Solo urbano

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.

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.

This paper explores the entanglement of dreams and reality in the production of economic infrastructures. It focuses on the Manta-Manaus multimodal transport corridor, which is currently being constructed between the Pacific coast of Ecuador and the Atlantic coast of Brazil, with the aim of integrating the Amazon into global production networks. Drawing on extensive field research conducted in Ecuador, we develop a fantastical materialism, as a theoretical and methodological approach to the intertwining of fantasy and materiality through which the spaces of capital are conceived, constructed, and brought to ruin. Manta-Manaus is revealed not only as a technocratic accumulation strategy, but also as a seductive dream of planetary integration and geographical freedom. This dream has become ensnarled in the material dynamics of uneven geographical development, and its infrastructures have been repurposed for the expansion of the oil frontier. The Real of Capital thus advances through the creative destruction of its own fantasies.

This paper aims to make a modest contribution to the debate on how the ecologies of urbanization help us understand the socio-spatial changes we confront in the climate emergency. The intervention is constructed in four steps. First, it speaks to what kind of Urban Political Ecology (UPE)—or generally what I call a “spatialized political ecology”—may be appropriate for urban society. In a second step, it historicizes and spatializes the narrative by introducing an urban political ecology of landscapes. For that, the paper mobilizes the concepts of boundaries, belts, and in-betweens. The third part illustrates the transformation of postsuburban political ecologies in three rather different world regions. The last part of this paper examines what the potential is and what need for action exists in an urban society threatened and conditioned by the climate emergency and the Capitalocene. Ultimately, the paper aspires to move the debate on UPE more into the direction of making it relevant for the urban affairs of a suburban planet.

O presente artigo visa discutir como os processos de neoliberalização se fazem presentes na gestão urbana municipalista. Esses processos podem ser observados na privatização de espaços e nos modelos de gestão implantados, principalmente a partir dos anos 1990, quando os condomínios fechados se destacaram no mercado imobiliário. No texto, são apresentados conceitos gerais, referentes a esses processos, e seus impactos na governança das cidades. Ao longo da discussão, os conceitos são analisados no contexto da cidadania e das peculiaridades do federalismo municipalista brasileiro. Por fim, é discutido se a descentralização favoreceu ou não as políticas neoliberais no âmbito da gestão municipal, bem como nas propostas de participação popular elencadas pelo direito à cidade traçado depois da Constituição de 1988. O texto, ao analisar o municipalismo e a privatização da gestão urbana, exemplifica a discussão com casos da Região Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte.

Através do conflito social é possível observar a transformação do sertão-semiárido pernambucano. Essa análise é baseada na metodologia crítica de agregação de valores no processo de exploração de novas reservas naturais. Com isso, surgem novas mercadorias e ocorrem desmembramentos de laços sociais tradicionais (Alvater & Mahnkop, 2007; Giddens, 1991). No passado foram as desvantagens climáticas e a inóspita natureza local que impulsionaram a organização social desse território. Atualmente, é a valorização do semiárido, a riqueza do bioma caatinga, que provoca sua transformação. Em ambos os momentos, a transformação do espaço é marcada pelo distanciamento entre sociedade e natureza e pela singularidade da relação tempo e espaço a nível local (Giddens, 1991). Os dois momentos de transformação desse espaço são marcados por formas de violência peculiar: primeiro foi através do extermínio da população nativa e na atualidade é a exploração das reservas produtivas naturais.