A Socio-Technical Perspective To The Right To The City: Regularizing Electricity Access in Rio de Janeiro's Favelas (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2017
This article takes the contemporary transformation in electricity access in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas as a starting point for a broader review of the relationship between the right to the city in informal settlements and the neoliberalization of the electricity service (introduction of full cost recovery and ‘the user pays’ principle). It examines the socio-technical process through which contractual customer relationships have been established or restored through regularization of the electricity service in two favelas, namely, the installation of meters and networks. I suggest that applying a science and technology study perspective to the right to the city helps explore both the materiality and the spatial dimension of power and politics and, in so doing, provides an insight into some of the forms of mediation that help reshape recognition, urban practices and the favela dwellers’ position within such an essential service. Our analysis shows how the means of recognizing these city dwellers ‘by the network’ are materially and symbolically reshaped by commercial processes. The question then is whether this right to the city, which is being reshaped by commercial processes, will be the source of new inequalities or new politicizations. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12489/abstract
In book: Energy, Power and Protest on the Urban Grid Geographies of the Electric City, Chapter: 4, Publisher: Routledge, Editors: Andrés Luque-Ayala, Jonathan Silver, pp. 67-85 https://www.routledge.com/Energy-Power-and-Protest-on-the-Urban-Grid-Geographies-of-the-Electric/Luque-Ayala-Silver/p/book/9781472449009 Providing a global overview of experiments around the transformation of cities' electricity networks and the social struggles associated with this change, this book explores the centrality of electricity infrastructures in the urban configuration of social control, segregation, integration, resource access and poverty alleviation. Through multiple accounts from a range of global cities, this edited collection establishes an agenda that recognises the uneven, and often historical, geographies of urban electricity networks, prompting attempts to re-wire the infrastructure configurations of cities and predicating protest and resistance from residents and social movements alike. Through a robust theoretical engagement with established work around the politics of urban infrastructures, the book frames the transformation of electricity systems in the context of power and resistance across urban life, drawing links between environmental and social forms of sustainability. Such an agenda can provide both insight and inspiration in seeking to build fairer and more sustainable urban futures that bring electricity infrastructures to the fore of academic and policy attention.
The techno-political fabric of Rio de Janeiro: insights from electricity infrastructure
Estudos Avançados
Taking infrastructural changes in favelas as a starting point, this article investigates how the electricity infrastructure contributes to understanding the production of the city of Rio de Janeiro. It builds on the “infrastructural turnaround” in urban studies, and on the notion of techno-politics to bring a new perspective to the role of urban infrastructures in mediating everyday life, in shaping the form of the city - both materially and symbolically - and in managing differences and urban inequalities. In particular, the article sets out three different ways by which electricity infrastructures contribute to the urban fabric of Rio de Janeiro: 1) the reordering of urban space; 2) urban fragmentation; and 3) everyday practices. Through this analysis, the article seeks to investigate the relationship between infrastructure and urban fabric by considering the technological, material, and symbolic aspects of infrastructures that shape space and everyday practices.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2019
In cities of the Global South, universal physical access to networked infrastructures, such as electricity and water, is often presented as enabling the reduction of social and spatial divisions. Whereas most of the discussions in these cities have focused on the obstacles to networked infrastructure expansion, little attention has been paid to the increased universalization of the physical electricity network in several Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian cities. This article unpacks the discussions around the modern infrastructural ideal and its local reshaping by building on the case of Rio de Janeiro, which has achieved universal grid electricity coverage, but where strong urban inequalities remain. By focusing on electricity grid management in favelas, this article analyzes how infrastructural inequalities emerge within the network. It suggests that, in order to understand how urban inequalities are reproduced or mitigated through networked infrastructure, it is important to c...
Francesca Pilo’ (2016): ‘Co-producing affordability’ to the electricity service: a market-oriented response to addressing inequality of access in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, Urban Research & Practice, DOI: 10.1080/17535069.2016.1154101 User involvement in service organisation is seen as a potential means of improving and resolving service delivery issues. The aim of this article is to review a market-oriented project involving electricity customers in the favelas – defined here as an example of ‘co-producing affordability’ to the service – in order to enhance understanding of the diverse collaborative arrangements in service delivery in the South. By examining the part played by the institutional stakeholders involved in the project and the partial dissatisfaction that arose among users, this article will highlight the limitations of this approach for addressing disparities in access to services.
Between Transience and Permanence: the Public Policy of Favela Removals in Rio
The public policy of favela removals in Rio de Janeiro, which the government has been executing for decades, shows how the public power sees the favela space as a transitory one. The State often proposes the removal of people from their homes in order to transfer them to new spaces, which are perceived as complying with official standards of living, for example, in places where people have to participate in activities that force their integration, and a sort of permanence in the new place. This policy shows that the State has a stereotyped perception of this social segment, which violates their lives both symbolically and materially. This paper aims to analyze how Rio de Janeiro's government assesses the removal policy nowadays, in its view of the favela as a transitory place, and how the imposition of permanence has become violent, as it imposes ideas and symbols. To achieve this objective, we present the history of favela removals in Rio de Janeiro as well as their relations to the household projects of each studied period. In doing so, we intend to shed a light on the type of city that is organized, and how this affects its sociability and social life.
The favela in the city-commodity: deconstruction of a social question
The emergence, consolidation and expansion of the favelas 3 in Rio de Janeiro, and the related debate about the virtues and vices of their existence in the city's social space, synthesize, in an eloquent manner, the various stages of metamorphosis of the Brazilian social question 4 . Each of them begins with the appearance of new propositions for the model of action regarding such territory, justified by the construction of social representations that defend and/or condemn the existence of favelas. For such, cognitive, normative, political, more or less erudite, arguments are mobilized, in different institutional ambits. Therefore, as a social question, the favela presupposes a discursive field and action open to passion and reason, centered around a set of aporias sustained by arguments with which they simultaneously intend to become acquainted, judge and propose, or, to be coherent with what has been enunciated above, propose, judge and become acquainted. This is the starting point for this article. The understanding of the various conjunctures in which the favela enters the public debate must seek to elucidate the relations inherent between the explanation/assessment of its existence and its problems with the propositions of action. Here, however, we do not aim to reconstruct these conjunctures. It would be impossible to do so in this brief approach that only develop the oral communication presented in the seminar from which this book resulted. We center our reflection on the present conjuncture, which we consider as a hypothesis, constituting the final stage of the favela as a social question and the deconstruction of the aporia formerly established by the imposition of a set of instrumental and pragmatic justifications -which withdraw the debate from the 1 Senior Professor of the Institute of Research and Urban and Regional Planning of Rio de Janeiro Federal University -UFRJ. Researcher 1A of the CNPq (National Research Centre). Co-ordinator of the INCT Observatório das Metrópoles (Metropolis Observatory) -CNPq/Faperj/Capes.
CUS Working Paper Series, 2019
Through an ethnographic study of a document in urban Brazil - the electricity bill - this article argues for developing a relational and materialist approach to citizenship. It analyzes the uses and meaning of this document for favela residents, the state and the private electricity provider, within projects to regularize illegal connections and the so- called ‘pacification’ program, a state-security policy to re-establish state territorial control. It proposes to investigate the tensions between the market-oriented process of electricity regularization and citizenship by examining the implications of this contractual change on the way state and non-state actors and residents frame membership to the society. Analysis of this document reveals how citizenship framing takes specific shape in line with both state reforms and urban processes of differentiation. It shows that the bill materializes both normative ideas of ‘deserving citizenship’ as a territorial, moral and material process, and the potential for political contestation. This article thus expands analysis of documents as material mediators of social and political relations, and proposes an understanding of citizenship as a negotiated process involving people, state and non-state actors and objects.