Movimentos sociais

Nowadays there is an imperative for governments to be more responsive to community needs, and public sector modernisation programmes are introducing opportunities for citizen participation. We look at citizen participation initiatives through the lenses of institutional and stakeholder theories. Using survey data and exogenous variables we analyse experiences in thirty OECD and MERCOSUR local governments. We find that the possible gains in legitimacy and trust explain the efforts made towards citizen participation. In addition, the different levels of commitment towards meaningful citizen participation suggest that factors such as power and urgency can be complementary to legitimacy when analysing citizen participation.

Waste pickers all over the world work innovatively to reduce the environmental footprint of cities as they struggle to meet their critical livelihood obligations. Informed by the case of waste picker organizations (WPOs) this article examines how grassroots initiatives and extreme-niche innovations are created and sustained by mobilizing resources, rationales and relations. The study is informed by a cross-national survey and in-depth interviews with WPOs in Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Kenya and Tanzania, and builds upon theories of grassroots innovation movements. The findings show how operating in contexts of extreme scarcity, these grassroots organisations tap into local resources, e.g. tacit knowledge, economies of affection and other socially embedded institutional resources. Blending material and environmental rationales, contributes to expanding their audiences and to gaining further support. In such deprived urban contexts, radical and cumulative crises and events hindering residents’ livelihoods can paradoxically also spark ingenuity out of necessity, and the transformation of these settings into extreme niches of innovation. Finally, the mobilization of relations through the formation of networks linking WPOs with supportive intermediaries and global circuits of solidarity becomes another fundamental resilience strategy by which WPOs can navigate contested environments and insert their extreme-niche innovations in governmental structures. By simultaneously adopting a broad repertoire of strategies of insertion, contention, and mobilization WPO and their innovations thrive in highly constrained environments. We conclude with reflecting on how ‘extreme’ niches of innovation − at the cracks of the formal city, economy and waste systems − can unleash the creative power of stigmatized, illiterate and neglected grassroots to experiment with new solutions in resource-poor environments.

Since the 1970s, popular movements organized around the struggle for housing have been strong in São Paulo. Based on four central agendas – slums and precarious neighborhoods upgrading; better rental conditions; urban improvements and land tenure in peripheral subdivisions; and public funding for housing production – housing movements have consolidated as an essential political player in São Paulo, intersecting with the struggles for health, education, transportation, and urban infrastructure. With local action and national organization, São Paulo’s housing movements are responsible for empowering the community, qualifying their dialogue, preparing for confrontations with the public authorities, and ensuring access to housing through public programs via organized building squatting. This paper analyzes the importance of São Paulo housing movements and its prominent female participants in São Paulo in conquering social rights.

The appropriation of the housing sector by global finance has transformed housing policies worldwide while leading to new opportunities for capital accumulation. Financialized models have also become increasingly prevalent in the Global South, promoting mortgage and household debt and stark housing commodification impacting lower-middle-income communities and residents. Yet, despite adversity, housing social movements have worked to challenge some of these trends in struggles for housing justice and de-financialization. This study examines the organizing work of such housing struggles in Mexico and Brazil in the face of varied commodification and financialization processes through the analytical framework of bridging. Bridging as a strategy entails social movements’ dynamic relationships and practices in challenging and altering housing commodification and financialization processes in relation to changing political environments. Housing movements integrate reactive responses to immediate threats with proactive strategies for long-term structural change, emphasizing the importance of multifaceted approaches in addressing housing financialization. Bridging between invented and invited spaces of action showcases how housing movements adjust to evolving circumstances and establish new counter-hegemonic arenas to advance their objectives and ideas. Bridging scales enables further reach of demands and visibility, creating the possibility of challenging the distances inherent to financialization networks. The accomplishments, constraints, and paths of housing organizing for de-financialization provide critical lessons about the co-constitutive nature of social mobilization, housing policies, and the financial market.

Recycling consists of a variety of everyday practices that involve a complex urban ecology of materialities, subjectivities, knowledges, organising practices, institutions, policies, communities. In this article, we look at self-organised collectives of catadores (waste pickers) in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. This research combines quantitative data from the 497 municipalities of Rio Grande do Sul with a set of interviews and ethnographic observations. The emergence of self-organized collectives of catadores shows the affirmation of creative and transformative practices that actively resist the precarious infrastructures in which they operate. This resistant attitude is displayed by their political and strategic positioning in relation to municipalities and low-level administrators, but also in relation to the social, economic and environmental inequalities that affect their lives and their communities. We propose to look at these practices of collective resistance as expansive and creative, establishing transversal alliances throughout the community. In this sense, resistance becomes an act of recycling: the transformation of urban ecologies into an ongoing and sustainable way of staying with waste. Resistant recycling transforms individual and collective existences.

In this paper, I examine the links between revanchist populism and the labor crisis in Brazil, a country with a stratified labor market where informality is prevalent among low-income, racialized groups. I analyze the struggles of street vendors for accessing urban space in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where the Worker’s Party (PT) played a key role in evicting vendors from public spaces and criminalizing their activity in the early 2000s. I focus on the connections between this initiative and a more recent “revitalization” policy that displaced street vendors from public spaces in the city center. In this context, I explore the political discourses of displaced workers during the 2018 elections that brought Bolsonaro to power. I show how the eviction stimulated antipetismo (anti-PT sentiment) among street vendors by triggering collective memories and rage against the party that “sold them out.” I argue that street vendors strongly identify as workers but are excluded from the unionized waged workingmen notion central to unions and Latin American left-wing parties. By discussing how street vendors reiterate their position as workers and not criminals, I highlight their identification with a moral notion of worker aligned with Bolsonaro’s conservative anti-crime agenda. I thus argue that support for Bolsonaro among street vendors was stimulated by the shortcomings of Brazil’s urban reform as well as the lack of appropriate policy responses to an increasingly heterogeneous and informalized workforce. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of supporting the collective struggles of non-waged workers as a path beyond revanchist populism.

In the past decade in Brazil, we have witnessed the rise of a new subaltern space, which has prompted a new theoretical category, incorporated in the contemporary epistemologies of Subaltern Urbanism: Urban Occupations. These new terrains of livelihood and self-organization have prompted a series of new resistance strategies, everyday practices and narratives that must be understood and decodified. The Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte —third largest in the country— accounts for over 25 housing occupations in its territory, more than half of which settled in the last five years. Occupation Rosa Leão, established in 2013, is one of them. As it happens in many other occupations, most of its dwellers are black women. They constitute majority in the coordination groups and are often more closely involved in the collective necessities of the community. The present article draws upon the experiences of these women as subjects of their own history to showcase urban occupation as a powerful place for understanding and dismantling the always existing but often overlooked intersection between coloniality and gender. It relies on the activist and academic engagement of both authors in these territories, and specifically in the experience with a women-only self-construction workshop organized in October 2017. Through this workshop, we sought to understand how “usually male” construction knowledge was employed (or not) by women, how it could be used as a tool for domination/emancipation and how gender relations intertwined with such issues in the process.

In an age of resurgent populism, emotional geographies play an underexamined yet pivotal role in explaining cross-class alliances that have enabled particularly angry forms of revanchist politics across world regions. This essay delineates the notion of “revanchist populism” and its grounding in “entitled anger,” as well as self-righteous geographical imaginations more broadly, to shed new light on the Brazilian case in recent years, which is further explored in this special issue. Beyond Brazil, we suggest how this approach can be used to bring a more geographical perspective to related iterations of revanchist populism elsewhere in the world and across the political spectrum, from Venezuela to Turkey, and Argentina to India.

This paper seeks to offer a new perspective on the interrelated questions of globalized capitalism and anti-Blackness. We engage with current geographical work on the question of Blackness, highlighting the ways in which prevailing forms of global capital accumulation—which take shape in numerous spatial and political practices around the world—coincide with acts of anti-Blackness. In recognizing the connections between capitalism and anti-Black violence, however, we choose not to frame anti-Blackness as an effect of capitalist relations. Rather, we insist that anti-Blackness remains a necessary precondition for the perpetuation of capitalism, as the perpetual expansion of capitalist practices requires “empty” spaces open for appropriation—a condition made possible through the modern assumption of Black a-spatiality. Drawing on theoretical discussions of both global capital and anti-Blackness, empirical examples of shifting global spatial-racial regimes, and the discursive and material practices of Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, and the Afro-Brazilian community Ilha de Maré, this paper attempts to forge new geographical conversations regarding current capitalist practices and the matter of Black lives.

This article focuses on the struggle of a group of street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil – displaced in the run up to the 2014 World Cup – to claim back their traditionally occupied workspace. Their displacement dramatically ruptured their pursuit of dignified livelihoods in the city’s informal economy. Using prolonged ethnography between 2014 and 2016, I describe how the workers engaged with an affective governance regime in which narrow avenues of negotiation are opened but promises are never kept, generating a constant state of unpredictability and possibility. This cycle of hope and frustration demobilises their resistance movement while their charismatic leader struggles to produce and maintain the hope that they might achieve relocation. This labour of hope keeps their association alive but also generates frustration and further demobilisation. The article foregrounds the ambiguous role played by hope in the life of political movements and their everyday relationships with states.