Fluxos populacionais e migrações

This article reveals how newcomers weave their own threads into the fabric of urban infrastructure. Entangling their own with other urban assemblages, newcomers generate multi-layered dynamics situationally in order to render possible the lives to which they aspire. They forge openings where there seemed none before and keep negative potentialities in check. To offer an ethnography of how the Senegalese presence in Rio de Janeiro has grown dynamically between 2014 and 2019, I draw analytical strength from the double meaning of agencement: the action of interweaving varied socio-material components—agencer—so that they work together well, and the resulting assemblage of social and material components. Two case studies act as a starting point: how Senegalese came to inhabit an urban architectural landmark and how they regularize their residence status. Their transformative power of city-making is generated both through the mutual intertwining of a dahira, a religious group of Senegalese migrants, and a diasporic Senegalese association and through the ways in which the Senegalese interweave themselves and their institutionalized collective forms with ever more socio-material components of the urban space. Beyond the better-known transnational embeddedness of the Senegalese, their complex infrastructuring practices upon arrival become constitutive of new urban realities, moulding the city fabric of which they are becoming part.

This article contributes to debates on the decentering of urban research by critically examining emergent forms of housing in the mining municipality of Canaã dos Carajás, Brazil, beyond the dominant lexicons that have emerged from the country's metropolises. The notion of ‘beyond the metropolis’ is offered here as a geographically situated, conceptual placeholder that empirically grounds calls for dislocating urban research. I draw upon fieldwork conducted in Canaã in 2018 and 2019, after the construction of the largest open-pit mine in human history, which attracted tens of thousands of migrants and more than doubled Canaã's population in five years, creating a severe housing crisis. By looking closely at how regional developers, local authorities, mining giant Vale as well as Amazonian majorities came up with their own ‘solutions’ to the housing problem they faced, I foreground the role of ‘extractivism’ and ‘extensions’ in driving and shaping urbanization and inhabitation—beyond the metrocentric emphasis on agglomerative dynamics driven by industrialization and rural-to-urban migration. This twofold conceptual grammar grounded in non-metropolitan Amazonia is absent from current housing debates and illustrates the generative analytical potential inherent in the move beyond the metropolis.

Segregation has been one of the most persistent features of urban life and, accordingly, one of the main subjects of enquiry in urban studies. Stemming from a tradition that can be traced back to the Chicago School in the early twentieth century, social segregation has been seen as the natural consequence of the social division of space. Such naturalized understanding of segregation as ‘territorial segregation' takes space as a surrogate for social distance. We propose a shift in the focus from the static segregation of places—where social distance is assumed rather than fully explained—to how social segregation is reproduced through embodied urban trajectories. We aim to accomplish this by exploring the spatial behaviour of different social groups as networks of movement that constitute opportunities for co-presence. This alternative view recasts the original idea of segregation as ‘restrictions on interaction' by concentrating on the spatiality of segregation potentially active in the circumstances of social contact and encounters in the city. This approach to segregation as a subtle process that operates ultimately through trajectories of the body is illustrated by an empirical study in a Brazilian city.

One of the main factors of imbalance in the urban development of cities is undoubtedly their growth rate. In this sense, one of the main characteristics of rural-urban migration phenomena that have shaped the development of megacities in developing countries has been the need to integrate a large mass of people through processes of rapid growth of its urban plot. In this paper the growth of five different cities in Latin America is analyzed from the perspective of the impact of these processes of transformation in the urban landscape, describing different levels of pathology in their development. Consumption of periurban space, cityscape misconfiguration, or the longterm sustainability of these processes of transformation are complex issues that need to be addressed from a rigorous and technical perspective. These variables will be subject to GIS evaluation and diagnosis by territorial indicators in order to establish patterns of behaviour.

One of the new challenges globalization raises to urban management is the increasing number of international migrants moving to cities of developing countries and their impact on urban governance. Although there is growing perception that urban cultural diversity is a desirable outcome of globalization, most international migrants add to the low-income population and are particularly affected by urban exclusion. Furthermore, local governments in developing countries are seldom prepared to cope with the ad hoc policies needed to integrate people with different cultural, social and religious traditions into the urban society. Such policies should aim to encourage mobility and temporary vs. permanent migration, strengthen civic identity, deal with the cultural differences and the resulting discriminatory reactions from local residents, promote participation and representation, and fight the social and economic exclusion that often expose migrants to illegal activities contributing to raising urban violence.

Nascida do ideal modernista do desenvolvimento nacional, Brasília — Capital da Esperança — desde sua gênese apresentou-se como a materialização da utopia desenvolvimentista brasileira. Teve o progresso planejado em cada linha do seu projeto urbanístico-arquitetônico, o qual traçou uma cidade sul-real, apresentada ao mundo capitalista como mais humana, igualitária e harmônica que as cidades reais efetivamente existentes. Hoje, 37 anos após sua inauguração, muitos se perguntam: o que aconteceu ao sonho? Da Utopia à Exclusão: vivendo nas ruas em Brasília é um livro que procura mostrar, sem uma pretensão generalizadora, um dos muitos aspectos nos quais falhou o sonho de Brasília: a utopia da integração depara-se, nos dias atuais, com uma triste realidade de miséria e exclusão.

This article examines the trafficking of Venezuelan truck drivers for labour exploitation in Brazil. The remilitarisation of politics is increasingly a hallmark of elite-driven strategies to manage the circulation of labour and goods from extractive zones. This article introduces the notion of logistics of unfreedom to explain the growing imbrication between techniques of control by the state and corporations that confine the reproduction of migrants within the realm of logistics processes. The analysis focuses on data from participatory observations and the narratives of 22 Venezuelan refugees who were trafficked from a militarised humanitarian zone in Brazil's Amazon to work for a freight road transport company in Southern Brazil. Findings show that a concerted logistic approach to refugee employment channelled mobility, constrained statutory protection and shaped the ethno-political differentiation of Venezuelans in the labour market. This forced Venezuelans to live in trucks where both productive and socially reproductive aspects of their daily lives were overdetermined by the rhythms of goods distribution. The article concludes that this logistic rationale has converged towards a self-contained regime of labour unfreedom that facilitates the labour trafficking of Venezuelan refugees.

 It is often argued that various forms of illegality persist in the Brazilian Amazon because of weak frontier governance. However, very little is understood about how this governance can be strengthened in the context of social and spatial change in a way that will counter illegality. Drawing on the concept of heterotopias, as discussed by Michel Foucault, and the life history of an illegal logger in an agrarian reform settlement project in the state of Pará, this paper approaches frontier governance by conceptualising the ‘settlement heterotopia’ as a real, lived-in place in which the space that makes up various state and nonstate actors’ sites of action interact and continually rearrange power relations. This rearrangement process may or may not work to legitimise illegality and, therefore, strengthening frontier governance involves a process by which collaborative power relations emerge and residents decide to work with the state instead of alongside illegality.