Abstract
The chapter provides an account of current disputes over urban land in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in dialogue with theoretical discussions in contemporary urban studies and critical geography concerning postcolonialism, neoliberalism and the right to the city, proposing the importance of pluralist perspectives in these debates. By analyzing a series of new land squats conducted and organized by new urban social movements in Belo Horizonte, the chapter addresses the insertion of these agents in the recent history of organized movements acting on planning and general urban issues. It also points to the need of trans-scalar panoramas to these processes, framing larger economic and political dynamics taking place in larger spatial scales and their connection to metropolitan Brazil today.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
A story yet to be told, which escapes our scope in this intervention, is Henri Lefebvre’s direct influence in Brazil’s urban social movements in the late 1960s and early 70s. Le Droit à la Ville’s 1969 translation (Lefebvre, 1968) published in Portugal circulated quickly within the Brazilian community of activist urbanists (according to some accounts, the military government’s censors did not capture Lefebvre’s connection to Marxism ), and while there is a great amount of debate concerning the subsequent diminishing/distortion of the term (rather ironically) by those involved in organized action to the simple access to “means of collective consumption”, Lefebvre’s influence is recognized by many.
- 2.
There is a foundational political dispute around the terms occupation versus invasion, in which the movements use the first, while the media aligned with conservative mayors use the second to condemn their actions. The idea of occupying in this context refers to a sociopolitical attempt to frame the movements’ own actions in terms of promoting justice and serving the collective interests of diminishing the stock of empty homes and urbanized plots of land while many people remain without access to homes or land.
- 3.
In Magalhães (2017), I approach the events of 2013 and the subsequent reactions that culminated in the 2016 coup against Dilma Rousseff.
- 4.
e.g., large urbanized plots donated by the state to private investors, conditioned upon industrial investments that end up not taking place; areas owned by corporations that owe large amounts of property tax to the city, and that remain empty in the middle of urbanized neighborhoods, waiting for a favorable change in the city’s zoning ordinance for higher density building etc.
- 5.
I do not have the scope in this chapter to present a careful reading, in relation to the context above described and the stories in which they insert, of each of these trends in contemporary southern/postcolonial urbanism—such as Peck (2015), with his own perspective on this literature. For a recent panoramic on important parts of this literature, see Parnell and Oldfield (2014).
- 6.
- 7.
Not only from abusive police forces but also from the drug trafficking and armed militias that take over these territories. Today, the Rio de Janeiro story of favela militarized police units intensifies conflicts amongst these forces. Their locations, restricted to the strategic parts of the city either inserted in its postcard or World Cup/Olympics circuits, is very telling of their connections to a city marketing/land rent/urban financialization nexus.
- 8.
Alternatively, dislocating centers towards Asia—as in Arrighi’s (1994) interpretation of this geo-economic shift as inserted in a centuries old Braudelian genealogy of capitalist centers changing places in each long cycle of accumulation.
- 9.
It is worth noting that the epistemologies of the south which Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) invokes have been an important and influential theoretical intervention in Brazil and Latin America in the last 20 years. Also through practical engagements with the World Social Forum and its networks of movements, Santos’ approach to popular knowledge and political epistemologies of southern Others could be an interesting additional point of contact and dialogue for contemporary postcolonial urbanists.
- 10.
On Storper’s (2016) critique of the idea and concept of the neoliberal city, it is important to note how it speaks from a technocratic standpoint that is very common amongst neoclassical hegemonic economists that deny the validity of the adjective—in spite of the IMF itself engaging with the term ‘neoliberalism’ in technical discourse more recently (Ostry, Loungani, & Furceri, 2016). It also does not seem to realize the trans-scalarity of urban neoliberalism (as a concept that refers to a scalar-relational set of processes), or this connection to the state as a major pillar, implying a general democratic deficit that is intensely experienced in the contemporary metropolis.
- 11.
Bringing important implications for the contemporary left, in recognizing that the roots of organized resistance movements in Brazil are far from the immigration of Italian anarchists in the early twentieth century, as the common story tells.
References
Abensour, M. (2010). Democracy against the state: Marx and the Machiavellian moment. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Amin, A. (2014). Lively infrastructure. Theory, Culture & Society, 31(7–8), 137–161.
Arrighi, G. (1994). The long twentieth century: Money, power and the origins of our times. New York: Verso.
Barnes, T., & Sheppard, E. (2010). ‘Nothing includes everything’: Towards engaged pluralism in Anglophone economic geography. Progress in Human Geography, 34(2), 193–214.
Bittencourt, R., Morado Nascimento, D., & Goulart, F. (2016). Ocupações Urbanas na Região Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte. Belo Horizonte: Praxis UFMG. Retrieved from https://issuu.com/praxisufmg/docs/relato-ocupa-jun2016
Dardot, P., & Laval, C. (2014). Commun: essai sur la revolution au XXI e siècle. Paris: La Découverte.
Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. New York: Verso.
De Castro, E. V. (2014). Who’s afraid of the ontological wolf? CUSAS Annual Marilyn Strathern Lecture. Retrieved from www.academia.edu/12865685/Who_is_afraid:of_the_ontological_wolf
Fernandes, E. (2005). A new statute for Brazilian cities. Mimeog. Retrieved from http://portal.unesco.org/shs/es/files/6104/10928441881city_statute.pdf/city_statute.pdf
Fernandes, E. (2007a). Implementing the urban reform agenda in Brazil. Environment and Urbanization, 19(1), 177–189.
Fernandes, E. (2007b). Constructing the ‘right to the city’ in Brazil. Social Legal Studies, 16(2), 201–219.
Graeber, D. (2015). Radical alterity is just another way of saying ‘reality’: A reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5(2), 1–41.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Holston, J. (2008). Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1968). Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos.
Lefebvre, H. (2003). The urban revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Magalhães, F. (2017). Thinking from June 2013 in the Brazilian metropolis: New urban political assemblages, old state-society relations. In V. Lawson & S. Elwood (Eds.), Relational poverty politics. Athens: UGA Press.
Mignolo, W. (2007a). Introduction. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 155–167.
Mignolo, W. (2007b). Delinking. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 449–514.
Ostry, J. D., Loungani, P., & Furceri, D. (2016). Neoliberalism: Oversold? IMF Finance & Development, 53, 2. Retrieved from http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm
Parnell, S., & Oldfield, S. (Eds.). (2014). The Routledge handbook on cities of the global south. New York: Routledge.
Peck, J. (2015). Cities beyond compare? Regional Studies, 49(1), 160–182.
Robinson, J., & Parnell, S. (2011). Travelling theory: Embracing post-neoliberalism through southern cities. In G. Bridge & S. Watson (Eds.), The new Blackwell companion to the city. Oxford: Blackwell.
Roy, A. (2011). Slumdog cities: Rethinking subaltern urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(2), 223–238.
Santos, B. S. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. London: Routledge.
Tonucci, J. (2015). Urban occupations as urban commons? Explorations from Belo Horizonte, Brazil. 1st IASC Thematic Conference on the Urban Commons, Track 1: Claiming the Urban Commons. Bologna.
Vainer, C. (2014). Disseminanting ‘best practice’? The coloniality of urban knowledge and city models. In S. Parnell & S. Oldfield (Eds.), The Routledge handbook on cities of the global south. New York: Routledge.
Velloso, R. (2015). A cidade contra o Estado: sobre a construção política de escalas e institucionalidades. In G. Costa (Ed.), Teorias e práticas urbanas—condições para a sociedade urbana. Belo Horizonte: C/Arte.
Acknowledgements
I thank the editors for important feedback on drafts, along with Joshua Akers, Dan Cohen, Max Ritts and Trevor Wideman, who have contributed with valuable comments and critiques on previous versions of this piece.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Magalhães, F.N.C. (2018). The Southern Urban Political in Transcalar Perspective: A View from the Squatter Movements of Belo Horizonte. In: Enright, T., Rossi, U. (eds) The Urban Political. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64534-6_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64534-6_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-64533-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-64534-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)