Movimentos sociais

Since re-democratisation, Brazil has experienced a slow but continuous process of urban reform, with the introduction of legal and institutional developments that favour participatory democracy in urban policy. Legal innovations such as the City Statute have been celebrated for expanding the ‘right to the city’ to marginalised populations. While most studies examine the struggles of the urban poor, I focus on middle-class citizens, showing how such legal developments have unevenly affected the ways in which different social groups are able to impact the production of urban space. The two cases explored in this study concern residents’ struggles to preserve their middle-class neighbourhoods against change triggered by projects related to the hosting of the 2014 World Cup in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The first looks at the Musas Street residents’ fight against the construction of a luxury hotel in their neighbourhood, while the second examines the Pampulha residents’ struggle against the presence of street vendors and football fans in their streets. My findings show that through the articulation of legal discourses, middle-class claims on the need for preserving the environment and the city’s cultural heritage are legitimised by the actions of the local state. The article thus looks beyond neoliberalism, showing that socio-spatial segregation and inequality should not be regarded solely as the product of state–capital alliances for engendering capital accumulation through spatial restructuring, but also as the result of the uneven capacities of those living in the city to access the state resources and legitimise certain forms of inhabitance of urban space.

The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened existing inequities and injustices in Brazil, seen in the disproportionately detrimental impacts on favelas. State policy responses to the pandemic have disregarded favela residents’ experiences. Recommendations such as ‘shelter-in-place’ ignore the reality of over 11.4 million favela residents who cannot work from home or afford to stop working, nor practise physical distancing from others. This study investigates the discourse of community organisations in favelas as they respond to the threats of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state’s necropolitics. Community organisations in favelas have taken action to protect their residents from the virus, unemployment and hunger. I assess organisations’ (1) justification to act as a collective in their communities, and (2) stances about the government’s responses to the crisis. Through content analysis of social media, websites and media appearances of eight favela organisations and collectives in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, this study finds three main themes through which organisations justify their actions: vulnerability, neglect, and collectivity and care. More than survival strategies, the actions of favela organisations are counter-political acts as they oppose the decrepit necropolitics of the state by collectively enduring in the Brazilian context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding favela organisations’ actions in response to the pandemic is fundamental. It further illuminates the impact of public health emergencies in the lives of informal settlements’ residents and the governance of public health emergencies in these communities.

The Brazilian urban reform movement expanded citizen participation in decision-making processes through a policy environment motivated by a right to the city (RTC), a collective development strategy for political transformation. Yet recent events evidence that social exclusion and spatial segregation remain dominant features of the Brazilian city. These contradictions have led planning scholars and practitioners to grapple with misalignment between the reform movement’s paradigmatic goals and its paradoxical failures. We build upon this genre of thinking to assess critical areas of paradigm and paradox in Brazilian planning – insurgent urbanism, informality and knowledge – each of which is rooted in the lesser-understood concept of autogestão for improving the equity of land division through urban planning. Although not all inclusive of the issues faced by Brazilian cities, these three categories were selected for best representing how Brazil’s participatory turn established a range of paradigmatic and paradoxical conditions that can help us to understand cities in Brazil and beyond and might better leverage autogestão in the future.

Social Forums, modeled on the World Social Forums, are not social movements in the classic sense. They are not, and do not purport to be, the organizational form through which basic social change will be achieved, or can best be pursued. But they do bring together elements of many social movements, afford an opportunity for coalition-building among them, frequently around urban issues, and thus make a significant contribution to achieving such change. Conceivably they may be the foundation for an international social movement for change, but if so it is likely to coalesce about a specifically political program. Some concrete suggestions are made which might enhance their effectiveness.

This paper evaluates the perennial question of whether the urban poor in developing countries are autonomous political actors or co-opted tools of patronage. I develop a theoretical interpretation of urban politics, arguing that collective action is shaped by changing configurations of state, economy and civil society. Collective action is expressed in struggles over labor, public goods and political rights — issues of varying salience in different periods of development. The theoretical framework generates a set of propositions which I evaluate with reference to a wide range of secondary evidence. At bottom, the data indicate that collective action varies in form and intensity (militance) with specifiable conditions. Illustratively, clientism did predominate during the ‘developmental decades’ (1960–80) that followed earlier (1930–60) experiences of militant labor conflict and yielded in the current period of neoliberalism to struggles for political rights.

This article discusses the reproduction of housing as a commons in São Paulo. It analyzes the occupation of vacant real estate properties and their subsequent transformation into low-income housing in central São Paulo as instances of commoning. It examines the mechanisms through which housing commons are protected, with a particular focus on the mediating role of social movements and property claims. We draw on a combined methodology of participatory action research and semi-structured interviews to explore the dynamics between the commons as a political ideal and its practical application in the urban environment, focusing on the long-term sustainability of housing commons amid capitalist urbanization. Through the lens of two autonomous housing projects, Dandara and Marisa Letícia, we illustrate the transformation of occupied buildings into permanent housing through collective self-management. We also consider the protection of housing as commons through five processes: regularization, restoration, integration, ideation and federation. Our analysis calls for further research into the potential for creating interconnected commons ecosystems.