree to which the absence of effective rights rendersinhabitants political dependents rather than rights- bearing citizens. Whilepoor informal residents have often been able to capitalize on this process toprevent more draconian urban exclusion and gradually claim urban rights,

Auyeros chapter paints a dark picture of the waiting the constant, depen-dent expectation that can envelope and paralyze the most vulnerable in-formal residents.

Collectively, these chapters have much to say about themes that havedominated debates about shantytowns and other poor neighborhoods fordecades: social marginality, demagoguery, collective social movements, andcultural dynamism. But the contributions comments on these old themesare also shaped by new paradigms and developments. Tese chapters notefrom the inside out the ways in which Latin Americas informal cities have been transformed by democratization, the rise of Latin Americas new

Left, the recent centrality of rights- based approaches to urban poverty, theacceleration of international migrations, urban environmental degradation,and the expansion of the drug trade. Tey also engage (often critically) newparadigms about subaltern politics, neoliberalism, and race.

Te hope and aim, however, is that the chapters discuss these issues onlyin as much as they emerge from and are crucial to local dynamics. Te vol-umes central questions are about the nature of Latin Americas poor in-formal cities themselves: their relationships to the larger urban form, theirpolitical roles, their transformations over time, and their nature as sites forthe reproduction or transcendence of poverty and subcitizenship.

Tis local perspective, far from limiting this volumes broader signi-cance, allows for its most signicant contributions. Te urban neighbor-hoods that emerge from these studies are diverse, historically rooted, andinseparable from the formal city. Teir informality is often functional inand of itself, and not simply a side- product of poverty and need; the use value of illegality for purposes both hopeful and exploitative emergeseverywhere, calling into question popular policies that aim to solve the slum

problem through simple legalization. Progress is a delicate and often cycli-



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Introduction 7

cal process in these neighborhoods, as it is in the broader urban ecology. Above all, the informal cities that emerge from these pages are building

blocks of Latin American urbanity, not the unfortunate side effects of mod-

ernist city building. Urbanization, from this perspective, involves far morethan physical upgrading and the elimination of illegal settlements. It de-mands that cities recognize the needs and interests that poor informal citiesserve, the multiple ways in which they are embedded in urban life, and thatthey expand the limits of the formal city to incorporate what informalitydoes best. Urbanization demands, in short, that we recognize that Latin

American cities are dened rather than deformed by the dynamic intersec-tion of formal and informal urbanity.

NOTES

1. Habitat, State of the Worlds Cities 2010/11: Bridging the Urban Divide (Wash-ington, DC: United Nations, 2011), 32.

2. Ananya Roys article Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism, Inter-national Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no. 2 (2011), highlights the perilsof conceptualizing urban informality as the exclusive domain of the poor, preferringto use the concept to focus attention on the processes by which poor informalitiesare criminalized while others are valorized. Tis collection, however, is less inter-

ested in informality as a concept than in the spaces where poverty and informalityintersect and will generally use the terminformal city to denote only those places.3. Te phrase planet of slums is from Mike Daviss book Planet of Slums (London:

Verso, 2006).4. See Javier Auyero and Dbora Swistun,Flammable: Environmental Suffering in

an Argentine Shantytown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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Cities from Scratch edited by Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero