Reframing housing struggles: Right to the city and urban citizenship in Santiago, Chile (original) (raw)
Related papers
2010
The last half century has been a time of unprecedented global urbanization, democratization, and neoliberalization. In a matter of decades, countries that were mostly rural have become mostly urban. At the same time, the number of electoral democracies has doubled, increasing from one third to two thirds of the world's sovereign states. In many regions of the world, the growth of cities and the invention of democracy has also coincided with the institutionalization of neoliberalism as an organization of state and a rationality of privatization and dispossession. These processes of urbanization, democratization, and neoliberalization are deeply related. Although their combinations are intensely local in combustion, they produce a remarkably similar condition worldwide: enormous numbers-soon approaching a majority-of the world's population now live in impoverished urban peripheries in conditions of illegal and irregular residence, around urban centers that benefit from their services and their poverty. Yet these conditions also generate a characteristic response: precisely in the urban peripheries, residents come to understand their basic needs in terms of their inhabiting the city, suffering it, building their daily lives in it, making its landscape, history, and politics a place for themselves. The many meanings of this making often coalesce into a sense that they have a right to the city. This transformation of need into right has made cities a strategic arena for the development of new and insurgent Holston 2 citizenships. By citizenship I mean membership in a political association or community that articulates a relation, not a dichotomy, between structures of power and social lives. By insurgent urban citizenship, I refer to the political transformation that occurs when the conviction of having a right to the city turns residents into active citizens who mobilize their demands through residentially-based organizations that confront entrenched national regimes of citizen inequality. Not all urban peripheries produce this kind of insurgence of city against state. But enough do to qualify this collision of urban and national, local and imperial, insurgent and entrenched citizenships as a global category of conflict. The results of these processes in Latin America, Southern Africa, India, and elsewhere have been contradictory. If democratization would seem to hold special promise for more egalitarian citizenships, and thus for greater citizen justice and dignity, in practice most democracies experience tremendous conflict among citizens as principle collides with prejudice over the terms of national membership and the distribution of rights. If cities have historically been the locus of citizenship's expansion, contemporary peripheral urbanization creates especially volatile conditions, as city regions become crowded with marginalized citizens and noncitizens who contest their exclusions. Thus the insurgence of urban democratic citizenships in recent decades has disrupted established formulas of rule and privilege in the most diverse societies worldwide. Yet the result is an entanglement of democracy with its counters, in which new kinds of urban citizens arise to expand democratic citizenships and new forms of urban violence, inequality, impunity, and dispossession erode them. Today, I want to emphasize that this insurgent right to the city confronts the entrenched with alternative formulations of citizenship; in other words, that its conflicts Holston 3 are clashes of citizenship and not merely idiosyncratic or instrumental protest and violence. I want to emphasize that although brutal political economies of labor, land, and law segregate the urban poor into peripheries and reduce them to a "bare life" of servility, the very same structures of inequality incite these hinterland residents to demand a life worthy of citizens. The incitement that I am talking about takes place in the realm of everyday and domestic life taking shape around the construction of residence in remote urban peripheries. It is an insurgence that begins with the struggle for the right to have a daily life in the city worthy of a citizen's dignity. Accordingly, its demands for a new formulation of citizenship get conceived in terms of housing, property, plumbing, daycare, security, and other aspects of residential life. Its leaders are the "barely citizens" of the entrenched regime: women, manual laborers, squatters, the functionally literate, immigrants and, above all, those in families with a precarious stake in residential property, with a legal or illegal toehold to a houselot somewhere far from elite centers. These are the agents who, in the process of building and defending their residential spaces, not only construct a vast new city but, on that basis, also propose a city with a different order of citizenship.
Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city Cities breed contention. Social movements usually express themselves in cities, but cities have nevertheless been seen merely as a backdrop, as the empty canvas on which social movement activity unfolds. We maintain that the city is constitutive of social movements. The defi ning features of cities-density, size, and diversity (Wirth, 1938)-provide the basic elements for contention to develop. Because cities are dense, they are likely to trigger confl icts over space. Because they are large, they have suffi cient numbers to sustain organizations of even small minorities. And because cities are diverse, they become the laboratories where new ties are forged and the battlegrounds where competing demands vie for domination. Contention thus emerges from the microinteractions between large numbers of diverse people living in close proximity. Social movements crystallize when people organize to collectively claim urban space, organize constituents, and express demands. Contention and movements emanate from cities but also stretch outwards as activists broker relations between local and their more geographically distant allies. The recent series of protests demonstrate how the urban is uniquely conducive of contention and reveals the linkages that connect contention between different locales ). All over the world, protesters occupied central areas, formed relations among themselves, and expressed their demands for equality and liberty. During the Arab revolutions, relational and cognitive connections permitted activists in Tripoli and Bahrain to imagine their struggles in very similar ways to those in Cairo, in spite of very different and uneven political opportunities, mobilization capacities, and cultures (Lopes de Souza and Lipietz, 2011). This movement then inspired protesters in Spain to take to the squares, which inspired Occupy Wall Street, which in turn spiraled into the global-yet geographically uneven (Uitermark and Nicholls, 2012)-Occupy movement.
Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city
Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city Cities breed contention. Social movements usually express themselves in cities, but cities have nevertheless been seen merely as a backdrop, as the empty canvas on which social movement activity unfolds. We maintain that the city is constitutive of social movements. The defi ning features of cities-density, size, and diversity (Wirth, 1938)-provide the basic elements for contention to develop. Because cities are dense, they are likely to trigger confl icts over space. Because they are large, they have suffi cient numbers to sustain organizations of even small minorities. And because cities are diverse, they become the laboratories where new ties are forged and the battlegrounds where competing demands vie for domination. Contention thus emerges from the microinteractions between large numbers of diverse people living in close proximity. Social movements crystallize when people organize to collectively claim urban space, organize constituents, and express demands. Contention and movements emanate from cities but also stretch outwards as activists broker relations between local and their more geographically distant allies. The recent series of protests demonstrate how the urban is uniquely conducive of contention and reveals the linkages that connect contention between different locales ). All over the world, protesters occupied central areas, formed relations among themselves, and expressed their demands for equality and liberty. During the Arab revolutions, relational and cognitive connections permitted activists in Tripoli and Bahrain to imagine their struggles in very similar ways to those in Cairo, in spite of very different and uneven political opportunities, mobilization capacities, and cultures (Lopes de Souza and Lipietz, 2011). This movement then inspired protesters in Spain to take to the squares, which inspired Occupy Wall Street, which in turn spiraled into the global-yet geographically uneven (Uitermark and Nicholls, 2012)-Occupy movement.
“The framing of movements as ‘urban’ obscures their class and ethnic features.” Discuss.
In this Essay I will investigate the ethnic and class features of different forms of squatting in Europe. I will argue that mainly political and cultural squatting movements in their fight for a ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre [1970] 2003) and ‘just city’ (Harvey [1973] 2009) are, through passive resistance and civil disobedience challenging the social stratification within the urban environment. To that end their anti-capitalist struggle is fought through cultural and educational empowerment. Conversely it will be shown that it is only the already empowered and educated, hence higher classes turned-squatters that are able to enter into political activism, form urban movements and advocate for the silent others. At the beginning of the essay, based on Henri Lefebvre’s and David Harvey’s thesis, I will investigate structural conditions that position the urban environment and in particular the housing market as forms of class marginalization. I will also present both Lefebvre’s and Harvey’s proposition to the anti-capitalist reclaiming of the city by the lower classes. Further I will define squatting as a form of the anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal urban movement that nevertheless mediates between the notion of individual need and a political fight as called for by previously mentioned authors. Finally based on selected case studies from European squatting movements I will examine their class, ethnic and cultural makeup. I will conclude by contrasting the Marxian and Weber’s class definitions and argue than within both those two spheres squatting movements attempt a social chance.
The right to the city, a concept previously associated with radical social movements, has been accepted by several governments and has inspired new public policies. However, some authors see this process of institutionalization as involving a loss of a significant part of the radical origins of the concept. This article approaches this process and the new opportunities and limitations it may entail for social movement organizations with a more radical perspective on the right to the city. We explore the paradigmatic case of Brazil and the action of a particular organization, the Movimento dos Sem Teto da Bahia (MSTB, or Homeless Movement of Bahia) in the city of Salvador. We draw on the discussion of the politics of the right to the city and on an original combination of social movement theories and critical discourse analysis in order to analyse political-institutional and discursive changes in urban reform in Brazil and Salvador. We then analyse how the MSTB moves within this new context, navigating its tensions and contradictions while advancing a radical project of transformation of urban reality within a reformist context. We also reflect on the relevance of Lefebvrian ideas for understanding and inspiring contemporary struggles for the right to the city.
Contradictions in urban activism in the context of neoliberalization
My talk deals with the CONTEMPORARY developments that force us to rethink USMs and the theoretical approaches to make sense of them. For this, I suggest a contextualized analysis that explains USMs in the specific geo--political context of the evolving rule regime, the neoliberal project, and, since the crisis, its own adaptive reinvention, which places different parts of the urban movement sector into different strategic positions, and therefore frequently in contradiction with each other. So I will talk first, on --sites of putative regulatory "solutions" (where new policy prototypes are developed and experimented with, which, if effective, will travel around the world) --sites of contradictions, conflicts, and opposition to such projects/"solutions" -i.e. the stuff that SMs react to and get involved in, which I will talk about in the second part of the talk.
This paper is concerned with processes of place making (Benson, 2014) and belonging among middle class residents in Santiago de Chile, and particularly focuses on the ways in which neighborhood groups seek to receive heritage status for their areas of residence, as a way to contest and impede the demolition of houses in order to build high-rise buildings. I particularly focus on the tensions inherent in reconciling a critical view of neoliberal residential politics with a securing of their individual or family class position. I bring together debates and evidence about social and spatial boundary making with analysis of strategies of reproduction of class position. The paper focuses on intra-class symbolic boundaries in place making or neighborhood making, and the local politics and practices involved, by addressing the relationship of the middle classes to territory and their place in the contemporary city (Andreotti, Le Galès and Moreno- Fuentes, 2014; Bacqué et al, 2015; Bridge, Butler and Lees, 2012; Brown-Saracino, 2009; Butler and Robson, 2003; Low, 2013; Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst, 2005; Zukin, 2010). I discuss data obtained from research in five inner-city urban Santiago neighbourhoods that had been, or were in the process of being declared “heritage neighborhoods” by Chile’s Council for National Monuments (CMN, in the Spanish acronym). The research blends data drawn from a mix of sources: in depth interviews, non-- participant observation, content analysis of CMN legal texts, real estate advertisements, websites of organizations of local residents, and copies of the files prepared by some neighborhood groups for submission to the CMN in order to seek heritage status.