UAA Conference 2019

Thursday April 25, 2019 11:10am - 12:35pm | Imagination (2nd Floor)

In the middle of the 20th century, the rural to urban migration and the expanding population radically transformed cities across Latin America. The emergence of different urban social movements allowed for the re-articulation of the city as a space where people gained access to new economic and social opportunities. The social, political, and economic trends that began around the middle of the century in Latin America have had a pervasive effect on the construction of the city in the Global South, and its challenges can shed light on similar urbanization processes currently taking place in regions like Africa and Asia.

This panel will reflect on ways in which Latin American cities are being imagined, produced, and transformed through discussions around the “Right to the City.” Presenters’ works will focus on two countries, Mexico and Brazil, aiming not to represent the whole spectrum of Latin American realities, but to highlight some of the regional dynamics with case studies. Making use of interdisciplinary approaches, we will explore policies, built infrastructures, and regulations, and their effects on urban spaces as well as physical and social changes observed through the everyday life of cities. We will examine the relationship between spatial and social exclusion through the case study of Concentration Camps in Northeast Brazil; the social and economic effects of lack of infrastructure in the conjuntos urbanos of Mexico City; the role of the new political actors in Brazilian peripheries and their relation the production of space and the right to the city; and the challenges of using master plans as tools for guaranteeing the right to the city in the context of small towns in the hinterlands of Brazil. Overall, this panel intends to foster a dialogue in which multiple perspectives come together to deepen our understanding of emerging urban spaces and the right to the city, hoping to spur dialogues with experiences in countries within and beyond Latin America.

Keywords: right to the city, urban imaginaries, Latin America

Laura Belik, University of California, Berkeley (Architecture)

At the turn of the twentieth century, Northeast Brazil suffered three of the most severe drought periods ever registered, popularly known as the Terrible Years. Extensive literature has been written about the topic and most specifically about the life of the retirantes, migrant families trying to escape the inland areas towards the coast and capital cities of the region. As a response to this state of emergency, and pressure by the local elites, seven Concentration Camps were built by the government in the state of Ceará between 1915 and 1932. The state used a humanitarian rhetoric to justify the creation of these spaces. However, the concentration camps were zones of isolation and intense policing, with extremely high death rates due to famine, disease outbreaks and overcrowding. Over the course of one year (1932-33), these camps sheltered over 150,000 people (Rios, 2014). On both local and national levels, few people know about these scarcely documented spaces. This paper seeks to uncover the history of the Concentration Camps, and how they were deployed by the Brazilian government, evidencing the role of the built environment in debates of social and political order. It also expresses how despite supposedly promoting aid, thus further inclusion and integration of citizens, such segregated spaces ceased any conversation on the Right to the City.

In this paper I am going to highlight the relationship between spatial and social exclusion, looking at the Camps as physical and moral barriers to access to the city, and I will approach this on three different scales: national, through the history of territorial migrations of the retirantes Nordestinos; state-wide, exploring the implementation of the Camps as a public policy; and local, reflecting on the everyday life of the Camps themselves and the organization of their internal spaces, in conversation with a theoretical grounding in ideas of biopower (Foucault, 1978) as well as collective memory, memorialization and heritage.

Keywords: Ceará (Brazil), Concentration Camps, spatial exclusion, memory

Priscila Coli Rocha, University of California, Berkeley (City and Regional Planning)

This paper gives a brief overview of the literature about urban peripheries in Brazil and analyzes the possible consequences of the rise of new political actors in relation to the production of space, politics, and planning.

Traditionally, cities in the Global South have primarily developed by a production of space referred to by some as peripheral urbanization. In this mode of production, residents are active agents in city making, building their own houses and neighborhoods over time through autoconstruction. Among the critical outcomes of this process is the emergence of politically engaged and empowered citizens, as well as the extension of property ownership to the majority of the population. In Brazil, peripheral urbanization also resulted in the creation of a differentiated citizenship, and the formulation of inclusive urban planning legislation which sought to reverse the country’s inequitable pattern of urban growth. However, the production of space in Brazilian peripheries has significantly changed due to the rise of new political actors. My preliminary research has identified the following ones: the evangelical churches, drug cartels, militias, autoconstructors entrepreneurs (those who enlarged and rented part of their property), and big construction firms financed by social housing state subsidies. Their uniqueness relays on the illegality through which some of them operate. For instance, militias and drug cartels are criminal organizations that often operate in the peripheries as landlords and developers who dominate the local real estate market, and sometimes regulate different economic resources such as light, internet, water supplies, and security. In this context, increasingly new residents have to come in as tenants or as consumers of an already developed urban space in which criminal organizations provides their basic needs. This transformation alters the land tenure pattern and the agency of residents, as well as it challenges the role of the state and planning institutions in these territories.

Keywords: peripheral urbanization, spatial justice, production of space

Giselle Mendonça Abreu, University of California, Berkeley (City and Regional Planning)

A significant part of the literature inspired by postcolonial critiques of urban studies and debates on the “right to the city” focuses on metropolitan areas in the Global South. Alternatively, this paper turns its attention to the network of non-metropolitan urban centers in the hinterlands, using Brazil as a case study. In the past twenty years, small- and mid-sized cities in interior states of Brazil grew at higher rates than metropolitan areas in the Atlantic coast, a process anchored in the expansion of export-oriented farming and industrial decentralization. At the same time, the national City Statute (2001) established the requirement that every town with more than 20,000 inhabitants should have a participatory master plan to guide its growth and transformation based on a broader urban reform agenda that partly draws on “right to city” debates.

First, I will briefly retrace, based on existing scholarship and accounts, the recent history of how participatory master plans became institutionalized as the key tool for urban reform in Brazil, highlighting the creation of the federal City Statute and, soon after, the Ministry of Cities. Second, I will analyze, based on government documents, the massive program to support the dissemination of master plans in Brazil undertaken by the Ministry of Cities—which included guides to municipalities and interactive games to facilitate participatory processes—with a particular focus on small and mid-sized cities. Lastly, I will review the recent literature on empirical case studies of master plans developed in non-metropolitan cities in different regions of Brazil, focusing particularly on cases where urbanization is not led by industrialization (e.g., cities in the Amazon region or in areas dominated by agricultural production).

Keywords: right to the city, master plans, hinterland urbanization

Francisco Trejo Morales, University of California, Berkeley (Anthropology)

This paper provides a brief overview of the living conditions found in conjuntos urbanos in Mexico City and the Metropolitan Area, and the social and economic problems that they engender. These housing developments represent a new mode of producing space inspired by the Chilean experiment with social housing. Conjuntos urbanos were introduced in the 1990s along with other policies meant to make housing available to the working class. Today they are built by private developers with subsidies from the Federal Government and through other sophisticated financing mechanisms.

These urban configurations are deployed everywhere in the nation, but nowhere is their presence more pronounced than in the State of Mexico, which has adopted the construction of conjuntos urbanos as its primary instrument for urbanizing the areas adjacent to Mexico City. However, this mode of producing housing has proven to be problematic, because conjuntos urbanos often lack the appropriate services and infrastructure, and they are also located far away from urban centers and jobs.

This study focuses on two conjuntos urbanos: Santa Teresa IX and Hacienda Las Misiones. I use excerpts from interviews, field observations, photographic evidence, and Mexican census data to illustrate some points about life in conjuntos urbanos. Using these data, I develop a concept that can help us understand how people are able to inhabit conjuntos urbanos, where precarious living conditions complicate the practice of everyday life. Drawing from “peripheral urbanization,” a term proposed by Caldeira (2016), I develop the notion of the “politics of un-becoming” as a means to understand how the residents of conjuntos urbanos disassemble and reassemble their dreams and expectations in order to accommodate them within their new reality.

Keywords: peripheral urbanization, social housing, Mexico City