Pobreza e desigualdade

In this paper I argue that global urbanism produces peripherality in ways that cannot be adequately problematized without taking into account its actual extent and geographically uneven development. Therefore, planetary urbanization needs to engage scholarly traditions attuned to regional urbanization if the discourse is to move pastlimitations in the urban globalization canon and its narrow focus on cities. To that end, I examine research on extensive urbanization in the Amazon region. Illustrative case studies show how attempts to globalize Manaus precipitated territorial restructuring and sociospatial change far beyond the city’s boundaries. Manaus is now a more unequal city. Selective metropolitan expansion to the Rio Negro’s south bank has led to the simultaneous upgrading and peripheralization of Iranduba. Yet, the building of a city-centric regional network of roadways also shaped Roraima State’s transformation from isolated borderland to by passed periphery. Moreover, financial and symbolic appropriations of standing rainforests by metropolitan conservationism marginalize remote communities even in the absence of exploitative deforestation and resource extraction. Final remarks emphasize the need for further research on the hybrid (urban–rural) conditions andf unctional articulations of distant-yet-impacted peripheries. Such efforts may broadenthe political horizons of planetary urbanization by informing extensive contestations of entrepreneurial urbanism.

The article explores cartographic and statistical registers of poverty as geo-legal technologies operating across shifting visual economies which structure ways of seeing and concealing ‘the poor’ in the urban landscape. Drawing on the fields of critical cartography and digital urbanism, and taking a 2013 controversy around Google Maps’ mapping of favelas in Rio de Janeiro as a starting point, it investigates the aesthetic role of digital maps and data in the legal geographies of urban poverty. It is argued that sociospatial encodings give form to poverty in ways that activate antipoverty responses and continuously support correlations between poverty and criminality. This argument entails a post-representational approach to maps considering their inscriptional, propositional and normative functions. Cartography, statistics and law are interrogated as devices of global governance that work aesthetically to shape poverty and its modes of appearance in the city, i.e., as productive methods of documentation as well as world-making, through which geocodings simultaneously create images of poverty and become functional of spatial transformations. Poverty is thus conceptualized as it is made into an aesthetic category subjected to continuous geo-legal modulations.

Geographical scholarship has, since the late 1990s, shown how infrastructure was central to the making of urban modernity and the metabolic transformation of socio-natures. Meanwhile, the work of Latin American scholars including Aníbal Quijano and Maria Lugones has focussed attention on the imbrications between modernity and coloniality, in particular through the international racial division of labour. Moving between these ideas, I argue that there is intellectual and political ground to be gained by specifically accounting for the coloniality of infrastructure, in both its material and epistemic dimensions. I ground the analysis in the history of Recife, Northeast of Brazil, analyzing the role of British engineering in the production of the city's landscape and infrastructure, and address the epistemic dimensions of the coloniality of infrastructural by exploring infrastructural spectacle in 1920s Recife. Finally, I explore how the coloniality of infrastructure directs our attention to race, labour and finance.

Assemblage thinking offers a new conceptual toolkit for analysing the relationship between society and space. However, major questions remain regarding both its ontological propositions and how it might be applied to the analysis of specific socio-spatial objects. This article contributes to these debates by using assemblage thinking to trace the long-term development of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. These territories have undergone a range of seemingly contradictory changes over recent decades. On one hand, expanded infrastructure and service provision and improved social outcomes have meant favelas have moved closer to, and in some cases surpassed, areas officially designated as “formal”. On the other, they continue to be heavily stigmatised, targeted by exceptional forms of governance, and subject to militarisation and abuse by police and non-state armed groups. Tracing these developments over time, I argue that the favela is best understood as an assemblage of heterogeneous, interacting elements that operate according to diverse logics. Despite continual pressures to deterritorialise, or break apart, a density of components and relations has ensured the continual reterritorialisation of the “favela” as a distinct object of perception and action over more than a century, with far reaching consequences for residents and the wider city.

O artigo baseia-se em duas pesquisas qualitativas em favelas cariocas, especialmente em uma de suas atividades, aproximadamente 50 horas de dinâmica com 15 grupos focais (envolvendo 150 moradores de mais de 40 favelas). Designou-se de “coletivos de confiança” os grupos focais compostos a partir de relacionamento anterior dos participantes com algum dos pesquisadores, capaz de, através do conhecimento pessoal, gerar alguma confiança prévia. Pensada com vistas a minimizar os prováveis efeitos de uma “lei do silêncio” imposta pelos agentes da violência nessas localidades, esta forma de recrutamento demonstrou ter sido adequada. O texto analisa os enunciados colhidos durante os debates, claramente concentrados nas diferentes modalidades de presença e atuação dos bandos de criminosos e das forças policiais nas favelas cariocas. Sustenta que, menos que questionar a violência criminal e policial como um todo, eles expressam intensa preocupação com algumas de suas manifestações, aquelas que impedem o prosseguimento das rotinas diárias. Sem ser diretamente tematizado, este é o horizonte de atenção que organiza todo o discurso crítico “para fora” das favelas, bem como as atitudes e condutas nos locais de moradia. Os autores avançam um pouco mais, argumentando que, em suas descrições e denúncias, os moradores demonstram não lidar da mesma maneira com todas as formas de desestabilização de suas rotinas, evitando homogeneizar os responsáveis. Assim é que, de um lado, a violência deflagrada durante as famosas “operações” policiais e sempre presente na arbitrariedade da conduta regular desses agentes aparece associada ao seu caráter quase totalmente imprevisível. De outro lado, quando se trata da violência envolvida nas práticas dos traficantes, com os quais os moradores são obrigados a compartilhar o mesmo território, há muitos relatos de tentativas (bem e mal/sucedidas) de redução da imprevisibilidade do fluxo da vida local. Isto ocorre por meio do ajustamento das condutas a um cálculo – inviável e/ou ineficaz no caso da ação policial – dos riscos envolvidos nesta convivência forçada. Este, tornando “administrável” uma pequena porção da violência na localidade, permite reabsorvê-la como a parte “extraordinária” das rotinas “ordinárias”.

Resultado de uma pesquisa mais ampla que foi realizada no Setor de Cirurgias Reparadoras e Estética, obra social sobre a responsabilidade do doutor Ivo Pitanguy na Santa Casa de Misericórdia, situada na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. A pesquisa tem como objetivo refletir sobre a representação da imagem e os significados que as classes populares fazem do corpo e da beleza.

This paper analyzes the intersection between waste, value, and the right to the city within the context of the Municipal Recycling Collection Program in Salvador, Brazil. It shows how the legal recognition of recyclable-waste collectors as legitimate workers and their integration into municipal practices of waste management has not materialized into improved working conditions and has done nothing to advance their struggle for the right to the city. A critical value perspective on this specific case demonstrates that waste and “humans-as-waste” “switching” from not-value to value-in-the-making does not represent a way of escaping abjection and exploitation. Instead, the inclusion of cooperative collectors into the municipal recycling collection program has resulted in new forms of dispossession, through state-increased control over recyclables and in the municipality appropriating the value produced by the struggles, knowledge, and informal collective labor of the collectors. The right to the city for waste workers in Salvador therefore entails the right to work with dignity and the re-appropriation of waste as the urban commons to create livelihoods based on labor relations and regimes of value against and beyond capitalism.

In this article, we scrutinize the concept of ‘urban informality’ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. By unpacking key moments in Rio’s history when conceptualizations of informal housing (i.e., favelas) changed, we explain why favelas have been understood in different ways over the last century. Our argument is that the concept of informality, while signaling an important shift in how favelas were understood, also perpetuated orientalist epistemologies in theories of urban development. This helps to explain why the term gained traction when it did, as well as why it remains salient today. In Rio, this means that changing understandings of favelas over the last century reveal little about actual changes within favelas, and more about how different geographic imaginaries were projected onto them, reflecting specific ‘problems’ confronting the city at different moments in history. This is important for seeing how conceptualizations of favelas – including the ways we understand urban informality – tend to mirror a host of latent social and political anxieties connected to urban development, including attempts to govern and control informal space.