Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Dialogues (Transforming Capitalism) 1786606402, 9781786606402

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Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality

Transforming Capitalism Series Editors Ian Bruff, University of Manchester; Julie Cupples, University of Edinburgh; Gemma Edwards, University of Manchester; Laura Horn, University of Roskilde; Simon Springer, University of Victoria; Jacqui True, Monash University This book series provides an open platform for the publication of pathbreaking and interdisciplinary scholarship, which seeks to understand and critique capitalism along four key lines: crisis, development, inequality, and resistance. At its core lies the assumption that the world is in various states of transformation, and that these transformations may build upon earlier paths of change and conflict while also potentially producing new forms of crisis, development, inequality, and resistance. Through this approach, the series alerts us to how capitalism is always evolving and hints at how we could also transform capitalism itself through our own actions. It is rooted in the vibrant, broad, and pluralistic debates spanning a range of approaches that are being practised in a number of fields and disciplines. As such, it will appeal to sociology, geography, cultural studies, international studies, development, social theory, politics, labour and welfare studies, economics, anthropology, law, and more. Titles in the Series The Radicalisation of Pedagogy: Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit of Revolt, edited by Simon Springer, Marcelo de Souza and Richard J. White Theories of Resistance: Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit of Revolt, edited by Marcelo Lopes de Souza, Richard J. White and Simon Springer The Practice of Freedom: Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit of Revolt, edited by Richard J. White, Simon Springer and Marcelo Lopes de Souza States of Discipline: Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order, edited by Cemal Burak Tansel The Limits to Capitalist Nature: Theorizing and Overcoming the Imperial Mode of Living, by Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen Workers Movements and Strikes in the 21st Century, edited by Jörg Nowak, Madhumita Dutta and Peter Birke

Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle edited by Neil Gray Renewing Destruction: Wind Energy Development, Conflict and Resistance in a Latin American Context, by Alexander Dunlap Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth, edited by Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Alexander Paulsson and Stefania Barca Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Dialogues, edited by Julie Cupples and Tom Slater

Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality Interdisciplinary and Comparative Dialogues

Edited by Julie Cupples and Tom Slater

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd 6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL, UK www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Selection and editorial matter © 2020, Julie Cupples and Tom Slater Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Available A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN:

HB 978-1-78660-640-2 PB 978-1-78660-641-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78660-640-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-641-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-642-6 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

We would like to dedicate this book to Joe Schaffers of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. Since we began taking our Geography students to Cape Town three years ago, Joe has been exceptionally generous with his time and knowledge. Through an inimitable combination of profound knowledge, personal experience and complete approachability, Joe allows our students to learn about community, housing, memory, anti-racist struggles, human dignity, and hope, and demonstrates to them why understandings of urban marginality should be embedded in a sense of social justice.

Contents

Acknowledgementsxi  1 Introduction: Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality Tom Slater

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PART I:  CONCEPTUAL TERRAINS

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 2 An Explanatory or Mystifying Concept? The Use Value of Gentrification Theory Edwar Calderon, Neil Gray, Hamish Kallin and Ebru Soytemel

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 3 Oscillations in Housing Policy: Comparative Urbanism across Delhi and Rio de Janeiro Héctor Becerril Miranda and Kavita Ramakrishnan

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 4 The Calais Jungle: A City In-Between Urban Worlds Oli Mould

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PART II:  EVERYDAY MARGINALITIES

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 5 Contrasting ‘Ghetto’ Pride: A Comparison of the Sense of Belonging for People Who Live Outside of Their Local Neighbourhoods: London and Mexico City César Rebolledo and Joy White  6 Music Neotribes: Moving from the Margins Catherine Wilkinson and Joseline Vega Osornio

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 7 Popular Religiosity and Struggles for Urban Justice in Mexico: A Decolonial Analysis of Santa Muerte Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn PART III:  MARGINALITY BY DESIGN AND DESIGNING OUT MARGINALITY  8 Cultural Marginality and Urban Placemaking: The Case of Leicester and Ouro Preto Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos and Tom Hulme  9 Marginalised Development and Ad-Hoc Tactics for Growth Lucía Martín López, Christoph Lueder and Almudena Cano

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10 San Miguel de Allende: Tackling Marginality in the FalseUtopian City Mario López González Garza

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11 Conclusion: Urban Research and the Pluriverse: Analytical and Political Lessons from Scholarship in Varied Margins Julie Cupples

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Index227 About the Contributors

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Acknowledgements

This book emerged from a workshop on urban marginality held in Mexico City in July 2016. We would like to thank the British Council-Newton Fund for the crucial funding that made this workshop possible. We’d also like to thank Universidad La Salle in Mexico City for hosting the event, especially Toño Gallardo, Mario López González Garza and Mariana Gallardo for their support in putting together the grant application and for all the superb logistical arrangements that ensured the success of the workshop.We’d also like to thank all of the early career researchers from Mexico and the United Kingdom who attended the workshop and shared their ideas. Special thanks go to all those who have contributed chapters to this volume. It has been a pleasure to work with you all and to share perspectives on urban marginality across geographical and disciplinary spaces. Thanks too to the University of Edinburgh Global Development Academy and in particular to Dalinda Alvarez Pérez, director of the University of Edinburgh Latin America Office, who put us in touch with our collaborators at Universidad La Salle. Finally, we’d like to thank the Transforming Capitalism team at Rowman & Littlefield International, namely Rebecca Anastasi, Ian Bruff, Gemma Edwards, Laura Horn, Dhara Snowden, Simon Springer and Jacqui True.

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Chapter 1

Introduction Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality Tom Slater In July 2016, two dozen early career scholars from Mexican and British universities came together at a four-day workshop on urban marginality held in Mexico City, funded by the British Council’s Newton Fund. Scholars came from diverse academic fields, including geography, history, sociology and architecture, but were united in a shared analytical and political concern to dissect the diverse forms of urban marginality in the United Kingdom, Mexico and elsewhere in the world, and to consider the modes and tactics of resistance deployed by people living in marginalised circumstances. The workshop covered a range of urban themes such as gentrification and urban regeneration; informality and irregularity; territorial stigmatisation, exclusion and precarity; inequalities of class, race and gender; belonging and citizenship; agency, resistance and resilience (especially via popular culture). As will be evident in many chapters in this book, these familiar themes were often tackled from less familiar geographical, conceptual and methodological terrains. In addition, much of the discussion following the presentations at the workshop (via case study approaches) took on a comparative dimension, and explored the theoretical, empirical and methodological challenges that come with the analysis of urban marginality across very different political and historical contexts when, at first glance, marginality appears to display a number of generic socio-spatial features across those contexts. Mexico City provided a fascinating, unsettling yet inspiring context for the workshop. As in many other large cities across Latin America and beyond, contemporary modes of urban governance, layered on top of the legacies of colonial domination, have overwhelmingly benefited affluent populations and widened social inequalities. Disinvestments from social housing and rent-seeking developments by real estate companies and land speculators have resulted in the displacement of low-income populations to the urban 1

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periphery. Public social spaces have been steadily eliminated to make way for luxury apartments and business interests. Low-income neighbourhoods are often stigmatised by dominant social forces and institutions wielding the symbolic power to justify their demolition. But far from being passive victims of such processes, the urban poor have negotiated and resisted these developments in a range of imaginative and very powerful ways. The workshop included a field visit as part of an exploration and consideration of these urban dynamics in Mexico City, which informed subsequent discussions of the material and symbolic mechanisms through which urban marginality is produced and contested. These discussions resulted in cross-cultural (Mexican-British) collaboration and co-authorship, where the workshop participants fused their empirical and theoretical lenses in writing the chapters that appear in this book. Anchoring such collaborations was an understanding that urban marginality is not everywhere cut from the same cloth, in spite of powerful transnational forces and homogenising discourses, and a shared concern for more inclusive forms of belonging and citizenship against the political grain of intensifying marginalisation, precarity and poverty.

URBAN MARGINALITY: The History and Anatomy of a Contested Concept Sometimes an expression has to be withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning – then it can be put back into circulation. —Ludwig Wittgenstein (1940, 39)

Over the past twenty years, a vibrant theoretical and empirical literature has emerged under the generic label of postcolonial urban studies, of which a key strand is a ‘new comparative urbanism’ primarily concerned with the important and necessary task of theory-building from Southern urban contexts and experiences. This work is fuelled by a strong conviction that generalising ‘Northern’ approaches, theories and concepts prevent scholarship and policy from understanding both the diversity of histories within Southern, and especially postcolonial contexts, and the heterogeneity of urban experiences. In a powerful and influential body of work, Jennifer Robinson (e.g. 2006; 2011; 2016) has critiqued the fact that, before the interventions of postcolonial and subaltern theory, almost all the concepts available to investigate urban processes and phenomena were produced from research in and about the Global North. An interesting exception is the hotly contested concept of marginality which, applied to the study of urbanisation, was first developed in scholarship not in the North,



Introduction 3

but in and on Latin American cities in the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, given their significant political differences, marginality was developed and deployed by both conservative modernisation theorists and Marxist theorists trying to explain, via structural macronarratives, the dramatic pace of urbanisation (and the emerging inequalities) in these contexts during this time. As Marques (2016) has helpfully and comprehensively summarised, much of the pace of urbanisation in Latin American cities following World War II was caused by the disparities in living conditions and opportunities between rural and urban areas, which generated internal flows of migrants to cities during periods of rapid capitalist modernisation that shaped the region from the 1930s onwards (Gugler and Gilbert 1982). Even though the industrial sector was expanding in most contexts, there was a surplus of labour flowing into cities, caused by a variety of push and pull factors, resulting in unemployment and precarious work (the informal economy), and a patterning of urban space characterised by widening inequalities along every possible axis. Marques also provides a clear summary of the various explanations that emerged to account for the emergence of urban ‘marginality’. Conservative modernisation theorists argued that urban development followed various stages of capitalist modernisation (Rostow 1960). Any ‘underdevelopment’ during early stages of this process was supposedly caused by ‘accommodation effects’ that would fade away with time. Modernisation, they hypothesised, would bring to the cities people with rural behaviours, who – detached from their rural origins, social connections, relationships of familial authority and economic activities – would develop provincial, lazy and ultimately behavioural traits somehow incompatible with modern city life, ending up as urban ‘marginals’ (Germani 1966; Portes 1972). Yet ‘marginality’ as a generic theme was also embraced by Marxist structural-historical analysts, from (of course) a different political position and interpretation. This perspective focused on the process of import-substitution industrialisation and its intrinsic inability to absorb the growing mass of the labour force. Dependency scholars such as Nun, Marín and Murmis (1968) were concerned with such vast unemployment among a ‘surplus population’, one that transcended the logic of the Marxist concept of the industrial reserve army. They called this population the ‘marginal mass’, and as Auyero (1997) summarises, it was ‘neither superfluous nor useless; it was “marginal” because it was rejected by the same system that had created it. Thus the marginal mass was a “permanent structural feature” never to be absorbed by the “hegemonic capitalist sector” of the economy, not even during its expansionary, cyclical phases’ (510). These dependency scholars, therefore, argued that ‘marginal’ populations played a functional role in the peripheral capitalist economies across the region (Kowarick 1979). The contribution of these countries to global capitalism was to provide low paid

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and poorly regulated labour forces. This was facilitated by the presence of an expanding informal economy that sustained the marginal mass of unemployed people, whose function for the capitalist system was to push down wages. This was intensified and entrenched by the authoritarian political regimes that held power in, inter alia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile between the 1960s and the 1980s (Kowarick 1979). Marxist analysts argued that it was precisely because of periods of strong state-sanctioned economic growth and urban expansion that poverty was widespread, and marginality was not a category applicable to isolated individuals and families, but rather a signature socio-spatial feature of the entire region (Camargo 1976; Cardoso and Faletto 1977; Quijano 1977). These macro theories of urban marginality, while differing in politics and focus, were intensely criticised by scholars who drew on ethnographic observations of urban poverty to demonstrate that the ideas, values and economic situations of the poor could not be helpfully reduced to sweeping, often negative, generalisations from analysts across the political spectrum. The lives of the poor, they argued, were highly diverse and often tightly organised around progress, individual work/effort and family sacrifice/savings, pursuing objectives similar to those of other (more affluent) social groups, albeit with different strategies because of severe structural constraints, highly scarce resources and narrower life chances (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Garrido 1981; Durham 1988; Lomnitz 1975). One of the most influential critiques from this genre was Janice Perlman’s (1976) The Myth of Marginality, a remarkable analysis of favela poverty in Rio de Janeiro. This work challenged the ‘myth’ that people living in favelas experienced an all-encompassing sense of exploitation and isolation; rather than being located on the ‘margins’ of the system, Perlman argued that favela lives were tightly integrated into institutional structures, especially those of the state, both socially and spatially. Such was the intensity of critique of the concept of marginality that it fell out of fashion in studies of urbanisation across Latin America (see Cortés 2006, for an overview). The only exceptions have been the use of Latin American cities as examples in new macronarratives that tend to oversimplify empirical realities, such as generic references to neoliberalism (Goldfrank and Schrank 2009), global cities (Taylor et al. 2010), and precarious housing (Davis 2006). As Marques (2016) has argued, the problem with these studies is that ‘local elements, actors, conflicts, institutions and struggles are all treated as peripheral details, leading to conclusions about the inevitability of processes and leaving no room for politics’ (17). ‘Latin American cities’, of course, refers to several different contexts with distinct historical, political and geographical legacies and, notwithstanding the shared history of Iberian colonisation, is itself a highly problematic generalisation. Indeed, the problems of using sweeping generic terms with troubled histories such as ‘marginality’ has been highlighted by the development of postcolonial and



Introduction 5

comparative urbanism with its focus on dissecting local variations, everyday heterogeneities and politics, and a corresponding avoidance of over-imposing economic and global processes. In particular, the centre/periphery model of urban structure – common not only in the urban land use models favoured by neoclassical urban economists but also in the language of structural analysts both conservative and Marxist – has been intensely critiqued for blocking any understanding of the sheer diversity of the urban experiences, and for presenting a serious oversimplification of the heterogeneity of the processes, relations and features present in contemporary metropolises. As numerous recent analyses convincingly demonstrate, the social, economic and spatial ‘margins’ are no such thing, but vibrant social and political centres of possibility and vitality (e.g. McFarlane and Silver 2017). In cities of the Global North, the concept of urban marginality, after a period of dormancy throughout the 1980s and 1990s, came back into view as a structural analytic courtesy of the influential work of the sociologist Loïc Wacquant. However, it would be erroneous to portray his conceptual formation as a generalising macronarrative similar to the way it was invented and deployed in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. Wacquant was troubled by the lack of reflexivity and the gaze from afar that dominated scholarship on the United States ghetto, and especially by the presumption of social disorganisation and what he characterised as the scholarly myth of the urban ‘underclass’. He brought Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to theory and social research into the United States ghetto, and joined a boxing gym in Chicago’s South Side and began conducting an ethnography, interpreting the post-1960s transformation of the historic ‘Black Metropolis’ depicted by Drake and Cayton (1945). He subsequently expanded his research focus to a transatlantic comparison of urban marginality in response to the moral panic that swept through France and much of Western Europe in the 1990s about the alleged ‘ghettoisation’ of peripheral urban districts ravaged by deindustrialisation. The comparison between Chicago and Paris, mixing fieldwork, survey data and institutional comparison, yielded two urban monographs: an ethnography of boxing in the ghetto seen from inside and below, Body and Soul (2004), and a macroanalytic dissection of the ghetto seen from above, Urban Outcasts (2008). For Wacquant, advanced marginality is an ascendant poverty regime in post-industrial cities on both sides of the North Atlantic, typified by the fragmentation of wage labour, the recoiling of the social state, the buckling of the social economy of reciprocity based on kinship and place (a feature of working-class districts in the Fordist-Keynesian era) and the concentration of dispossessed groups into stigmatised neighbourhoods of relegation (functionally disconnected from expansionary phases in aggregate employment and income). Crucially, Wacquant contends that it is the state that is the principal

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determinant of the intensity and forms assumed by advanced urban marginality in both North America and Western Europe. He argues that it is advanced marginality as it is ahead of us – a poverty regime that is incubating and etched on the horizon of contemporary urban societies, something to which numerous societies are advancing towards in the context of mutating yet deepening neoliberalisation, or ‘an articulation of state, market and citizenship that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third’ (Wacquant 2012, 66). While critiqued by many for prioritising class over racial and gender divisions, for ignoring the existence of social movements and for downplaying the significance of capitalist political economy, Wacquant’s conceptulisation of advanced marginality has been highly influential and has spawned numerous attempts to probe the dynamic interplay of spatial patterns, symbolic divisions and social action in the city and analyse the multisided role of the state and assorted holders of economic and cultural capital in the production, distribution and representation of ‘problem’ categories and territories. In particular, his diagnosis of territorial stigmatisation as ‘arguably the single most protrusive feature of the lived experience of those trapped in these sulphurous zones’ (Wacquant 2008, 169) has shaped an entire sub-field of study dissecting how certain areas of disrepute in advanced societies become renowned across class levels, racialised, and portrayed as emblems and vectors of disintegration, as well as attempts to trace how spatial stigma impacts social strategy and identity at multiple scales in ways that entrench marginality (e.g. the articles in the special issue edited by Wacquant, Slater and Pereira [2014]). Given the contemporary unease surrounding the concept of marginality in the region, it is perhaps surprising that Wacquant’s writings on urban marginality circulate widely in Latin America, where they inform and influence scholarship (e.g. Auyero 1997) and policy debates. They have proved especially useful to scholars studying the impact of neoliberal restructuring at the bottom of the urban order in Argentina and Brazil, where his characterisation of neoliberalism as ‘market-conforming state-crafting’ (via the organisational triad of economic deregulation, ‘restrictive workfare’ and ‘expansive prisonfare’) has influenced urban research across several disciplines. For example, upon revisiting her seminal study in the Rio de Janeiro favelas, and conducting a new survey among residents, Janice Perlman (2010) argued that marginality had moved from myth to reality when considering in that context the dynamics of advanced marginality identified by Wacquant, not least the intense stigmatisation suffered by favela dwellers that affects every aspect of their lives. Living in a favela, Perlman observed, is today the principal source of discrimination and stigma that curtails entry into the formal labour market, restricts access to social services and encourages tactics of police harassment of residents – all resulting in their profound social and economic marginalisation.



Introduction 7

An additional, much more recent perspective on marginality needs to be acknowledged. This has emerged from the current interest in assemblages thinking among social and cultural geographers, particularly those based in the United Kingdom. Lancione’s (2016) edited volume Reassembling Life at the Margins offers the first systematic book-length attempt to deploy such thinking to analyse marginality in multiple contexts. Working from a point of departure that marginality ‘is simply too vague to be used as a category and thus not useful for sociological inquiry’, Lancione argues for a broader consideration of ‘life at the margins’ that takes into account what he sees as ‘the latest advancements in social theory’, that is, work that explores how social worlds are composed of ‘non-human beings, artefacts, natural forces, atmospheres and so on’ (8). He calls this a ‘vitalist’ approach, and highlights contingency, subjectivity, specificity, multiplicity, complexity, becoming and processual and interactive combinations as being central to ‘decentralise the human and its assumptions in order to re-imagine how the social comes together and falls apart’ (9). For Lancione and the contributors to his book, marginality is ‘not the outcome of broader economic causes, but can only be grasped as an ongoing process of subject formation . . . always a collective endeavour – a matter of contextual material and discursive arrangements to be addressed in their heterogenous becoming’ (22). The advantage this perspective offers is the remarkably fine-grained analysis of a wide array of unfamiliar events unfolding at ground level in marginalised circumstances, as exemplified by the work of Simone (2010), but the disadvantage is that any political promise of ‘assemblages thinking’ (recognising its Marxist roots via Deleuze) is often drowned by woolly conceptualisation and especially by the vague, ethereal writing of its leading proponents – something of a pretheoretical and pre-critical experimental empiricism frequently carrying an ungainly posture of emancipation itself. This book, considered as a whole, refuses to prioritise any theoretical approach to urban marginality over another. However, it also resists one of the more problematic developments in postcolonial urban studies, which is to dismiss, before any empirical research has taken place, a concept on the grounds that it is a generalising macronarrative (or worse, if the concept is from the North applied to the South, a form of intellectual imperialism). A brief observation vis-à-vis the logic of concept formation and theory building seems necessary at this juncture. It is of course very important to ask theoretical questions about the pertinence – and especially history and geography – of a certain concept, and to ask whether it is helpful or not in dissecting urban processes beyond the time and place where the concept was formed. The analytic challenge is to take that concept seriously, to clarify it and understand it, and if, for example, it turns out not to be useful in a certain context or struggle, then not to use it. Concepts are devices of explanatory

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utility. We design them, employ them, tweak them, and they are there to be useful to us if we need them: to bring things to light that we did not see before or know about, and to help explain phenomena that require careful scrutiny. They may or may not have utility across geographical and historical contexts, but if they help us explain social phenomena, and help us answer research questions, and maybe even help us make political interventions, then they should be retained – as long as they do not become all-encompassing or stop us from recognising that there may be even more powerful concepts available to us, if we take the trouble to look and think closely. Every contributor to this book sees utility in the concept of marginality, to varying degrees and from a very wide variety of research traditions and approaches, while also recognising its complex and controversial history (especially in the Latin American urban contexts), and its limitations. OUTLINE OF THE CHAPTERS As the foregoing account outlined, this book brings together the research and develops the conversations initiated at the workshop in Mexico City and provides what we hope we be a useful resource for scholars and students of urban studies interested in how urban marginality is produced and contested. While many of the chapters explore and compare the contemporary situation in the United Kingdom and Mexico, insights are also drawn from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, France, India, Morocco and Turkey. The contributors to this book engaged in theoretically guided dialogue across national borders that helped them avoid getting locked into the parochial parameters of their local debates, as well as guard against the subordination of scholarly to policy agendas. In addition, the chapters bring together scholars of the metropolis from multiple countries and disciplines who adopt field-based approaches (solo or in combination with historical and archival methods) attuned to the textures of everyday life, and who pursue a research agenda that is driven by a strong sense of social justice – a belief that a much fairer, more equal distribution of resources and life chances across a city is not just desirable, but politically possible. Chapter 2, by Edwar Calderon, Neil Gray, Hamish Kallin and Ebru Soytemel, tackles a concept probably even more contested than marginality: gentrification. In the context of recent interventions by postcolonial theorists questioning whether gentrification has relevance beyond the Global North, the chapter begins by reflecting on the process of theoretical abstraction itself, arguing that abstractions must be anchored by a commitment to reflexive empirical observation, the openness of categories and the specificities of social determinants on the ground. This sets the stage for an analysis of



Introduction 9

gentrification in Quibdó (Colombia), Istanbul (Turkey) and Edinburgh (Scotland), where the authors conclude that contextual research on gentrification must be alert to spatial and historical contingency and the multiple ways in which more is going on than gentrification, yet without feeling the need to jettison the concept. While the authors point to the enormous differences between those research contexts, none of these differences need be inappropriately erased when the concept of gentrification is applied critically. They argue that gentrification remains a useful concept because it invites us to try and investigate the class transformation of space critically, so long as we reject a static, sweeping interpretation of its meaning. In chapter 3, Héctor Becerril and Kavita Ramakrishnan bring two housing case studies from Delhi and Rio de Janeiro into dialogue with each other, guided by foundational work on comparative urbanism, and also by recent work that views the economic and spatial margins as vibrant social centres of possibility. They focus specifically on housing policy ‘oscillations’ in these two contexts: the repeated shifts between slum eviction/resettlement and in-situ upgrading. This is undertaken in order to examine the socio-political dynamics that facilitate more pro-poor housing policies and those that hinder them. The authors approach the question of urban marginality ‘from below’, by focusing on the particularities of each context to understand the place-specificity of a progressive urban housing policy and what conditions are needed to make it durable and transferrable across contexts. Against the trend in much of the urban studies literature where eviction and slum upgrading are treated separately, they see the two as interlinked, for eviction and slum upgrading (1) can exist side by side depending on who are termed as ‘rightful’ beneficiaries, (2) are considered in tandem by policy-makers and (3) represent shifting discourses on how the urban poor should be accommodated within the city. They demonstrate that a linear progressive trajectory from evictions to upgrading does not exist, for even when upgrading has been achieved, the process can be fraught and competing interests can sideline the ultimate goal of affordable housing for the poor. Recognising considerable contextual differences between Delhi and Rio in the dynamics of eviction and slum upgrading, there are important, transferable lessons across these contexts for political praxis. Chapter 4, by Oli Mould, analyses a different kind of marginalisation. Based on ethnographic research conducted at a (now demolished) refugee camp on the outskirts of Calais known as ‘the Jungle’, which was not officially recognised as a camp, Mould argues that it became an ‘interstitial’ space – a kind of urbanism that defies prevailing, singular ontological categories in urban research. Mould finds an urbanism infused with subaltern theory to be most appropriate to explain this heterogeneous space, from its formation to its marginalisation and eventual destruction. He demonstrates that the Jungle’s

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juridical, legal, social and cultural ‘in-betweenness’ allowed for brutal experiments in forms of societal control and enforcement, and facilitated violent encounters between police, refugees and volunteers. Yet the Jungle was not an entirely grim, negative or passive space – its experimental and ‘slippery’ urbanism fostered collective action, radical socialisation and Lefebvrian ‘autogestion’. In particular, the intense and unique beneficial social collaborations nurtured by the interstitial space of the Jungle were visible in the democratic camp/shelter design and construction (which involved volunteers and refugees, and created a dynamic feedback loop that was able to adapt individual prefabs to particular needs); in the provision of numerous essential social services and in the entrepreneurial growth of restaurants, cafes, barbers, bathing rooms and other leisure services. Chapter 5 brings together the intensive fieldwork on place, belonging and identity undertaken by César Rebolledo in Mexico City and Joy White in London. Interviews were conducted with people who had left stigmatised parts of these cities and live in other parts of the city, country or even the world, due to reasons of employment, school, marriage, gentrification, security or violence. Analysing changes in their identity construction, considering social stereotypes and stigmas that they carry as newcomers from marginalised areas, the authors dissect the senses of belonging or distinction through the variable degrees of pride (seen as the inversion of stigma). In the case of Iztapalapa, Mexico City, Rebolledo explores the stigmatising social media commentaries about this large district, and used those themes to shape and structure the interviews. In several disadvantaged eastern districts of East London, White interviewed young people who were involved in the urban music economy in some way, for their creative work had allowed them to travel outside of their usual bordered territories. They found that, despite clear cultural, political and institutional differences between these contexts in the experience of marginality and in the modalities of territorial stigma, senses of belonging from stigmatised groups often contained the same logic. There was a strong bond among stigmatised people, based on the neutralisation of prejudice, and on the positive evaluation of the idiosyncrasies, character and values of a place, even if that evaluation also incorporated the deviant, disruptive and dislocated. Chapter 6, by Catherine Wilkinson and Joseline Vega, is a highly original approach to the question of urban marginality via its critical analysis of techno music consumption, particularly rave culture, in the context of the exclusion of large groups of young people from privileged urban spaces for entertainment in both the United Kingdom and Mexico. Working with the concepts of subcultural capital and neotribalism (which are often pitted against each other, rather than productively fused), the authors build on a long tradition of scholarship in cultural studies to explore how social life at the urban margins



Introduction 11

is made and remade through raving. Specifically, they demonstrate how rave culture, displaced out of the cities in the mid-1990s because of a hostile political and institutional environment, has resulted in a marginal subculture which can be understood through the lens of music neotribalism. This has implications for struggles against marginality as, they contend, raves are places for unlearning neoliberal codes of behaviour and nuclei for digressions, and for ‘shedding’ the identity of the responsible worker. In an equally original contribution, Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn analyse Mexico’s cult of Santa Muerte in chapter 7. The cult is a controversial form of popular religiosity that draws syncretically upon pre-Columbian indigenous spiritualities, reworked aspects of Catholicism and other cultural sources. Devotion to Santa Muerte (the eponymous skeleton saint at the centre of the cult) was driven underground throughout much of the history that followed a 1775 edict prohibiting the worship of the image of death, yet in the age of neoliberalism it has seen an astonishing resurgence. Santa Muerte worship has expanded dramatically among those most punished by neoliberalism in Mexico: marginalised populations such as prisoners, LGBT communities, garbage pickers and other workers from informal sectors have been inspired and energised by social and other grass-roots media rearticulating its public presence. The cult is still ferociously condemned by the Mexican state, mainstream churches, and the nation’s middle and elite classes, and a moral panic over this form of popular religiosity has raged in the mainstream media. To dissect this struggle, the authors fuse together an approach guided by the British cultural studies tradition (in particular, conjunctural analysis) with the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality research paradigm to argue that Santa Muerte celebration intervenes in the contemporary capitalist conjuncture and provides a clear critique of urban marginality, state-led violence, stigmatisation and criminalisation. In the context of the ongoing privatisation and fragmentation of public space, Santa Muerte worship brings thousands of people into the streets for many hours, disrupting the everyday social order, and facilitating the revival of alternative ways of knowing and being together that are traditional for the indigenous peoples of Mexico. In chapter 8, the focus switches to the question of urban placemaking via heritage. Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos and Tom Hulme analyse the narratives of heritage in Ouro Preto, Brazil, and Leicester, England, in the context of heightened inter-urban competition in each country. To attract investment and visitors, policy elites feel their city must offer something that feels ‘unique’, and often do so via the incorporation of a notion of ‘urban heritage’ into their reorganising of cityscapes – a process validating certain social groups over others. In Ouro Preto, they explore the dominant narratives that followed the designation of the city as a national monument in the 1930s (in particular, the history of slavery is largely obscured by these narratives and

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the monuments and symbols carrying/imposing those narratives), focusing on how residents have either embraced or rejected these narratives depending on their class position. In Leicester, they explore how the St George’s area in the city was transformed into the ‘Cultural Quarter’ in the 2000s – a regeneration project that completely obscured the fascinating history and presence of organic ‘counter culture’ in the neighbourhood. In both cases, they illustrate how the past was much more complex and controversial than ‘urban heritage’ stories allow, but importantly for this book, they show how cherry-picking history has the ability to undermine and impede the integration of marginalised groups into city politics. Chapter 9, by Lucía Martín López, Christoph Lueder and Almudena Cano, examines the question of time-based residential architecture (strategies for flexible use and adaptation to changing patterns of inhabitation) in Mexico, Morocco and Chile, drawing on information obtained through collaborative mapping workshops, surveys and interviews undertaken with the inhabitants of marginalised communities and community organisations in each context. The three case studies demonstrate that the tactics for the self-construction of informal dwellings amount to an iterative and incremental process subject to continual reassessment and correction that not only generated spaces but also qualified and differentiated spaces. Although there were of course considerable differences in the wider historical, political and geographical contexts in which time-based architecture was unfolding, all three case studies expose the dynamic interaction between informality and monetisation, between the use value and the exchange value of informal (or informalised) dwellings. Taking inspiration from the work of Ananya Roy on informality, they argue that struggles for local sovereignty triggered by a critical threat, such as forced eviction, cannot be isolated from their (micro)spatial context. In contexts of acute marginalisation, they argue that the architectural experience of making space, individually and collectively, matters greatly, for it offers an environment for the formation of opinions and tactics of resistance. The final contribution to the collection, chapter 10, is Mario López González Garza’s account of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. After detailing the extent of the poverty and precarity in the municipality, he argues that the diverse vulnerabilities visited upon its residents are a consequence of the ‘false utopia’ projected by actors with economic interests, who exploit the city due to the World Heritage status granted by UNESCO in 2008. He shows how this status quickly turned the city into an arena for neoliberal policy experimentation, with predictable consequences in terms of widening inequalities, driving gentrification and displacement and deepening social suffering in poor districts. He is especially interested in how these developments have produced a local architectural vernacular of division and conflict that reflects economic interests above all others, which he calls a



Introduction 13

‘false-utopian city’. Drawing inspiration from the possibilities of the ‘illustrative city’, where indigenous communities and their knowledges of the territory must be integrated principally, he argues that emancipatory architectural transformations and designs must be enacted alongside the strategies that numerous non-governmental organisations are implementing to mitigate the impact of marginality in San Miguel de Allende. We hope that this book, with its theoretical pluralism, offers something of a refreshing way forward from the tedious and increasingly obnoxious divide in contemporary urban studies between postcolonial/subaltern/comparative theorists and Marxist/political-economic/planetary urbanisation theorists. We see these divisions as increasingly counterproductive given that, politically, these theorists usually share similar concerns and motivations towards addressing social injustices and resisting grotesque inequalities in cities. To this end, the Conclusion to this book, by Julie Cupples, explores the possibilities for the study of urban marginality infused with decolonial theory, where black and indigenous knowledges marginalised by coloniality are recovered and centred via a research paradigm that embraces epistemic pluriversalism (Grosfoguel 2007), allowing scholars to combine numerous theoretical insights and knowledges to imagine much more inclusive urbanisms. Taken together, the contributions to this book probe the parameters and scope of the concept of urban marginality, ask what is distinctive about it as a form of inquiry and consciousness and weigh what it contributes to our understanding of the urban condition and our present historical predicaments. While exhibiting a striking diversity of theoretical approaches deployed to analyse equally diverse historical, social, political and geographical terrains, the contributors are united by their commitment to the disciplined scrutiny of critical reasoning and systematic empirical observation in order to reveal latent properties of cities and phenomena in cities, to diagnose some of their more pressing challenges, and to demarcate the possibilities for more progressive, inclusive formations for urban citizenship.

REFERENCES Auyero, Javier. 1997. “Wacquant in the Argentine slums: Comment on Loic Wacquant’s ‘Three Pernicious Premises in the Study of the American Ghetto.’” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21 (3): 508–11. Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika, and Annaliese Garrido. 1981. “Marginalidad en América Latina: Una crítica de la teoría.” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 43 (4): 1505–46. Camargo, Paulo (ed.). 1976. São Paulo, 1975—Crescimento e pobreza. São Paulo: Ed. Loyola.

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Cardoso, Fernando, and Enzo Faletto. 1977. Dependency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press. Cortés, Fernando. 2006. “Consideraciones sobre la marginación, la marginalidad, marginalidad económica y exclusión social.” Papeles de Población 47: 71–84. Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Drake, S., and H. Cayton. 1945. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durham, Eunice. 1988. “A sociedade vista da periferia”. In Lutas sociais e a cidade, edited by L. Kowarick, 169–81. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Goldfrank, Benjamin, and Andrew Schrank. 2009. “Municipal Neoliberalism and Municipal Socialism: Urban Political Economy in Latin America.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (2): 443–62. Grosfoguel, Ramon. 2007. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn.” Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 211–23. Gugler, Josef, and Alan Gilbert. 1982. Cities, Poverty, and Development: Urbanization in the Third World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kowarick, Lúcio. 1979. A espoliação urbana. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Lancione, Michele (ed.). 2016. Rethinking Life at the Margins: The Assemblage of Contexts, Subjects and Politics. London: Routledge. Lomnitz, Larissa Adler de. 1975. Como Sobreviven los Marginados. Ciudad de Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno. Marques, Eduardo (ed.) 2016. São Paulo in the Twenty-First Century: Spaces, Heterogeneities, Inequalities. New York: Routledge. McFarlane, Colin, and Jonathan Silver. 2017. “Navigating the City: Dialectics of Everyday Urbanism.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42 (3): 458–71. Nun, Jose, Carlos Juan Marin, and Miguel Murmis. 1968. Marginalidad en America Latina. Documento de Trabajo, Centro de Investigaciones Sociales, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella 53, Buenos Aires. Perlman, Janice. 1976. The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janerio. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Perlman, Janice. 2010. Favela. Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro. New York: Oxford University Press. Portes, Alejandro. 1972. “Rationality in the Slum: An Essay in Interpretative Sociology.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 14: 268–86. Quijano, Aníbal. 1977. Imperialismo y “Marginalidad” en América Latina. Lima: Mosca Azul. Robinson, Jennifer. 2006. Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. New York: Routledge. Robinson, Jennifer. 2011. “Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative Gesture.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (1): 1–23. Robinson, Jennifer. 2016. “Thinking Cities through Elsewhere: Comparative Tactics for a More Global Urban Studies.” Progress in Human Geography 40 (1): 3–29.



Introduction 15

Rostow, Walter. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simone, Abdoumaliq. 2010. City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads London: Routledge. Taylor, Peter, Pengfei Ni, Ben Derudder, Michael Hoyler, Jin Huang and Frank Witlox (eds.). 2010. Global Urban Analysis: A Survey of Cities in Globalization. London: Routledge. Wacquant, Loïc. 2004. Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wacquant, Loïc. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity. Wacquant, Loïc. 2012. “Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism.” Social Anthropology 20 (1): 66–79. Wacquant, Loïc, Tom Slater, and Virgilio Borges Pereira. 2014. “Territorial Stigmatisation in Action.” Environment and Planning A 46 (6): 1270–80. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1940. Culture and Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Part I

CONCEPTUAL TERRAINS

Chapter 2

An Explanatory or Mystifying Concept? The Use Value of Gentrification Theory Edwar Calderon, Neil Gray, Hamish Kallin and Ebru Soytemel Debates over the use value of ‘gentrification’ as a concept have, in recent years, focused primarily on its applicability in contexts that do not fit the blueprint of the Western de industrialised city. The likes of Maloutas (2011), Ghertner (2014) and Smart and Smart (2017) urge us to see beyond the word or to discard it altogether, especially in contexts where something other than an upward trajectory of rents is threatening to displace lower-income residents. The Urban Marginality workshop in Mexico City, from which this book project derived, forced us to engage with these questions upfront, bringing together academics from a variety of contexts. Over the course of several sessions, we kept returning to variations of a similar question, and it is this that animates our discussion here. Is the concept of gentrification helpful, and why? Is it an explanatory or mystifying concept in our research? Broadly speaking, we are all convinced that the central pillar of gentrification scholarship is intellectually sound and still (depressingly) useful in the contexts we study: the rent gap is at work in Quibdó (Colombia), Edinburgh (Scotland) and Istanbul (Turkey); the pursuit of the ‘highest and best use’ for urban land is pervasive in all three. But what is equally clear is that ‘gentrification’ cannot stand alone as a catch-all descriptor, still less an explanatory framework that can capture all that goes on in these cities. Smart and Smart (2017, 519) suggest: If we extend gentrification to cover all of the processes by which urban areas undergo the replacement of lower-income by higher-income residents, it is neither a new concept nor does it follow any clear common process of change.

This kind of complaint serves to highlight why we feel this chapter remains necessary. It does not matter if gentrification is not ‘a new concept’ – indeed, 19

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it is at least fifty years old in its academic formulation, and arguably far older as an historical phenomenon (Clark 2005). Nor is there anything inherently virtuous about conceptual ‘newness’. More importantly, who has argued that it follows a clear common process of change? Considering that the concept was dogged by ‘production’ versus ‘consumption’ debates for decades (Slater 2006), to present gentrification as a concept that has always had a unified explanatory basis is simply false. For the purposes of this chapter, these debates are not interesting because we take a specific ‘side’ on them; they are interesting because they occur. They demonstrate that gentrification is (and always has been) a contested concept, one within which there are huge variations. What connects the state’s role in financing urban redevelopment in Philadelphia, USA, some forty years ago (Smith 1979a) with the in-migration of people from England to Crieff, a small medieval market-town in rural Perthshire, Scotland (Stockdale 2010)? They are clearly not examples of exactly the same process, but they do bear some similarities (alongside many differences): they both involve rising land values, the displacement of poorer residents (see chapters 2 and 5 in this volume for diverse, spatially and historically distinct examples of this process) and the redevelopment of buildings (see chapters 8 and 9 in this volume). The extent to which either is ‘gentrification’ should always be up for debate. But to call them both case studies of gentrification is not to suggest that they are carbon copies of the same process, following some kind of always-already-known blueprint. Nor does this preclude them from being case studies of far more than gentrification at the same time – in fact, quite the opposite; it is impossible to explain either example without recourse to other theories and processes (and neither author is foolish enough to try). In other words, it is precisely the lack of any immediately clear common process of change that makes these case studies so fascinating. In what follows, we are not brazen enough to believe we can settle these debates. There are, undoubtedly, places in the world where gentrification is not taking place, just as there are, of course, processes of displacement and urban injustice that are not gentrification (we witnessed quite a few during our stay in Mexico City). What we seek to do is far more modest: to show, through a reflection on the process of abstraction itself and gentrification in three different cities, that contextual research on gentrification must be alert to spatial and historical contingencies and those multiple ways in which more is going on without feeling the need to jettison the concept altogether. ABSTRACTION? LET’S ASK LEFEBVRE (Neil Gray) Recent postcolonial critiques of (planetary) gentrification theory argue that the concept is both too stretched and too abstract to be usefully applied



An Explanatory or Mystifying Concept? 21

beyond certain European and North American contexts, and cannot account for the multiplicity of material sociocultural scenarios it encounters. Debates around this subject are dealt with in this chapter and elsewhere (see Ghertner 2015; López-Morales 2015; Bernt 2016). As Loftus (2018) bemoans, however, such debates are in danger of reproducing decades of unproductive, hackneyed and dichotomous arguments that on both sides crudely juxtapose allegedly over-determined and totalising abstractions with allegedly oversubjective particularisms. Here I share Loftus’ (2018, 93) recommendation that the tension between ‘the abstract and the concrete, the situated and the planetary’ remain continually present within our analyses. More polemically, though not contradictorily, I argue that the concept of gentrification may not be abstract enough – or better, it may lack the reflexive conceptual historicity and determinate abstraction so central to Marx’s method (Sayer 1987; Sohn-Rethel 1978; Toscano 2008; Loftus 2018). In my selective defence of abstraction as a method, I draw on Henri Lefebvre, whose presence in the aforementioned planetary gentrification debates is muted. This is curious since Neil Smith, perhaps the most significant theorist of gentrification in the Anglophone world, made explicit his debt to both Lefebvre (Smith 2003) and David Harvey, who in turn acknowledges a significant debt to Lefebvre (Harvey 1991). Moreover, Lefebvre (or at least parts of his oeuvre) is central to the planetary urbanisation thesis (Brenner and Schmidt 2014), which the contested concept of planetary gentrification mirrors. In this necessarily brief intervention, I pose some questions about the validity of the (planetary) gentrification analytic in relation to Lefebvre’s conceptions of capitalist urbanisation and the production of space (via Marx’s method of abstraction). These are gathered under the concept of abstract space that stands as a spatialised correlate for Marx’s view of ‘abstract labour’: the pivot point of political economy and contested social relations within commodity exchange. I begin by touching on Lefebvre’s critique of what he termed the ‘fragmented sciences’ – tendencies towards the hyperdivision and fragmentation of intellectual and manual labour so evident in capitalist relations – before unpacking the merits of his method of abstraction and considering how his concepts of the production of space and the urbanisation of capital might contribute to an expanded historical-geographical notion of gentrification whose determinate abstraction is a strength rather than a weakness. Like Marx, Lefebvre resisted the canalisation and atomisation of knowledge resulting from class structure, the relations of production, private ownership, institutions and ideologies and the division of labour (technical, social and intellectual). ‘How can we manage to convince specialists’, he asked, ‘that they need to overcome their own terminologies, their lexicons, their syntax, their way of thinking, their jargon, their professional slant, their tendency

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towards obscurantism, and their arrogance as owners of a domain?’ (Lefebvre 2003, 55). For Lefebvre (2003, 53), urban phenomena, taken as a whole, ‘cannot be grasped by any specialised science’. Usurping such reductionism, he contended that the critique of everyday life must approach the whole concretely between ‘the experiential, the philosophical and the political’, seeking to construct, in praxis, relations between fields and fragments hitherto apprehended separately (Lefebvre 2005, 17). From this point of view, we might better view gentrification analyses as part of a more systematic critique of the urbanisation of capital considered as a ‘central motive force of urban economic expansion’ (Smith 2002, 100). Like other philosophically inclined Marxist theorists, Lefebvre insisted on the political and analytical utility of abstract conceptual frameworks that function as ideal expressions of specific historical and transitory determinate social relations. In traditional philosophy, Sohn-Rethel (1978, 18) argues, abstraction is generally understood as ‘the exclusive privilege of thought’, but the Marxist method of ‘real abstraction’ inverts this viewpoint. Real abstraction is no mere flattery of the mind but instead its opposite: In the Marxist schema, to put it bluntly, abstraction precedes thought. More precisely, it is the social activity of abstraction, in its form as commodity exchange that plays the pivotal role in the analysis of real abstraction. (Toscano 2008, 281)

The question of real abstraction is relevant for this discussion because Lefebvre’s theory of spatial production was based on what Hegel termed the ‘concrete universal’, meaning that the concepts of production and the act of producing have a ‘certain abstract universality’ (Lefebvre 1991, 15). Yet Lefebvre read Hegel through Marx, and, as Sayer (1987) cautions, Marx clearly separated his conception of the trans-historical abstraction, ‘concrete labour’, which produces use values, from his conception of ‘abstract labour’, which produces exchange values within specific, conjunctural historical material conditions of capitalist commodity exchange. Abstract space, as Lefebvre (1991, 307) contends, ‘corresponds . . . to abstract labour – Marx’s designation for labour in general’. His most significant contribution was to apply this understanding speculatively to socio-spatial relations in a particular incipient period of capitalist urbanisation within Western capitalism, most famously in his capital switching thesis: from the ‘primary sector’ of industry and manufacturing to the ‘secondary sector’ of land, property and the built environment (Lefebvre 2003). Abstract space, Lefebvre argued, is dominated by exchange value over use value, forming a politics and practice of spatial production that leads to ‘a kind of overall colonisation of space’ (Lefebvre 2003, 113). He viewed



An Explanatory or Mystifying Concept? 23

spatial production as a ‘privileged instrument’ in accumulation strategies, imbuing space with economic functions and determining the reproduction of the social relations of production. As a consequence, he argued: If space is a product, our knowledge of it must be expected to reproduce and expound the process of production. The ‘object’ of interest must be expected to shift from things in space to the actual production of space. (Lefebvre 1991, 37)

Contemporary urbanisation lends much credence to Lefebvre’s claims as it increasingly becomes the means of ‘embedding the logics, threads, and assumptions of capital accumulation more deeply than ever in the landscape’ (Smith 2003, xxi). Brenner’s (2009) notion of planetary urbanisation similarly emerges from a long-term understanding that urban questions cannot be reduced to a specialised sub-topic, but must be understood in the context of capitalist urbanisation globally. The concept of planetary gentrification (Lees, Shin and López-Morales 2016), meanwhile, follows that of planetary urbanisation (Brenner and Schmidt 2014), mirroring Smith’s (2002) contention that gentrification has become a ‘global urban strategy’. Yet Smith (2003) warns, Lefebvre’s analysis of urbanisation should not be reified. Rather it should be seen as a powerful tendency towards the urban as a site of capitalist expansion. Lefebvre himself viewed the process as one of ‘transition’ (Lefebvre 2003, 138), developing Marx’s method of abstraction spatially, not as ‘a system or a dogma but a reference’ (Lefebvre 1988, 77). This proviso is crucial when considering the conceptual validity of the term ‘planetary gentrification’ – which ups the ante by framing the gentrification analytic at an abstract and axiomatic level globally. However, as Sayer (1987) observes, whether a method of abstraction works or not in Marx’s terms depends entirely on its relation to concrete reality. He refers to Marx in the Grundrisse for reference: ‘as a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all’ (cited in Sayer 1979, 127). ‘Abstractions’, as Loftus (2018, 89) sums up, ‘are not . . . ahistorical’. When discussing the validity of the category planetary gentrification, then, we might ask whether gentrification is really a determinate abstraction that corresponds to historically and spatially contingent capitalist social relations, or not? I conclude with two propositions and a cautionary note. First, at a local scale, I contend that gentrification analyses can benefit enormously with reference to the wider questions of abstract space and the urbanisation of capital. Such abstractions are potentially transformative precisely because they deconstruct reified and fragmented analyses and social forms so that human emancipation might be released from their constraining equivalence and abstraction. Moreover, it is through the politicisation and generalisation

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of particulars, seen as manifold determinations of abstract space and their contention, that a properly axiomatic anti-capitalist politics might emerge (Gray 2018). As Harvey (2012, 65) contends: If the capitalist form of urbanisation is so completely embedded in and foundational for the reproduction of capitalism, then it also follows that alternative forms of urbanisation must necessarily become central to any pursuit of a capitalist alternative.

Such an approach avoids the pitfalls of narrowly culturalist or consumptionist readings of gentrification, jaded references to inadequate base-superstructure distinctions, the endless reproduction of ‘it happened here too’ case studies and atomised theory as fragmented science. Second, and with no contradiction, at the planetary level much caution is required if concrete phenomena are not merely to be shoehorned arbitrarily into a priori abstractions, but instead function as properly determinate abstractions referring to concrete forms in actually existing capitalist social relations. Reflection and praxis must move carefully and cautiously from the concrete to the abstract and not from an assumed abstract to the concrete (Loftus 2018). As Sayer (1987, 136) notes, uncovering real relations in their historical specificity – beyond their mystification and reification – is an ‘ineluctably empirical enterprise’. In short, I contend that the method of abstraction is not the problem per se (as suggested by Ghertner 2015, for instance), but whether abstractions correspond to material reality or instead function as pure or universalist conceptions without genuine historicalgeographical purchase. Marxist thought has not always escaped the violence of such simple abstractions (Sayer 1987), but with a commitment to reflexive empirical observation, the open-ness of categories, the specificities of social determinants on the ground and a philosophy of social praxis it need not necessarily be so. QUIBDÓ, COLOMBIA (Edwar Calderon) Research on gentrification in Latin America has tended to seek out the process in large urban centres (López-Morales 2015; Lees 2012; Janoschka, Sequera, and Salinas 2013). Less attention has been directed to gentrification in marginalised cities, where a diffuse, mutated version of gentrification can take place. In this section, I focus on the city of Quibdó in the Colombian Pacific, where the word ‘marginalised’ has connotations, within national Colombian imaginaries, of backwardness, fear and scepticism. The Chocoan



An Explanatory or Mystifying Concept? 25

territory is inhabited by stigmatised ethnic minorities; 65.46 percent are Afrodescendants and 27.38 percent belong to indigenous communities (PNUD 2015, 7–8). Most of the marginalised cities of Colombia are immersed in geographies of (post)conflict where the tentacles of neoliberalism arguably move more freely through the weak presence of the state. In chapter 1 (of this volume), Slater discusses the imperative of having heterogeneous perspectives (North-South) regarding urban studies theory, to avoid oversimplification through ‘intellectual imperialism’. Nevertheless, López-Morales (2015, 564) discusses the applicability of gentrification theory in a Latin American context. Despite the fact that it ‘falls into [the] category of pre-established, Westernised thoughts and preconceptions’, he argues that we ‘do need some generic theoretical categories’. However, while gentrification theory insists on a number of key analytical concerns (not least social injustice, displacement, and inequality), it is not necessarily prescriptive. Studying gentrification in a context such as Quibdó should be tackled from a pluralistic perspective where theoretical justifications or ‘adjustments’ are necessary to engage in the diverse realities of urban development. What this section aims to demonstrate is that familiar processes of rent-seeking led to displacement within the city, but within a context involving geographies of conflict. Overall, I aim to provoke discussion and leave open questions around the reproduction of urban inequalities in marginalised cities. Quibdó is the commercial centre of El Chocó, Colombia, and the principal fluvial port of the Atrato River. It lies in one of the regions most affected by ongoing conflict between armed groups and the government. It is also a region dominated by the mining industry – both legal and illegal. Quibdó thus endures two processes of displacement. The first is rural-urban displacement caused mainly by internal warfare and environmental conflict. The second is within the city (urban-urban periphery) caused mainly by real estate pressures. Both forces of displacement are induced by what Harvey (2015, 139) calls a ‘parallel estate’, which is outside the law. While the former is carried out by physical violence, the second legitimises practices that challenge spatial justice within the city. This question of real estate pressures has been discussed from the perspective of gentrification in a Latin American context (see Betancur 2014; Inzulza-Contardo 2011; Janoschka, Sequera, and Salinas 2013; Lees 2012; Lees, Shin, and López-Morales 2016), as has displacement through tourism and ‘branding neighbourhoods’ (see Botelho 2005; Crossa 2009; Diaz 2015; Dot, Casellas and Pallares-Barbera 2010; Reyes 2013). Despite this, commercial gentrification as the sociospatial footprint of warfare is a particular phenomenon that needs more research due to the specific transformations it brings to cities (i.e. mono-functional land use, destruction of historical heritage and uncontrolled densification). Omeje (2008, 9) points

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out that most of the studies on ‘rentier state/elites’ do not necessarily focus on other ‘rentier classes’ (e.g. armed groups) seeking rent and accumulation: Most explanations centred on the rentier state and rentier elites pay insufficient attention to the role of non-state actors like local civil society organisations and insurgents and militia movements in engaging the state, in rent-seeking and accumulation, as well as in fomenting and prosecuting rent-related conflicts.

In Colombia, armed groups have become ‘rentiers’ since real estate investments have been an option for money laundering through capital fixing. Moreover, Arboleda (2016, 106) shows how the large amount of capital circulating in mining districts distorts their micro-economies, inflating the prices of rents sometimes by as much as 300 percent. Likewise, Omeje (2008, 11) explains how the ‘predation and obstructibility of rentier resources’ generates a parallel economy to the formal state which is sustained by capital accumulation through a ‘robust shadow economy’ and ‘black market’. As the Colombia Solidarity Campaign (2013, 92) report from Cajamarca (another mining area) shows, more than 100 families were displaced by the high cost of property rents in the area after the arrival of several infrastructure megaprojects that pushed up rents by as much as 500 percent in some cases. The particularities of Quibdó’s urban development suggest a mutated version of gentrification is enacted when groups outside the law look for a ‘spatial fix’ that transforms the built environment through extra-legal forms of capital accumulation. Conflicts in marginalised cities in Colombia are commonly linked (if not always) to economic and environmental causes. In these territories, extractive economies and illegal practices empower some local groups (guerrilla and militia groups), or individuals, to operate freely due to the geopolitical and economic marginality these cities face. The combination of a weak state and a political arena dominated by small local elites allows for harmful predatory practices such as corruption and clientelism. This provides fertile ground for illegal armed groups to achieve spatial accumulation by exploiting flexible and ‘permissible’ urban planning policies. In the past decade, the injection of capital (primarily from illegal mining and narco-trafficking) into the local real estate market has produced urbanisation patterns that have contributed significantly to the process of commercial gentrification in the city centre of Quibdó. Superseding traditional residential use, commercial gentrification is expelling Quibdó’s population from the city centre to peripheral areas of the city. The increase of rents makes it impossible for lower-income families to continue living there. According to local inhabitants, money laundering inflated real estate property prices to a point that it became a powerful temptation for property owners to sell them. In this



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way, local property owners are taking advantage of the rentier ‘bonanza’. Exploring the rental or purchase prices of property in the city can give you an idea about the high-profit expectations that current owners have. Indeed, real estate prices can be similar to those in much larger cities such as Bogotá and Medellín. Crucially, this micro-economic real estate dynamic, imposed by the shadow economy and generated through warfare, seems to replicate some of the consequences of gentrification, but in a highly mutated form. It seems that global trends of gentrification mutate in geographies of conflict and extractive economies from structured processes of displacement to processes of capital (spatial) fix through the unregulated commodification of land use. In this way, the real estate market is manipulated by non-conventional (‘invisible’ or extra-legal) rentiers that find in this process of accumulation by dispossession an instrument of capital legitimisation that exacerbates the existing production of urban inequalities. On the other hand, Carrión (2005, 92) argues that when the historic centre loses its diversity, it also loses its character of centrality. Therefore, land use standardisation (e.g. mono-functional land use) and centrality become antonyms within the city centre. This includes the uniformity of activities which Carrión calls actividad gentrificadora (‘gentrifier activity’), which does not necessarily reduce poverty but expel it. Based on Carrion’s argument, we could say that the proliferation of commercial property speculation in the city centre of Quibdó could be defined as ‘gentrifier activity’. The most likely cause of this tendency to homogenise the territory is the failure of the state to enforce urban planning policies. Consequently, forms of standardisation (i.e. areas dominated by commerce) in the urban development in Quibdó are exclusionary, stimulating unjust spatial production with the displacement of lower-income residents from the city centre. Moreover, this transformation of the city centre into a mono-functional commercial area is politically supported and stimulated by socioeconomic goals such as employment generation for local inhabitants. Thus, to put it another way, ‘gentrification is a fundamentally political conflict’ (López-Morales 2015, 565). The case of Quibdó shows us that even under conditions of urban development that are highly mutated, gentrification contains a familiar logic. It can be considered as a means to an end – the means being the displacement of vulnerable lower-income populations and the end being higher profits from investment in real estate. So, in agreement with López-Morales (2015), I would argue that theories of gentrification are useful to understand the harmful effects of rentier capitalism in marginalised cities despite their ‘mutant’ factual conditions. One particular challenge, in terms of defining (or discarding) gentrification theory in marginalised cities subject to geographies of conflict is the fact that ‘gentrifier forces’ are not well defined due to the illegality in which rentier

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actors move around. For instance, in Santiago de Chile, the state plays a primary role in structuring gentrification through its policies (López-Morales 2015, 569). However, in Quibdó, where there is not a strong presence of the state and a ‘parallel state’ implements its own ‘policies’, it is difficult to define (even through the creation of ad-hoc groups) a specific gentrifier class. Ghertner (2005, 559) complains that ‘gentrification scholars often cling to the concept for its strength in identifying processes of urban class formation’, but in the case of Quibdó, it is – to quote López-Morales (2015, 568) – ‘clear that the exertion of class power . . . takes different shapes, but this does not mean this process is not gentrification’. ISTANBUL, TURKEY (Ebru Soytemel) In this section, I reflect on my experiences of using gentrification research in my doctoral study to provide an example of how mainstream gentrification is interpreted, used, and connected to urban research in Turkey. I explore difficulties I encountered and my hesitations using gentrification as an analytical framework. My research examined the impact of gentrification processes on different groups in the historical peninsula neighbourhoods of Istanbul (Soytemel 2011). During the first decade of the millennium, researchers in Turkey focused on the impacts of globalisation on Turkish cities (Bartu 1999; Keyder 2005). At that time, urban planners and architects predominantly focused on urban regeneration and urban renewal projects, juridical changes in planning and local governance of urban transformation projects (Uzun 2007; Ozus, Turk and Dokmeci 2011). Some examined developments in global cities, discussing subjects like competitiveness and sustainability, both in academic and in non-academic circles (Özden 2001). The majority of these mainstream empirical urban studies adopted a district-level analysis (e.g. Dökmeci and Berköz 2000; Hoffmann 2007). Due to the lack of national data on land or housing prices or ownership structures in Turkey, there was a strong tendency towards macroanalysis and macronarratives even in qualitative research with small samples. Discussions from gentrification research arrived and proliferated in Turkey in the early 2000s. Initially, these discussions focused on the etymological problems of translating ‘gentrification’ into the Turkish language. Due to the lack of a ‘gentry class’ in Turkey, and the corresponding lack of a term for such a concept, different suggestions were considered by different scholars, such as nezihleştirmek (literally translated as ‘cleaner neighbourhoods without problems’) (Keyder 1999); mutenalaştırmak (carefully planned, elite) (Ince 2006); seçkinleştirmek (elitisation) (Uzun 2001) or soylulaştırmak



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(ennoblisation) (Şen 2006). These earlier examples often linked the reasons behind gentrification processes to more macro developments such as globalisation or economic development/restructuring and neoliberalism. Initially, I was very reluctant to use gentrification as a framework for my research for three reasons. The first was related to the lack and inadequacy of available data to explore the supply-side dynamics of gentrification. I found supply-side explanations in gentrification research more critical and better linked to housing and urban policy discussions. However, there were no available data to explore the rent gap or to explore the impact of gentrification on different groups in inner-city neighbourhoods in Istanbul. The only available data to examine demographic changes in different areas of the city were the census and it was conducted on a district level. Census data did not provide any information about the residential characteristics of the population nor housing tenure. Additionally, census data could be misleading even on a district scale due to the high populations in certain districts of Istanbul (some with almost a million inhabitants in forty distinct neighbourhoods). Moreover, there were no data available regarding property ownership or changes in housing prices in neighbourhoods, and especially in historical neighbourhoods, the trajectory of property ownership was very complex, with disputes dating back to previous centuries (Gülöksüz 2002). In order to understand the impact of gentrification and other urban interventions on different social classes in smaller historical neighbourhoods and to explore the inequality mechanisms created by these processes, I had to collect my own survey data and combine it with in-depth interviews. I was interested in capabilities, means and networks, and the everyday relations of different social and economic groups in these neighbourhoods. During the 2000s, mainstream gentrification research discussed examples of gentrification where gentrifiers and non-gentrifiers were neighbours (Barry and Derevlany 1987; Butler and Robson 2001; Slater 2004). Additional to these accounts, I was interested in socioeconomic or symbolic borders among different groups and how these borders limit interactions or lead to inclusion or exclusion practices in the everyday life of the neighbourhood. The ongoing battle between supply and demand-side explanations in gentrification research (Slater 2006) also had an impact on how concepts and research in other countries translated into gentrification research in Turkey. Researchers who embraced supply-side explanations to develop critical gentrification research in Istanbul focused on macro changes such as changes in labour markets, globalisation, and neoliberal urban policies. I was more interested in exploring different experiences of living with gentrification among different groups. The macronarratives did not help me much to understand the dynamics of and changes to neighbourhood life in gentrifying neighbourhoods.

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The second reason for my hesitation was the missing link between the research on gentrification and the research on housing patterns or the housing choices of different social classes. Existing housing research in Turkey at that time mainly focused on the macro economic dynamics of the housing sector, residential preferences in gated communities, and suburban developments (Ergun 2004; Sen 2011). Similarly, social class was reduced to an occupational class analysis. Furthermore, gentrifiers were treated as fictional characters or reduced to an occupational category, often as ‘a creative group within the middle classes’. Resonating with the mainstream gentrification literature abroad, gentrifiers were pictured by scholars from Turkey as creative middle classes innocently trying to distinguish themselves from the traditional middle classes and their suburban life. However, it was hard to find discussions on what a suburban life meant in Turkey in terms of different social classes, or why gentrifiers wanted to distinguish themselves from others or what this all meant in terms of social classes in Turkey. When researchers referred to groups such as artists, journalists or writers as gentrifiers, these groups were often considered as cosmopolitan people or people who did not mind living in deprived areas because of their appreciation of cultural diversity and their distinct consumption ideology (Ilkucan and Sandikci 2005). There was almost an assumption that all gentrifiers were people who had high income, higher educational attainments and higher levels of appreciation of diversity and multicultural values. Some even considered gentrification as a process of liberalisation. Cultural differences were not seen as cultural reflections of class distinctions and the existing discussions on class inequality and class distinction still carried the baggage of earlier decades before de industrialisation. The third reason for my hesitation was linked to relationality. In my research area, there were forced Kurdish migrants who were living in cramped conditions in the historical neighbourhoods of the Golden Horn. There were also working-class families who had worked and lived in these neighbourhoods since the 1960s when these neighbourhoods were the centre of the manufacturing industry in Istanbul. Additionally, gentrifiers came to these neighbourhoods following the European Union (EU)-funded Fener-Balat neighbourhood rehabilitation project. There were no examples in the mainstream gentrification research describing displacement/eviction as a process where different groups encounter each other. Rather, there was almost an assumption that low-income groups or people with low education levels (marginal groups, migrants) cannot exist or remain in these neighbourhoods at the same time. In my research area, most of these groups were living as neighbours next to each other. Instead of seeing these groups as oppositional, I explored them all relationally, focusing in particular on their position-taking in order to understand their border-making processes. Integrating different groups and actors in the picture of gentrification, I had to scrutinise other research areas and make links with research on poverty, gender, neighbourhood belonging and



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cultural class analysis (Soytemel 2013; 2015). Cultural class analysis inspired me to examine neighbourhood belonging among different social classes and Marcuse’s work helped me look beyond only physical processes in gentrification (see also, Bourdieu 2005; Lamont and Molnár 2002; Lamont 2009; Savage et al. 2010; Tissot 2011; Marcuse 2013, 2015; López-Morales 2015). Since that time, there have been important advances in gentrification research. We are now able to draw on case studies from dozens of cities from across the Global North and Global South. There are more examples of different place-making practices, more nuanced analyses of dislocation processes in Istanbul (Sakizlioğlu 2014; Erensü and Karaman 2017), case studies focusing specifically on the role of gender and race in gentrification and more micro case studies of state-led gentrification, as well as analyses of power and political processes in gentrification (Sakizlioğlu and Uitermark 2014; López-Morales forthcoming). I believe the empirical evidence from gentrification research provides rich information about everyday lives of local cultures, solidarity patterns, inclusion and exclusion patterns, conflicts and social boundaries among different groups. Gentrification research evidence is also very valuable for teaching students about different urban processes and inequalities. In my own research, I preferred to use gentrification as a concept and gentrification studies as one of my theoretical frameworks because evidence from different gentrifying neighbourhoods in other countries enabled me to ask more useful/relevant questions on power relations in changing neighbourhoods. The richness of empirical evidence on different processes of gentrification reminded me to question the impact of (macro) urban policies on micro processes of everyday contestations in neighbourhoods. Furthermore, gentrification research also helped me to understand that housing inequalities are not only about the houses, homeowners and their economic dispositions nor solely the result of housing policies but also linked to the struggles of tenants and the hidden dynamics of eviction and marginalisation. To develop a critical approach to gentrification, I suggest that we as researchers have to consider how we translate or transfer concepts from mainstream research or from other contexts. Despite the richness of empirical studies of gentrification in other countries, we have to consider processes of knowledge production and the types of data or evidence we use to explain the inequalities in our contexts. After all, the concepts that arrive at our research contexts could reflect broader power dynamics in mainstream research itself. EDINBURGH, UK (Hamish Kallin) Craigmillar is a neighbourhood on the south side of Edinburgh (Scotland). From the late 1920s onwards, the land here was rapidly transformed through

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the construction of a series of large-scale municipal housing estates, reaching a population as high as 25,000 in the mid-1960s before declining dramatically in the final decades of the twentieth century to around 4,000 in 2016 (a decline helped along the way by a series of mass demolitions). A longrunning attempt at ‘regenerating’ the area since the early 2000s appears to fit neatly into the roll call of ‘regeneration-as-gentrification’ case studies that proliferated under the watch of New Labour (see Kallin and Slater 2014). So far, so familiar: that local authorities across the UK took rising house prices to be a measure of ‘success’ in regenerating poor areas is by now well known (Allen 2008) and the link to gentrification is equally clear (Glynn 2008; Lees 2014). The prominence of the state here is nothing new (see Smith 1979a) but serves to reaffirm immediately that gentrification involves more than simply ‘a rising rent environment and associated forms of market-induced displacement’, as Ghertner (2015, 552) mistakenly implies. As a stand-alone concept, the word ‘gentrification’ has little relevance here: it is fruitless to seek out a pure form of it. Nevertheless, it retains its use precisely because it forces us to see beyond a purely ‘market-induced’ form of displacement. In this short contribution, I want to reaffirm the link between devalorisation and revalorisation inherent in the rent gap model (Smith 1979b), an ingeniously simple way of trying to show what happens when gentrification occurs. As the gap between the capitalised ground rent and the potential ground rent widens, so the profit to be made from closing that gap grows larger. But this process is often misunderstood because its seeming reliance on purely ‘economic’ values seems to render it cold and placeless. Liz Bondi (1991, 194), for example, suggests that the approach ‘prioritizes abstract economic processes over the cultural conditions of their operation’. By quoting Bondi I am not seeking to dismiss her wider argument – around the importance of gender in gentrification research – but rather her interpretation of Smith’s theory. As Smith (1996, 1200) pointed out, ‘The whole point [of the rent gap was] to reinfuse explanations of gentrification with a sense of historical change and geographical specificity’. The rent gap model is nothing without the ‘cultural conditions’ underpinning it – and one way in which this is explicitly clear in the case of Craigmillar is the intersection between territorial stigmatisation and gentrification. ‘Devalorisation’ is not a natural process. In Craigmillar, this ‘abstract’ word recalls a variegated and long history of marginalisation of both people and place. It is not a linear history nor does it have a single thread of agency: it involves slum clearance, de industrialisation, lack of maintenance, inconsiderate planning, the housing allocation policies of the local authority, the residualisation of council housing after the Right to Buy, continued negative media attention and so on. The constituent parts of this history of ‘devalorisation’ take place at multiple scales. The presence of ‘black gold’ under



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the soil dates back to the carboniferous period some 300 million years ago (Crummy 2004) creating, for around 800 years, the need for an exploitable labour supply nearby and then (quite suddenly, with the closure of the coal pits in the late 1960s) disappearing altogether as a source of employment. A cocktail of factors – not least the feudal character of Scotland’s land tenure, the construction of the Georgian New Town and the sociospatial cleavage this engineered, the anti-socialist tendencies of the Progressive Association and their dominance of the City Corporation and so on – led to the city becoming one of the most divided in the UK along lines of class (Richardson, Vipond and Furbey 1975; McCrone and Elliot 1989). The HIV/AIDS crisis that hit in the mid-1980s was uniquely acute in Edinburgh, and tied the ‘the socially deprived populations in inner-city housing estates’ (Robertson and Richardson 2007, 491) to ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and the international trade of heroin. This is a crudely abbreviated list, but I hope it demonstrates that the value of the land here has always been determined by a wide gamut of processes that cannot possibly be squeezed onto the downward curve of the rent gap model, but animate it nonetheless. The model, then, is only as reductive as we choose to make it. Some of these ‘moments’ of devalorisation were concerted decisions, imbued with class power, that were made (and remade) over time, but most are harder to pin down. Nor does this process foreclose the possibility of resistance, broadly conceptualised. Local people have persistently sought to reshape both their representation and their area, evoking a pride observed in Iztapalapa and Newham (Rebolledo and White; chapter 5 of this volume). As I have argued elsewhere (Kallin and Slater 2014; Kallin 2017) this process of ‘devalorisation’ began to factor in the gentrification process once it was juxtaposed against a future that promised to be unambiguously better. It functioned as the preface to revalorisation not only in the sense of widening the opportunity for profit, but in terms of morally legitimising the pursuit of that profit. And, of course, it functioned by being reductive itself, where stigma repackages marginality as a recent, either self-imposed or sadly inevitable fate. It is a discourse unable to see that its own solution (demolition and displacement) reproduces marginality anew, only elsewhere. Quite clearly, it would be ridiculous to suggest that any single word could explain how one of the most infamous housing estates in the ‘national demonology’ (Jack 1989, 36) became a ‘place of choice’ (City of Edinburgh Council 2013, 33) in the space of a decade. But the neighbourhood is now host to a frenzy of new building, as rows and rows of neat houses go up. What gentrification theory invites me to do is think through how the above statements of status, so diametrically opposed, might be linked. The rent gap shows us how urban marginalisation can become profitable. But it is surprisingly easy for such an explanation to lapse into a rehash of the ‘consumer sovereignty’

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thesis. In his riposte to Steven Bourassa (1993), Smith (1996, 1200) makes this quite clear: Gentrification, like any land-use change, Bourassa says, occurs when ‘land rent and value change’ and this happens ‘as soon as perceptions about the future change’. For Bourassa, then, it is not the history of investment and disinvestment that is important in explaining [gentrification], nor even processes of class and gender restructuring, but rather ‘perceptions’: the key question for Bourassa is ‘how neighbourhoods previously subject to disinvestment come to be perceived to have the potential for reinvestment’.

This is obviously torn from the middle of quite a specific argument, and one that takes place over a decade before ‘territorial stigmatisation’ enters the analytical lexicon (Wacquant 2008). But it brings up a particularly important point for those seeking to link territorial stigmatisation and gentrification. Neither simply ‘happens’. The usefulness of gentrification theory in such a context is limited when treated as an explanatory trick, but vital when considered as a way of denaturalising both the devalorisation and the revalorisation of land. ‘The market’ did not wake up one day and decide to reinvest here: a huge amount of preparatory work was required both discursively (through planning documents, branding exercises and outsourcing) and physically (through the violence of demolition and the mundane exercises in trying to shift perceptions of the area – like the £300,000 of public money spent on trees to line a road that no longer led to any houses, merely the hope of future houses). In this sense, the rent gap needed to be made, at both ends. Any ‘gap’ between the present and the future is speculative, not only financially, but discursively: it requires the power to enforce a certain vision of ‘progress’. It also, of course, requires a lot of money. Like Haila (2017), I am not interested in gentrification for its own sake: I am interested in processes of land use change that dispossess, displace and divide. The regeneration of Craigmillar involved the displacement of poorer residents, the demolition of a working class landscape, the necessity of rising land values, and the closure of the rent gap. It was, in this sense, a form of gentrification. But it was, as I hope I have demonstrated, also so much more.

CONCLUSION: From Quibdó to Istanbul, via Abstraction The intertwined processes of property investment and demographic change that have been observed in Quibdó, Istanbul and Edinburgh are not reducible to one word. What should be clear is that the differences between these



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contexts cannot be dismissed as a cultural ‘backdrop’ to any economic similarity, and they profoundly change how we might effectively study in these contexts. There are no extra-legal mining companies at work in the Edinburgh property market, just as there is no history of local authority housing estates in Quibdó. The process in Istanbul intersects closely with ethnicity and forced migration, two aspects conspicuous by their absence in the other case studies. It would make no sense to assume the presence of one of these factors in all of these contexts, just as it would make no sense to believe that all of these factors only occur as part of ‘gentrification’. The conference in Mexico City from which this volume originates was guided by the concept of urban marginality, and what should be equally clear from the sections of this chapter is that we could not agree on a single blueprint for ‘marginality’ nor could we identify any singular path from marginality through gentrification to ‘centrality’ (imagined socially and economically, rather than spatially). In Quibdó, a process of rising rents, real estate speculation and attendant forms of displacement is in part the result of the same processes that maintain the city’s marginal status (extralegal mining and organised violence). In Edinburgh, historic marginalisation bears none of these hallmarks but carves deep symbolic and economic divisions into the city’s geography. Marginalisation as a discourse helped to legitimate the mass demolition of the city’s oldest public housing estate, facilitating the closure of the rent gap. In Istanbul, marginalised groups (in particular Kurds, Syrians and earlier labour migrants) can coexist alongside ‘gentrifiers’ over long periods of slow transition, and the barriers between these groups are made, remade, contested and negotiated on the micro-level of everyday life. There is clearly far more divergence between these contexts than can be addressed either in these short contributions or this even shorter conclusion. A comparative urbanism underwritten by empirical research will inevitably reveal differences (see Becerril Miranda and Ramakrishnan, in this volume). What we hope to have shown is that none of these differences need to be erased when the concept of gentrification is applied critically. By contrast, some of this difference is erased by the process of gentrification itself, and while the former may upset claims to knowledge, the latter upsets claims to space. It is here that a discussion of effective abstraction becomes politically as well as analytically important. What unites these case studies, what can be considered ‘similar’ in the face of such difference, is the tendency towards the use of land for profit and, as a result, the desire to use the land for more profit. Where this tendency results in the displacement of poorer residents and a reinvestment in the built environment, the word ‘gentrification’ becomes useful. Gentrification cannot tell us what is happening everywhere, why and how. Rather, it remains useful because it invites us to try and investigate the

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class transformation of space critically, inspired by the tradition of radical scholarship and activism that the word represents, but not beholden to a static interpretation of its meaning. Seeing this ‘similarity’ requires a process of abstraction, and here, as the theoretical section in this chapter notes, Lefebvre’s concept of abstract space is crucial. Abstract space denotes space in which exchange value is dominant over use value. The contours of this dominance are never total, permanent or commonly experienced. It is a path-dependent socially mediated process. Just as the dominance of abstract labour relies on the continued existence of unwaged labour, informal labour and the gendered violence of ‘primitive’ accumulation (Mies 1986), so multiple forms of ‘non-capitalist’ relations to the land, to housing, to community, belonging and so on, can continue to exist even in a world where the overwhelming tendency is the dominance of abstract space. Lefebvre (1991) was very clear about this, for he knew well what Tomba (2012) has coined ‘Marx’s temporalities’, by which is meant Marx’s comprehension of the simultaneity and multivalence of different temporalities in the same historical period. Moreover, Lefebvre’s concept of abstract space, though many commentators neglect this aspect of his work, was always riven with contradictions, and always tied into an antagonistic relation with differential space (the space of a counter culture or a counter-space), always threatened and contested. It is not the theory of gentrification that seeks to homogenise knowledge, but the reality it describes that seeks to homogenise space. The distinctiveness of social forms that exist in any given context are not necessarily empirically sufficient to impede the applicability of ‘universal’ concepts any more than they are empirically sufficient to resist globalised methods of resource extraction and labour exploitation. In this sense, ‘the theory is no more determinate than reality’ (Chibber 2013, 248). So, to return to the question we started with, is the concept of gentrification helpful? Yes, but only if it inspires us to ask more questions, and pushes us on to verify our research questions empirically, not if it is seen as an answer that can stand alone. And why? Because it identifies a common thread in which landed power and financial power intersect to eke out exchange values from the city. In this context, the pursuit of the ‘highest and best’ use of urban land is instituted, in various forms, at the expense of those who inhabit space without the economic means to cling on in the face of rising rents, increased speculation, and the very concrete, emotional, and uprooting consequences of that most violent, and dare we say it, universal, form of abstraction, where all value is reduced to exchange value.



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ments/article/612/LA%20COLOSA_A%20Death%20Foretold.pdf, accessed 18 January 2018. Crossa, Verónica. 2009. “Resisting the Entrepreneurial City: Street Vendors’ Struggle in Mexico City’s Historic Center.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33: 43–63. Crummy, Helen. 2004. Mine a Rich Aein: A History and Vision of Craigmillar. Edinburgh: Craigmillar Communiversity Press. Díaz Parra, Ibán. 2015. “Introducción. Perspectivas del estudio de la gentrificación en América Latina.” Coloquio Internacional Perspectivas del Estudio de la Gentrificación en México y Latinoamérica. Instituto de Geografía, UNAM. Abril de 2014. Dökmeci, Vedia, and Lale Berköz. 2000. “Residential-Location Preferences According to Demographic Characteristics in Istanbul.” Landscape and Urban Planning 48 (1–2): 45–55. Erensü, Sinan, and Ozan Karaman. 2017. “The Work of a Few Trees: Gezi, Politics and Apace.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41: 19–36. Ergun, Nilgun. 2004. “Gentrification in Istanbul.” Cities 21: 391–405. Fotion, Nick. 2014. Theory vs. Anti-Theory in Ethics: A Misconceived Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ghertner, Asher. 2014. “India’s urban revolution: geographies of displacement beyond gentrification.” Environment and Planning A 46: 1554–1571. Ghertner, Asher. 2015. “Why Gentrification Theory Fails in ‘Much of the World’.” City 19: 552–63. Glynn, Sarah. 2008. “Soft-Selling Gentrification?” Urban Research & Practice 1: 164–80. Gray, Neil. 2018. “Neither Shoreditch nor Manhattan: Post-Politics, ‘Soft Austerity Urbanism’ and Real Abstraction in Glasgow North.” Area 50: 15–23. Gülöksüz, Elvan. 2002. “Negotiation of Property Rights in Urban Land in Istanbul.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26: 462–76. Haila, Anne. 2017. “Institutionalization of ‘The Property Mind’.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41: 500–507. Harvey, David. 1991. ‘Afterword’. In The Production of Space, by Henri Lefebvre, 425–34. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Hoffmann, Friederike. 2007. “Istanbul Living Together Separately.” Urban Action: A Journal of Urban Affairs, retrieved on 20 March (2008): 60–67. Ilkucan, Altan, and Özlem Sandikci. 2005. “Gentrification and Consumption: An Exploratory Study.” Advances in Consumer Research 32: 1–6. İnce, Ayça. 2006. Asmalımescit’te Kültür Endüstrisi Destekli Yer Değişim (Replacement in Asmalımescit by the support of culture industry).in İslam, T., & Behar, D. (Eds.). İstanbul’da Soylulaştırma: Eski Kentin Yeni Sahipleri, Bilgi Universitesi yayinlari: Istanbul. 99–111. Inzulza-Contardo, Jorge. 2011. “Latino Gentrification? Focusing on Physical and Socioeconomic Patterns of Change in Latin American Inner Cities.” Urban Studies 4: 2085–107.



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Jack, Ian. 1989. “Problem Families.” London Review of Books 11: 36–37. Janoschka, Michael, Jorge Sequera, and Luis Salinas. 2013. “Gentrification in Spain and Latin America—a Critical Dialogue.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38: 1234–65. Kallin, Hamish. 2017. “Opening the Reputational Gap.” In Negative Neighbourhood Reputation and Place Attachment, edited by Paul Kirkness and Andreas Tije-Dra, 102–18. Abingdon: Routledge. Kallin, Hamish, and Tom Slater. 2014. “Activating Territorial Stigma: Gentrifying Marginality on Edinburgh’s ‘Other’ Fringe.” Environment and Planning A 46: 1351–68. Keyder, Caglar (ed.). 1999. Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Keyder, Caglar. 2005. “Globalization and Social Exclusion in Istanbul.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29: 124–34. Lamont, Michèle. 2009. The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Lamont, Michèle, and Vlrág Molnár. 2002. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28: 167–95. Lees, Loretta. 2012. “The Geography of Gentrification.” Progress in Human Geography 36: 155–71. Lees, Loretta. 2014. “The Urban Injustices of New Labour’s ‘New Urban Renewal’: The Case of the Aylesbury Estate in London.” Antipode 46: 921–47. Lees, Loretta, Hyun Bang Shin, and Ernesto López-Morales. 2016. Planetary Gentrification. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1988. “Towards a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marx’s Death.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 2005. Critique of Everyday Life Volume III: From Modernity to Modernism. London: Verso. Loftus, Alex. 2018. “Planetary Concerns.” City 22: 88–95. López-Morales, Ernesto. 2015. “Gentrification in the Global South.” City 19: 564–73. Maloutas, Thomas. 2011. “Contextual diversity in gentrification research.” Critical Sociology 38: 33–48. Marcuse, Peter. 2013. “Socially Just Gentrification? Theory and Practice,” RC21 paper http://www.rc21.org/conferences/berlin2013/RC21-Berlin-Papers-7/13-1-Mar cuse-To%20Control%20Gentrification.doc, accessed 10 July 2018. Marcuse, Peter. 2015. “Gentrification, Social Justice and Personal Ethics.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39: 1263–69. McCrone, David, and Brian Elliot. 1989. Property and Power in a City: The Sociological Significance of Landlordism. Basingstoke: MacMillan Press. Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books.

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Omeje, Kenneth. 2008. (ed.) Extractive Economies and Conflicts in the Global South: Multi-Regional Perspectives on Rentier Politics. Farnham: Ashgate. Özden, Pelin Pinar. 2001. “Kentsel Yenileme Uygulamalarında Yerel Yönetimlerin Rolü Üzerine Düşünceler ve İstanbul Örneği.” İstanbul Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi Dergisi 23–24: 255–70. Ozus, Evren, Sevkiye Sence Turk, and Vedia Dokmeci. 2011. “Urban Restructuring of Istanbul.” European Planning Studies 19: 331–56. Reyes, Rodrigo. 2013. “Crime, Street Vendors and the Historical Downtown in PostGiuliani Mexico City.” International Journal of Criminology and Sociology 2: 186–98. Richardson, Harry, Joan Vipond and Robert Furbey. 1975. Housing and Urban Spatial Structure: A Case Study. Surrey: Saxon House and Lexington Books. Robertson, Roy, and Alison Richardson. 2007. “Heroin Injecting and the Introduction of HIV/AIDS into a Scottish City.” Journal of the Society of Medicine 100: 491–94. Sakizlioğlu, Bahar. 2014. “Inserting Temporality into the Analysis of Displacement: Living under the Threat of Displacement.” Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 105: 206–20. Sakizlioğlu, Bahar, and Justus Uitermark. 2014. “The Symbolic Politics of Gentrification: The Restructuring of Stigmatized Neighborhoods in Amsterdam and Istanbul.” Environment and Planning A 46: 1369–85. Savage, Mike, Chris Allen, Rowland Atkinson, Roger Burrows, María-Luisa Méndez, and Paul Watt. 2010. “Focus Article.” Housing, Theory and Society 27: 115–61. Sayer, Derek. 1987. The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Şen, Besime. 2006. Kentsel Gerilemeyi Aşmada Çelişkili Bir Süreç Olarak Soylulaştırma: Galata Örneği. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. Sen, Besime. 2011. “Kentsel Mekanda uclu ittifak: Sanayisizlesme, Soylulastirma, Yeni orta sinif.” Journal of Faculty of Political Science 44: 1–19. Slater, Tom. 2004. “Municipally Managed Gentrification in South Parkdale, Toronto.” Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien 48: 303–25. Slater, Tom. 2006. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30: 737–57. Smart, Alan, and Josephine Smart. 2017. “Ain’t Talking’‘Bout Gentrification: The Erasure of Alternative Idioms of Displacement Resulting from Anglo-American Academic Hegemony.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41: 518–25. Smith, Neil. 1979a. “Gentrification and Capital: Practice and Ideology in Society Hill.” Antipode 11: 24–35. Smith, Neil. 1979b. “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People.” Journal of the American Planning Association 45: 538–48. Smith, Neil. 1996. “Of Rent Gaps and Radical Idealism: A Reply to Steven Bourassa.” Urban Studies 33: 1199–203.



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Smith, Neil. 2002. “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy.” Antipode 34: 427–50. Smith, Neil. 2003. ‘Foreword’. In The Urban Revolution, by Henri Lefebvre, vii‑xxiii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 1978. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. Atlantic Highlands. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Soytemel, Ebru. 2011. Gentrification and Belonging in Istanbul. PhD diss., University of Manchester. Soytemel, Ebru. 2013. “The Power of the Powerless: Neighbourhood Based SelfHelp Networks of the Poor in Istanbul.” Women’s Studies International Forum 41: 76–87. Soytemel, Ebru. 2015. “Belonging in the Gentrified Golden Horn/Halic Neighbourhoods of Istanbul.” Urban Geography 36: 64–89. Stockdale, Aileen. 2010. “The Diverse Geographies of Rural Gentrification in Scotland.” Journal of Rural Studies 26: 31–40. Tissot, Sylvie. 2011. “Of Dogs and Men: The Making of Spatial Boundaries in a Gentrifying Neighborhood.” City & Community 10: 265–84. Tomba, Massimiliano. 2012. Marx’s Temporalities. Historical Materialism Book Series. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Torres-Tovar, Carlos Alberto, Johanna Eloísa Vargas-Moreno and Juan Carlos Garzón. 2015. “Entrevista a David Harvey en la Universidad Nacional de Colombia.” Bitácora Urbano-Territorial 1: 165–67. Toscano, Alberto. 2008. “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society 20: 273–87. Uzun, Nil. 2001. Gentrification in Istanbul. Utrecht: Knkl. Nederl. aardrijkskundig genootschap. Uzun, Nil. 2007. “Globalization and Urban Governance in Istanbul.” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 22: 127–38. Wacquant, Loïc. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: The Polity Press.

Chapter 3

Oscillations in Housing Policy Comparative Urbanism across Delhi and Rio de Janeiro Héctor Becerril Miranda and Kavita Ramakrishnan Comparative theorising across urban contexts has emerged as a key imperative in urban studies, with its importance articulated by various scholars, most notably Jennifer Robinson (2016a; 2016b). While conceptualisations of the ‘urban’ abound, we take seriously Robinson’s (2016b, 4) assertion that ‘any attempt to theorize the urban in a world of cities, immediately places insights gained in one context in relation to a multiplicity of urban experience’. Thus, she encourages seeing how far concepts generated in a particular instance ‘stretch’ across other contexts, ultimately enabling wider conversations of how we understand the ‘urban’. In this chapter, we approach slum eviction and upgrading across Rio de Janeiro and Delhi through a comparative lens, bringing to the fore urban housing policy shifts over time. Our intention in selecting a particular set of processes – namely eviction and in-situ upgrading – is to avoid the pitfalls of comparative urbanism, or the idea that Rio de Janeiro and Delhi are merely selected because of their (relative) similarity (i.e. ‘mega’-cities in middle-income countries in the ‘Global South’) (cf. Robinson 2016b). Rather, the ‘ontological foundations’ of our comparative project are to explore the sociopolitical dynamics that perpetuate policy oscillations between eviction and upgrading. We argue that highlighting oscillations helps chart and understand the purchase of housing policies, and when, and in what circumstances they are deemed implementable, viable and sustainable. We use oscillations to refer to the dynamics of housing policy design and implementation, specifically in relation to informal settlements in Rio de Janeiro and Delhi, which have fluctuated in the past decades. Recent public policy literature has traced policy oscillations of user ‘choice’ within public service domains, and the discursive 43

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work and equivalences that political usage of ‘choice’ mobilises (Clarke, Newman, and Westmarland 2008). In this chapter, we adapt the idea of policy oscillations to urban planning, which enables us to interrogate evictions and upgrading interventions, the discursive sphere such policies operate in and, more importantly, the dwelling and livelihood implications of these oscillations. Here, eviction and upgrading are considered as interrelated, rather than separate processes, unlike most case studies from the Brazilian and Indian contexts. Furthermore, our understanding of oscillations is rooted in empirical work, something we feel is important to informing both theory-building and ensuring that our approach to comparative urbanism does not remain abstract (cf. Peck 2015). This chapter, along with the others in this volume, is borne out of the Newton Fund Researcher Links Workshop on Urban Marginality in Mexico City in July 2016 that brought together UK-based and Mexican scholars studying the ‘urban’ from a wide range of disciplines. In conversation, we shared our dissatisfaction over existing understandings of how and why urban governments repeatedly shift between housing policies on either end of the spectrum, and the resulting (and often contradictory) community reception of such policies – beyond the usual explanation of conservative and progressive governments in power implementing conservative or progressive housing policies, respectively. While the conceptual questions remain vital, our intention here is also to speak methodologically about doing comparative work. For instance, Parnell and Pieterse (2016, 244) ask: ‘How best can meaningful knowledge about the urban be produced? What should we produce knowledge for?’ To this, we also add ‘for whom’? Echoing their concerns, we have sought to reflect on the deeply political nature of our work, with eviction and relocations representing a very real violation of ordinary people’s homes, livelihoods, sense of community and dignity. Furthermore, eviction and relocation are often accompanied by violent policing and bulldozing that destroy bodies, thus demonstrating how state housing policy deems some lives more valuable than others. Indeed, the profound inequality resulting from eviction and relocation demands that theoretical abstraction is carefully produced, with clear intent to influence more dignified housing policies. In our subsequent conversations throughout the writing of this chapter, the overarching concern was one of using contextualised processes to both explicate shared oscillations across Rio de Janeiro and Delhi and consider what our comparative work holds more broadly for praxis in cities both in the Global South and in the Global North. In terms of the workshop, this edited volume and our own research, urban ‘marginality’ remains a contested concept, but it is one that we argue captures (some of the) processes, resistance and modes of everyday life that people who have been displaced and/or live in informal settlements encounter/enact.



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In her original formulation of ‘marginality’, Perlman (1979) initially challenged the ‘myth’ that people living in favelas1 experience a sense of dispossession and victimisation; rather than being located on the ‘margins’ of the system, people had distinct ties and were networked into larger state structures, albeit in a severely asymmetric manner. Four decades later, Perlman (2010) argued that there was a shift from the ‘myth of marginality’ to the ‘reality of marginality’ due to the current economic and political climate. The expectation that rural-to-urban migrants would see better opportunities and choices for their children did not completely materialise. Despite having access to an improved education and quality of life, being from or living in a favela continued to be the principal source of discrimination and stigma that limited the entry of favela residents into the job market, meaning that they were ‘often unemployed, underemployed, or underpaid’ (Perlman 2010, 155) – ultimately resulting in their social and economic exclusion. Translating this to the Indian context, being from or living in an informal settlement (basti in local vernacular) has also constituted a source of stigma and discrimination in the past decades, a stigma that is not completely erased even when bastis are given formal status or basti-dwellers are relocated to a formal, resettlement colony (see Ramakrishnan 2017). However, to look at favelas and bastis solely through a lens of social stigma misses important narratives of vitality and possibility. Thus, while Perlman’s engagement with marginality has opened up rich debates, the economic margins are increasingly being seen as vibrant social centres (cf. McFarlane and Silver 2017). To this end, we find the recent research agenda set out by Lancione (2016, 4) more useful to this discussion: ‘A [research agenda] built on the refusal of meta-narratives and a priori definitions on marginality . . . on attention to the potential expressed by everyday life’s articulations; and on a commitment to produce an alternative cultural politics of the margins’. Methodologically, our mode of comparative urbanism included a substantial investment in the process of discussing and writing; for inspiration, we drew from Latour (2005, 134), his ideas of writing as a ‘laboratory’ and the need for social scientists to conduct writing trials to avoid ‘generalities, clichés, transportable definitions, substitutable accounts, ideal-types, [and] powerful explanations’. Through a series of writing trials and discussions conducted over Skype, we ‘stretched’ each other’s case studies: we pushed each other on what the cases may articulate beyond similarities and differences, and whether, in particular, they could contribute to an expanded understanding of how and when upgrading and evictions become embraced and by whom. Our own positionalities and research trajectories are important for comparative work. Hector is originally from Mexico and his interest in Rio de Janeiro and favelas stemmed from an internship at an architectural studio

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that specialised in favela upgrading projects. He has moved from architectural design questions to the exploration of policy processes and modes of governance, tracing how things are brought together or disassembled through the mobilisation of Actor-Network Theory. In Hector’s case, the main driver of his research on slum upgrading in Rio de Janeiro is to render visible and understandable the complexity and contingency of policy process and urban life, which might contribute to a more just future for ordinary people. Kavita has researched slum evictions and resettlement in Delhi since 2011, with an interest in understanding and capturing life on the ‘margins’. Her initial research focused on how people who have been displaced articulate notions of belonging and their aspirations for the future. More recently, she has started to consider situated knowledges and how shifting relationships between researcher and interlocutor inform marginality as a process, rather than as something fixed in time and space (Ramakrishnan 2017). This ongoing project of ‘representation’, inspired by postcolonial scholarship, informs her current work on conveying change and heterogeneity on the urban ‘margins’. We bring these histories, perspectives and personal relationships from the ‘field’ to our discussions of socially just forms and modes of housing. The chapter is structured as follows: first, we engage with slum-housing policy at a global level; second, we draw out particularities and lessons from one locality to another (i.e. what lessons can Delhi learn from Rio de Janeiro and vice versa) and third, we look at how the specific process of policy oscillation and comparative urbanism can inform wider housing agendas.

EXPLORING THE OSCILLATIONS BETWEEN SLUM UPGRADING AND EVICTIONS Emergence of Slum Upgrading: An Overview Housing policies centred on site-and-services (provision of land and basic infrastructure, but not housing structures) and slum-upgrading approaches emerged at the end of the 1960s in countries of the Global South. They were informed by studies on the ‘informal’, such as pioneering works by Turner and Fichter (1973). Overall, these works conceptualised the informal as ‘a universe of resourcefulness and inventiveness which required support and enhancement rather than eradication’ (Fiori and Brandao 2010, 186). However, the policies themselves were criticised for resulting in fragmented interventions (ibid.) and unsustainable solutions: projects were developed without the participation of communities or governments, and lacked continuity once internal aid ended (UN-Habitat 2003, 130). During the 1980s, housing policies in the Global South overlooked slum upgrading as they primarily



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focused on how to enable housing markets, restructure housing finance systems and support the housing sector as a whole, following the guidelines of major international funding agencies such as the World Bank (Pugh 2001). Nevertheless, slum upgrading returned to the forefront during the 1990s, supported by novel conceptualisations of poverty based on its heterogeneous nature and the understanding that housing and slum upgrading were key for poverty alleviation (Fiori and Brandao 2010). This new generation of slumupgrading programmes and projects was different from previous models as it included multi-scalar and multi-sectorial perspectives (including civil society participation) and an integrated approach to simultaneously address social, political and spatial issues (ibid.). This holistic and participatory approach to slum upgrading was recognised as a best practice by the beginning of the first decade of the 2000s (UN-Habitat 2003). During the past two decades, housing policies in the Global South responded to the financial restructuring of the sector, which included a focus on housing projects. This has led to the emergence of both large-scale housing estates and slum upgrading in countries such as Brazil and India (Becerril 2016), while simultaneously leading to mass evictions and relocations such as in the cases of Rio de Janeiro (Bin 2017) and Delhi (Dupont 2011) due to elite desires to capitalise on the skyrocketing value of urban land. THE CASES OF RIO DE JANEIRO AND DELHI Public policy in favelas in Rio de Janeiro has included an oscillating approach between upgrading and razing throughout the past decades. The 1960s and 1970s were marked by a wave of evictions: from 1962 to 1974, 80 favelas were razed; 26,193 shacks were destroyed; and 139,218 people were relocated (Valladares 2006). In contrast, the number of housing units built during this period only reached 48,985 (Fiori, Riley, and Ramirez 2000). Public policy slowly shifted towards the upgrading of favelas during the 1980s, with the introduction of the Mutirão Programme (Barboza 2013).2 A decade later, Rio’s housing policy consolidated and prioritised in-situ upgrading of favelas primarily through the implementation of an integrated, multi-sectorial and multi-scalar programme called Favela-Bairro (Fiori and Brandao 2010). Under this programme, slum-upgrading projects included basic infrastructure works (water and sanitation), the improvement and/or creation of public spaces and services (public squares, sport facilities, crèches and transport) and implementation of social programs (productive projects, health campaigns and training programs). Moreover, Favela-Bairro guidelines were established, mandating as few relocations as possible (a maximum of 5 percent of all houses in the case of projects funded by the first

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Inter-American Development Bank [IADB] loan in 1995), as the programme was based on the idea that upgrading projects should maximise favela dwellers’ investments and efforts by respecting the existing built environment as much as possible. The emergence of Favela-Bairro was informed by the 1992 Master Plan of Rio de Janeiro, which established favela upgrading as one of four housing objectives, and was supported by both state and non-state actors in Rio’s housing sector such as then City Mayor, Cesar Maia, his urban and housing secretaries, Luis Paulo Conde and Sergio Magalhães, academic researchers and civil-based organisations The existence of knowledge and know-how in Rio de Janeiro about favelas and their upgrading was also key to the emergence of Favela-Bairro. Since the 1980s, the municipal administration created a ‘register’ of favelas which detailed their major social and spatial characteristics, developed methods for slum upgrading through the implementation of the Mutirão Programme and built relationships with leaders and communities in favelas, as well as with different municipal and state departments relevant to favela upgrading. Last, the consolidation of slum upgrading as a central instrument of Rio´s housing policy was supported by a wide array of state and non-state actors: municipal departments, the state government of Rio de Janeiro, architects, researchers and universities, community leaders and organisations, NGOs, political figures, political representatives, the IADB, the European Union and the Brazilian Federal Government. These actors secured the implementation of slum upgrading and countered criticism of the delays, interruptions and poor quality of construction in some favelas (­Becerril 2015). However, slum upgrading went through a process of policy abandonment during the first decade of the 2000s. This process started with the dissolution of the politico-administrative alliance between Cesar Maia and Paulo Conde, mayors of Rio between 1993–1996 and 1997–2000, respectively, as both administrations together developed and gave continuity to Favela-Bairro. During the 2000 elections, Maia ran for the mayoral office and publicly criticised Favela-Bairro to weaken his opponent whose campaign was built on Favela-Bairro’s successes. Adding to the charged electoral campaign that opened up criticism of Favela-Bairro, Maia’s resulting victory introduced new staff to the Municipal Housing Secretariat with little understanding of slum-upgrading projects. This generated several issues around slum upgrading. For instance, in the following years, the slum-upgrading implementation process, which was previously highly regulated due to its complexity, became riddled with interruptions and delays, thus affecting efficiency and effectiveness (Becerril 2015). Moreover, the upgrading selection method adopted in the 1990s also contributed to the programme’s poor results in the first decade of the 2000s: the first favelas designated for upgrading were the



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most straightforward, while the more difficult were left for the second phase (implemented in the 2000s) (ibid.). The disenchantment with slum upgrading as a solution for the city’s housing crisis among state and non-state actors was also key for the policy’s abandonment. Although, the implementation of Favela-Bairro improved the lives of people living in favelas, it fell far from the expected outcomes and outputs: the programme did not improve household income (Abramo 1998), only benefitted a small number of all Rio’s favelas (less than 20 percent), and public works remained unfinished in several communities (Becerril 2015). Moreover, state and non-state actors criticised Favela-Bairro for not keeping its promise to introduce aspects of the ‘formal city’ such as roads, squares, infrastructure and public services, enabling favelas to be seen as ‘neighbourhoods’, and ultimately to integrate them into the city. The FavelaBairro programme was based on the idea that favelas were ‘neighbourhoods’ separate and different from those found in the rest of the city, with great material, social and economic needs (Becerril 2010). Last, the abandonment of slum upgrading was also precipitated by the rise of new housing construction as a perceived suitable solution, with the federal government launching a housing programme called My Home My Life Programme in 2009; this programme had the objective of building a million houses in two years (Becerril 2015). Slum upgrading returned to the housing agenda at the end the first decade of the 2000s. It was supported by the launch of the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC) in 2007 that included important investments for largescale slum-upgrading projects. Through PAC investments, large favelas in Rio were upgraded such as Rocinha, Manguinhos and Alemão. In 2010, the municipal administration launched the Morar Carioca Plan that sought to urbanise (upgrade) all favelas by 2020 as part of the Legacy Plan of Rio’s 2016 Olympic Games (Becerril 2017). However, it also announced the razing of 119 favelas by 2012 (Bonamichi 2016). The slum-upgrading initiatives (PAC and Morar Carioca) were coupled with the creation of the Pacifying Police Units (UPPs), which aimed to ‘securitise’ areas of the city controlled by gangs and drug dealers – in particular, favelas. In the following years, Morar Carioca was abandoned, while evictions continued: from 2009 to 2015, more than 22,000 favela households were evicted (Rio on Watch 2018). Moreover, the social control exerted by the UPPs and overall presence of military police in favelas heightened residents’ mistrust of the government (Sovik and Calado 2016). Therefore, over the past three decades, Rio’s housing policy shows strong oscillations between upgrading and evictions. These oscillations are fostered not only by political will and vision but also by the mobilisation of a wide range of actors during the 1990s and the re-emergence of upgrading at the

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beginning of the 2010s; this was then followed by the disenchantment of upgrading results and mega-events dynamics during the first decade of the 2000s and 2010s, thus leading to its abandonment. Moreover, this case shows that oscillations are interconnected, as upgrading and evictions influence each other in a dynamic process, rather than as a linear evolution towards progressive and inclusive policies. We now turn to Delhi, where slum (or basti in local vernacular) upgrading and resettlement have always been contentious, and are part of every political campaign’s promise to resolve once in power. In a detailed review, Bhan and Shivanand (2013) find that between 1990 and 2007, at least 218 evictions took place where at least some resettlement occurred (as only these evictions were officially recorded and logged by the former Slum and Jhuggi Jhopri Department), leading to the displacement of 64,910 families. They point to surges in evictions between 1999 and 2002 and again between 2006 and 2007, theorising that evictions during the former period could be due to the tenure of Jagmohan as chairman of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), who aggressively pushed for ‘slum clearance’; the surge during the latter period, the authors attribute to the second round of evictions at Yamuna Pushta (or the banks of the Yamuna River) due to the building of a flyover. Evictions also occurred during the lead-up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games on a city-wide level. Thus, there are similarities between how both Rio and Delhi have treated slums before mega events, though it is important to note that displacement in both contexts persists beyond such events, if at a smaller scale. It is hard to estimate the number of resettlement colonies and the number that reside in them, with Sheikh, Banda and Mandelkern (2014) recording fifty-five resettlement colonies in Delhi, housing 1.25 million people (though the authors note that this does not include household counts from eleven of the most recent colonies). While evictions in the early 2000s signalled clear human rights violations (see Housing and Land Rights Network 2011), the pro-poor agenda initiated by the current progressive Delhi government, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has not (yet) successfully addressed slum rehabilitation, and indeed, has at times utilised the same tactics of removal and peripheral resettlement (even if temporary) that earlier large-scale evictions have. Five key issues have led to a patchwork of policies and efforts, complicating an already complex housing arena. First, political campaign promises have not always been possible for the Delhi government to make, particularly given institutional fragmentation and Delhi’s designation as a National Capital Territory; the latter affects, and often stifles decision-making powers. Though the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board is currently responsible for informal settlements (both authorised and unauthorised), much of the land on which resettlement would take place is coordinated by the DDA under the Union Ministry of Urban Development, while many of the actual



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improvements within the informal settlement is under the purview of the Municipal Council of Delhi. Second, the 1990s saw the rise of a judiciary more likely to rule against the poor in relation to middle-class-led civic activism – often in the form of ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ (Mawdsley 2009) that sought to reshape the city in accordance with middle-class aesthetics and values. For instance, Ghertner (2008) directly attributes the tenfold increase of informal settlement demolitions between 1995 and 2000 to the expanding role of the judiciary responding to petitions from middle-class resident welfare associations, noting that the DDA no longer had the same purview over determining the legality of such settlements as it did previously. Third, bastis should not be seen as a failure of planning. Instead, they are dependent on and constitutive of the restrictive zoning policies of the Master Plan of Delhi (MPD) and the discretion of the DDA (Bhan 2016). Bhan (2016) argues it is no coincidence when mapping bastis in 2007 against the 1962 MPD that one finds they neatly fall within the boundaries demarcated by the plan. Bastis develop mainly on public lands, and these lands were acquired in 1962 as part of the ‘Delhi Experiment’ (the large-scale acquisition of lands by the DDA), and thus as Bhan (ibid., 82) argues, ‘Bastis are tied to planning in a particular way . . . as the city has grown around and beyond the MPD ’62, the poor have . . . remained in the core imagined by the first plan’. The prime location of these bastis offers both advantages and disadvantages according to Bhan (2016): on the one hand, in-situ upgrading would be highly advantageous for basti-dwellers, while on the other hand, the value of this land makes the continual relocation of bastis unsurprising. To further complicate the picture, the DDA can use its own judgement when designating the shift from ‘unauthorised colony’ to ‘legal regularised colony’, as has been shown in the many post-facto regularisations that occur. This remains a highly political issue with colonies regularly lobbying for regularisation and the access to services and infrastructure that this enables. Fourth, in the same way that slums are often depicted as a ‘concentrated site’ of poverty, resettlement is often portrayed as its antithesis: the remedy to the slum and/or poverty. Yet sweeping statements about the resettlement colony as an ‘improvement’ often misses accounts of the patchwork access to infrastructure and tenure that exists within these sites and how the oftenperipheral location of resettlement colonies disadvantages its residents when seeking employment (see Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008; Ramakrishnan 2016). By providing site-and-services – basic amenities without housing – and this too, often only on paper, the state has ensured that rebuilding life in many of these resettlement colonies has taken years, if not decades. Finally, the key policy shift from the 1990s to the 2000s is one of resettlement to in-situ upgrading3; the latter is articulated in the Master Plan for Delhi

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2021, prepared by the DDA. While the AAP has advocated in-situ upgrading, this policy predates their political term, with the national strategy, Rajiv Awas Yojana, promoting this along with tenure rights for slum-dwellers. However, the strategy is premised upon utilising public-private partnerships (PPPs), with a key emphasis on ‘community participation’. The model then capitalises on ‘land as a resource’ (Dupont et al. 2014, 40), with part of the slum used to rehabilitate residents, while the rest is developed into commercial or residential plots to be sold for profit. Dupont et al. (2014) documents how PPPs have already faced criticism in cities such as Mumbai, where corruption, land mafias and the real estate lobby have led to poorer circumstances for the original slum-dwellers. Current In-Situ Upgrading and Low-Income Housing Controversies Building on the five main themes mentioned earlier that defined the late 1990s and first decade of the 2000s, this section focuses on the unfolding project of in-situ upgrading in Kathputhli Colony, Delhi, a basti of 15,000 residents that has existed since the late 1960s (Dupont et al. 2014). While both the AAP and Bharatiya Janata Party (the current ruling national party) governments have promised a pro-poor housing agenda – with slogans such as ‘jahaan jhuggi, wahan makaan’ (‘where there is a shack, there will be a house’) and a slum-free Delhi by 2022, respectively – in-situ arrangements and targeted housing for the poor have not been without their issues as we shall see from the following example. In-Situ Upgrading in Kathputhli Colony At the time of writing, 3,000 slums were being demolished in Kathputli Colony (a colony that is home to many puppeteers and folk performers), DDA’s first in-situ project. Raheja Developers were awarded the contract in 2009, for Rs. 6.11 crore (approximately US $1 million) and have been mandated by the DDA to develop cost-free flats on 60 percent of the land, with the remaining 40 percent targeted for commercial plots (Dupont et al. 2014). While Raheja Developers are responsible for building the transit housing that slum-dwellers will occupy till final construction is completed, it is up to the DDA to identify vacant public land proximally located – a struggle given the fairly central location of Kathputhli Colony. Dupont et al. (2014) document that even after some transit housing had been constructed two kilometres from the colony, the DDA had failed to adequately ‘notify’ residents that such a transfer was to begin. Recent news reports document that while 1,355 families have shifted to the transit camp, others stayed put, protesting the shift (Tripathi 2017). Much of the current resistance has been against moving to newer transit camps (usually flats) in locations such as Bawana and Narela;



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compared to the original transit camp, Bawana and Narela are on the margins of Delhi, close to thirty kilometres away. One resident, Pinky Singh, told reporters the following, quoted in The Hindustan Times from November 2017: I have never heard of Narela before. It isn’t on the Delhi Metro route. How will we commute from there for our daily work? My four daughters study in a government school near the colony. How will they manage their studies from Narela? (Tripathi 2017)

The difference between transit camps located two and thirty kilometres away make for the difference between being able to continue one’s life amidst a potentially disruptive rehabilitation process and the complete evisceration of social and employment links. The rehabilitation project is premised upon the mandate that rehousing will occur in a five-kilometre radius, and this should be theoretically applied for transit housing as well, given the lengthy duration that slum-dwellers will have to wait. While upgrading has been an ongoing process since 2009, Kathputli Colony experienced a recent demolition in November 2017 of households in which families had refused to move, with reports of lack of prior warning and bodily harm (Nagpal 2017). Many residents decry their eviction, stating that they never gave their consent to the DDA; this is countered by the DDA who argue that consent is not required by law when rehabilitating slumdwellers in-situ (Jeelani 2017). From the start of the project, Dupont et al. (2014) has noted that it has been plagued by lack of proper consultation with the different communities in the basti (from differing regional, linguistic and religious backgrounds), and is opaque regarding conditions of eligibility to access the housing scheme and details on the financial conditionalities. More recently, further controversy arose when DDA representatives insisted that ‘all’ residents have been promised housing; the DDA website itself has a list of 771 people considered ineligible for the in-situ flats – thus apparently contradicting their own statements (Nagpal 2017). In terms of the actual cost, beneficiaries in the targeted area will be moving into 1060 ready-to-move-in units; however, these still are relatively steep at 1.12 lakhs (about US $1,700) for general beneficiaries and 1 lakh (about US $1,400) for those from scheduled caste backgrounds (Jeelani 2017). Thus, the slum upgrading – meant as a model for what this process could look like – has been riddled with issues. TRANSLATING EXPERIENCES FROM RIO AND DELHI FOR PRAXIS Based on the account of Rio, we consider two key elements that have considerable bearing on housing policy in Delhi. The first is the constant

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problematisation of favelas and how best to intervene, especially given the recent embrace of evictions after almost two decades of in-situ slum upgrading. Therefore, any progress regarding the respect of favela dwellers’ rights and the improvement of their living conditions should never be taken for granted. Second, there is a question of unfulfilled expectations. The decline of Rio’s slum upgrading was associated with the disenchantment of state and non-state actors, as the outcomes and outputs were small in comparison to the promises made. Thus, in Rio’s case, slum-upgrading approaches should be understood by stakeholders and the public as a long-term process – one that can be decades-long and include multiple stages of intervention. Based on Delhi’s experience, there are two key elements that translate to the context outlined in Rio. First, there should be independent watchdogs present, particularly during the rehabilitation process; institutions that can be relied upon to take on this role include the UN Special Rapporteur on Housing (who has authored reports condemning eviction, see Farha 2016), and non-governmental organisations selected by the state, but with considerable input and acceptance by the community facing upgrading. The ongoing use of violence and force to evict, rather than rehabilitate people does not send a pro-poor message; instead it corrodes trust in the state and makes slumdwellers less amenable to transit housing. Second, there needs to be more consideration in the planning of transit housing. While transit housing is necessary when constructing in-situ flats, its location is still important given the two-year duration that residents are required to remain there. Access to employment and social networks must be considered at every point of the housing rehabilitation process. Overall, the comparative perspective on Rio and Delhi provides a new set of insights on urban marginality. In much of the literature, eviction and slum upgrading are treated separately, whereas we see the two not solely as dichotomised processes but as interlinked; eviction and slum upgrading can exist side by side depending on the following: who are termed as ‘rightful’ beneficiaries; are considered in tandem by policy-makers; and/or represent shifting discourses on how the urban poor should be accommodated within the city. Yet it is important to note that oscillations between the two in Rio and Delhi demonstrate that contesting marginality is not a linear process. Indeed, a linear progressive trajectory from evictions to upgrading does not exist. Rather, the factors and actors that contribute to and contest marginality are not static, and fighting against stigma and for rights is a constant endeavour. Even when upgrading has been achieved, the process can be fraught and competing interests can side line the ultimate goal of affordable housing for the poor. As Perlman (2010, 148) notes, ‘the idea of getting rid of them [slums] will never be off the policy table’, demonstrating the fragility that upgrading represents as a policy achievement.



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In addition, although we consider what looking at Rio through the lens of Delhi and vice versa enables us to understand, a certain geographical specificity remains: we cannot completely transpose the experiences of one city onto another. Ruming (2009, 455) captures this well: All research is, therefore, a single narrative (or translation) told by a particular person, at a particular time and to a particular audience . . . research should be framed as the exploration of situated knowledges where the researcher is accountable to their positionality and acknowledges their role in knowledge construction.

Thus, in Rio, issues of social exclusion based on living in favelas and favela upgrading experiences remain unique, and in Delhi, issues of caste, religion and vote-based politics heavily influence eviction and upgrading; furthermore, our individual positionalities and subjectivities as researchers shape how we may read these two contexts differently. CONCLUSION By engaging in the policy oscillation between eviction and in-situ upgrading in Rio de Janeiro and Delhi, and drawing on Robinson’s (2016a) earlier call to theorise from ‘elsewhere’, we are able to trace the history of policy discourse, as well as programme implementation and abandonment. There are a whole host of institutional actors that both impede and facilitate upgrading, and even when such a policy is embraced, it can still rely on previous tactics of forced eviction – even if temporarily. The changing policies over time, institutional fragmentation and the multiplicity of urban decision-making bodies have resonated across both contexts and mandate a stronger consideration of how an integrated approach may function to deliver better housing outcomes. In addition, from both cases, we see that the oscillations between evictions and upgrading are interconnected dynamics that influence each other, and that they do not linearly evolve from conservative to progressive views and policies. Hence, we argue that oscillations allow us to trace policy-making processes and dynamics, contributing to a better grasp on how evictions and upgrading interventions emerge, the power they hold as policies discursively, the real-life implications on slum-dwellers, and why interest in such policies has been maintained or shifted. We also contend that oscillations permit us to consider both evictions and upgrading simultaneously, rendering visible their interrelations, overlaps and at times sequential nature. There was not enough space to reflect on how ordinary people cope with oscillating housing policy and the precarity that both options can bring:

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living in a far-off resettlement colony post-eviction (if such an option is even accessible) or waiting in a transit camp with no guarantee of in-situ housing. However, we see this conversation as a starting point: one in which we identify shared undercurrents or lessons, from managing expectations of in-situ upgrading to dealing with the pervasive stigma against slums that exists across the policy spectrum, both of which can determine how a progressive policy such as upgrading could potentially fail or fall from government favour. Moreover, the comparison enabled us to open an initial line of enquiry on how mega events in Delhi (2010) and Rio (2007, 2014 and 2016) inform processes of slum upgrading and evictions, and reproduction of urban marginality. The promise of comparative urbanism is in ‘stretching’ the case studies but also in thinking beyond; in broadening the scope of our analysis, it becomes apparent that the path to more dignified housing it is not a linear process solely dependent on political will nor is it dependent on the ‘right’ policy. Rather, it is a constant fight that should aim to privilege community participation over private development; prioritise inclusive upgrading over a piecemeal process (and piecemeal access) and reject state engagement in violent tactics, even in the face of slum-dweller resistance to a supposedly progressive policy, that can ultimately lead to more humane and pro-poor housing policies. NOTES 1. In Brazil, informal settlements are called favelas. For more details see Valladares (2006). 2. The Mutirão Programme was launched by the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro in 1981 with the objective of improving basic infrastructure in favelas. By the end of the 1980s, Mutirão became a programme focused on the improvement of quality of life for favela dwellers beyond introducing basic infrastructure (Becerril 2015). 3. The policy is still referred to as in-situ, even though housing can still be built up to five kilometres away from the original site.

REFERENCES Abramo, Pedro. 1998. “Impacto Do Programa Favela-Bairro No Mercado Imobiliário de Favelas Da Cidade Do Rio de Janeiro.” Unpublished research report, Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Barboza, Silvia Carvalho. 2013. “Políticas e Programas Habitacionais No Município Do Rio de Janeiro. Uma Avaliação Da Experiência (1979–2002).” MSc. diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense.



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Becerril, Hector. 2010. “El análisis cognoscitivo de la política de integración de las favelas a la ciudad de Rio de Janeiro.” In Saberes y lugares en movimiento, coord. by Segura Fernando, 224–38. Monterrey: Casa de Mexico—CONACYT—Univer sidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon. Becerril, Hector. 2015. “Slum Upgrading Role for Housing Policy and Governance Transformations. From Favela-Bairro to Morar Carioca, Investigating the Case of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.” PhD diss., University College London. Becerril, Hector. 2016. “A South-South Dialogue on Housing: The Facilitator Model and Its Limitations in Brazil and India.” In Dynamics and Resilience of Informal Areas, edited by Sahar Attia, Shahadan Shabka, Zeinab Shafik, and Asmaa Ibrahim, 211–21. Cham: Springer. Becerril, Hector. 2017. “Evictions and Housing Policy Evolution in Rio de Janeiro: An ANT Perspective.” Journal of Urban Affairs 39 (7): 939–52. Bhan, Gautam. 2016. In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Bhan, Gautam, and Swathi Shivanand. 2013. “(Un)settling the City: Analysing Displacement in Delhi from 1990 to 2007.” Economic and Political Weekly 48 (13): 54–61. Bin, Daniel. 2017. “Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic Dispossessions.” Journal of Urban Affairs 39 (7): 924–38. Bonamichi, Nayan. 2016. “Favela on Sale. Regularização Fundiária e Gentrificação de Favelas No Rio de Janeiro.” MSc. diss., Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Clarke, John, Janet Newman, and Louise Westmarland. 2008. “The Antagonisms of Choice: New Labour and the Reform of Public Services.” Social Policy and Society 7 (2): 245–53. Dupont, Véronique. 2011. “The Dream of Delhi as a Global City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (3): 533–54. Dupont, Véronique, Subhadra Banda, Yashas Vaidya and M. M. Shankare Gowda. 2014. “Unpacking Participation in Kathputli Colony: Delhi’s First Slum Redevelopment Project, Act I.” Economic and Political Weekly 49 (24): 39–47. Farha, Leilani. 2016. “End-of-Visit Press Statement, New Delhi, India, 22 April 2016.” https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews. aspx?NewsID=19861&LangID=E. Fiori, Jorge, and Zeca Brandao. 2010. “Spatial Strategies and Urban Social Policy: Urbanism and Poverty Reduction in the Favelas.” In Rethinking the Informal City. Critical Perspectives from Lantin America, edited by Felipe Hernandez, Peter Kellet, and Lea K. Allen, 181–206. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Fiori, Jorge, Elizabeth Riley and Ronaldo Ramirez. 2000. “Urban Poverty Alleviation through Environmental Upgrading in Rio de Janeiro: Favela Bairro.” Draft research report, London: Development Planning Unit-University College London. Ghertner, Asher. 2008. “Analysis of New Legal Discourse behind Delhi’s Slum Demolitions.” Economic and Political Weekly 43 (20): 57, 59–66. Housing and Land Rights Network. 2011. “Planned Dispossession: Forced Evictions and the 2010 Commonwealth Games” New Delhi. http://www.hlrn.org/img/publi cations/planned_dispossession.pdf.

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Jeelani, Gulam. 2017. “No Room for Poor: Why Delhi’s Housing Plans Are Ending Up in Ghost Townships.” Https://Www.Hindustantimes.Com/. 27 November 2017. https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/no-room-for-poor-why-delhi-s-hous ing-plans-are-ending-up-in-ghost-townships/story-FdOGLgFsMXoRNQF5j7s5nI. html. Lancione, Michele. 2016. “The Assemblage of Life at the Margins.” In Rethinking Life at the Margins: The Assemblage of Contexts, Subjects and Politics, edited by Michele Lancione, 3–26. London and New York: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. New York: Oxford University Press. Mawdsley, Emma. 2009. “ ‘Environmentality’ in the Neoliberal City: Attitudes, Governance and Social Justice.” In The New Middle Classes: Globalizing Lifestyles, Consumerism and Environmental Concern, edited by Lars Meier and Hellmuth Lange, 237–51. Dordrecht: Springer. McFarlane, Colin, and Jonathan Silver. 2017. “Navigating the City: Dialectics of Everyday Urbanism.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42 (3): 458–71. Menon-Sen, Kalyani, and Gautam Bhan. 2008. Swept Off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi. Delhi: Yoda Press. Nagpal, Akshita. 2017. “Uprooted Lives: Delhi’s Kathputli Colony Residents Watched Their Homes Razed to the Ground.” The Wire (blog). 1 November. https://thewire.in/193337/delhi-kathputli-colony-demolition/. Parnell, Susan, and Edgar Pieterse. 2016. “Translational Global Praxis: Rethinking Methods and Modes of African Urban Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40 (1): 236–46. Peck, Jamie. 2015. “Cities beyond Compare?” Regional Studies 49 (1): 160–82. Perlman, Janice. 1979. The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Perlman, Janice. 2010. Favela. Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro. New York: Oxford University Press. Pugh, Cedric. 2001. “The Theory and Practice of Housing Sector for Developing Countries, 1950–99.” Housing Studies 16 (4): 399–423. Ramakrishnan, Kavita. 2016. “ ‘Propertied Ambiguity’: Negotiating the State in a Delhi Resettlement Colony.” In Space, Planning and Everyday Contestations in Delhi, edited by Surajit Chakravarty and Rohit Negi, 59–76. New Delhi: Springer. Ramakrishnan, Kavita. 2017. “ ‘Journeys of the I and We’: Theorizing the Ethnographic Encounter over Time.” CITY 21 (2): 207–18. Rio on Watch. 2018 “Parliamentary Front Against Evictions: Threatened Favelas Criticize City’s Actions”. Accessed September 9 2018. http://www.rioonwatch. org/?p=45995 Robinson, Jennifer. 2016a. “Comparative Urbanism: New Geographies and Cultures of Theorizing the Urban” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40 (1): 187–99. Robinson, Jennifer. 2016b. “Thinking Cities Through Elsewhere: Comparative Tactics for a More Global Urban Studies.” Progress in Human Geography 40 (1): 3–29.



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Ruming, Kristian. 2009. “Following the Actors: Mobilising an Actor-Network Theory Methodology in Geography.” Australian Geographer 40 (4): 451–69. Sheikh, Shahana, Subhadra Banda, and Ben Mandelkern. 2014. “Planning the Slum: JJC Resettlement in Delhi and the Case of Savda Ghevra.” A report of the Cities of Delhi project. Sovik, Liv, and Camila Calado. 2016. “The 2016 Olympics, Discourses around Favelas and the Urban Reform of Rio de Janeiro.” Logos 44 23 (1): 31–44. Tripathi, Snehal. 2017. “Kathputli Colony Evictees Stay Put under Flyover, Refuse to Move to Transit Camp.” Https://Www.Hindustantimes.Com/. 3 November 2017. https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/kathputli-colony-evictees-stayput-under-flyover-refuse-to-move-to-transit-camp/story-IRoYRUJbBpH7ykgo b0uBpI.html. Turner, John, and Robert Fichter. 1973. Freedom to Build. New York: Collier Macmillan Ltd. UN-Habitat. 2003. The Challenge of Slums. Global Report on Human Settlements 2003. London: Earthscan. Valladares, Licia. 2006. La Favela d’un Siecle à l’autre. Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme.

Chapter 4

The Calais Jungle A City In-Between Urban Worlds Oli Mould

When the Sangatte refugee centre was closed in 2002 by the then-president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, many of the refugees seeking to gain entry into the United Kingdom formed a makeshift camp in the wooded area around the ferry port of Calais. Thereafter, the camp continually grew in geographical size, occupants and notoriety and became colloquially known as the ‘the Jungle’. It was brutally demolished in October 2016 after a long and protracted legal battle in the French courts, and violent encounters with the local police. At its ‘height’, there were an estimated 10,000 people camped there. Given that the UN never sanctioned it as an ‘official’ refugee camp, it existed in a state of juridical limbo. It was a space marginalised politically by its ‘host’ country’s government, police and citizens and by the state the refugees were hoping to claim asylum in (and still are, almost two years after its demolition). But the camp was also a formation of marginality by the ongoing geopolitical instability in the Middle East, and the media rhetoric that depicted the refugees as deviant, criminal scroungers and racialised others looking to attack and depurify ‘British values’. It was very much ‘outside’ Western Europe, but by being inside (on the doorstep of the London Global City Region) radically altered and destabilised Westernised urban sensibilities (and was often cited negatively in political narratives on both sides of EU referendum debate in the United Kingdom in June 2016). The camp was part slum, part thriving cauldron of urban entrepreneurialism, part humanitarian melting pot; yet at the same time, it was none of these things. It was a place of quasi-temporariness, precarious living, and was an interstitial site that fell between the cracks of any attempts to define it.

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As such, this chapter will argue that the Jungle was an emergent and experimental urban space, one that problematises how we theorise marginal urban spaces. Urban ontological debates have been fierce of late, catalysed by the preponderance of planetary urbanism (Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer 2012; Brenner and Schmidt 2014), which has built upon the previous idea of ‘extended urbanism’ (Monte-Mór 2005). The nuances of the planetary urbanisation thesis are too broad for discussion in this chapter, but suffice to say it has ignited a wide-ranging scholarly debate about the nature of urban theory and exactly what a ‘city’ is (Catterall 2011; Wachsmuth 2014; Simone 2016; Scott and Stroper 2015; Mould 2015; Jazeel 2018; Ruddick et al. 2018). Such debates have seen some scholars advocate subaltern urbanism as a means by which to counter Global North primacy of urban theoretical debates (Roy 2011 building on Spivak [1999]). Such a subaltern urbanism allows for heterogeneity in urban ontology and it is with this concept, I believe, that we can explain the formation, marginalisation and eventual destruction of the Calais Jungle. Because, the Jungle is ‘an outside that by being inside introduces a “radical undecidability” to the analysis of urbanism’ (Roy 2011, 235), and by also being outside the Global South, further complicates the ontological positioning (see also Schindler 2014). Hence, rather than rehearsing these periphrastic debates around the validity of subaltern urbanism (in dialectic with planetary urbanism or other forms of ‘cityness’), this chapter will mobilise the notion of ‘grey space’, a component concept of subaltern urban thinking, to argue that the Jungle in Calais was ‘in-between’ worlds and therefore a site of experimental forms of very different kinds of social urban processes (and hence also relates to what Minca [2015] has called ‘camp geographies’). It was used by the French and UK authorities as a site of experimental forms of enforcement and control, using buffer zones, temporary shelters and controversial weaponry to control the ‘spread’ of the Jungle and the incursion of the refugees in the spaces of global commodity flows (i.e. the commercial freight to and from the United Kingdom and France). But conversely, it was also a site of experimental forms of social cohesion, autogestion and humanitarian response. Because official non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were largely hamstrung by the Jungle’s unofficial camp status, the volunteers that aided the refugees did most of the aid work (and continue to help to this day with those migrants living rough on the streets of Calais), creating a complex social services network in the camp and beyond. Hence the Jungle was a city caught in between conflicting worlds of not only state-led enforcement but also community-led socialisation. The chapter uses insights from a period of intense volunteer work conducted in the Jungle. Over three separate week-long periods in 2016, I worked on the ‘build crew’ of one of the volunteer groups. This involved me going into the Jungle on a daily basis, helping to assemble prefabricated housing (‘prefabs’)



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for refugees. I used this time to talk to refugees, sample the leisure and retail services and also engage with the social services being offered by volunteers (such as theatre groups, church services, youth clubs). From this ‘lived ethnography’, I was able to gain an understanding of the general life of the camp for the refugees, the workings of the NGOs and volunteers and the actions of the authorities. I also witnessed first-hand the camp’s eventual destruction. Hence, rather than direct quotes (I didn’t record any conversations, but wrote up observations on each day in the evening in a field work diary), this chapter uses vignettes and general observations to illustrate the theoretical arguments. Using these data, the chapter first explains there are three metanarratives that contributed to the expansion of the Jungle: the intensification of borders across Europe, the ‘push’ factors of continual war in the Middle East and Eastern Africa and the influx of volunteers to Calais. The chapter then goes into detail about what kinds of urban space is created because of the interplay of these three narratives. The last section then refracts these observations through the lens of subaltern urbanism, specifically ‘grey space’ to conclude that the Jungle (and all the camps that will no doubt take its place in the future) was very much a city in between urban worlds. THE CREATION OF THE JUNGLE Since mid-2015, there were a number of conflicting and inter related processes that led to the rapid increase in the Jungle’s inhabitants, and its transformation from a temporary site occupied by tents, impermanent settlements and transiency to a temporary site of makeshift housing, services and subaltern urbanism. I wish to outline three of them. First, the continuing political tension within ‘Fortress Europe’ particularly between France and the United Kingdom has frayed relationships with these cross-Channel neighbours (Ibrahim and Howarth 2015). The rise of David Cameron’s Conservatism at the time of its rapid expansion, embedded within it a determination to loosen the United Kingdom’s relationship with the EU has meant that border controls between France and the United Kingdom have been severely tightened. The then-UK home secretary, Theresa May and her French counterpart Bernard Cazeneuve signed a ‘cooperation agreement’ in November 2015 (Anon 2015), which saw the funds from the United Kingdom being diverted to strengthen the police presence in Calais around the refugee camps, as well as to build more fences and walls around the ferry and rail terminals. This funnelling of UK funds to strengthen the border has only increased post-Brexit vote, with the Calais Wall being built – a nineteen miles stretch of twelve-foot high concrete wall along the main motorway to the ferry terminals. Cameron continually attempted to redress the United Kingdom’s

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relationship with the EU before the referendum, with much of the focus being on the restriction of movement across boarders for migrants and asylum seekers, as well as a limit to the amount of welfare they can claim for once in the United Kingdom. Clearly, he failed spectacularly in his goal, and now, in the uncertainty after the vote, shoring up the border with physical boundaries, technology and more police has continued at pace (see Travis and Stewart 2018). The intensification of these border controls was highly evident even in my time in Calais in 2016. Driving off the ferry, I was immediately shuttled onto the main motorway, with the fences on either side immediately looming up over the roadside. Built in striking white mesh and around five or six metres tall (and double-lined in some stretches), the fences were laced with razor wire. Intermittently, ripped clothes caught up in the wire flapped in the wind, material residue and macabre evidence of people’s attempts to scale them and jump on the lorries bound for the ferry port. Alongside the stretch of motorway that bordered the Jungle camp, police vans were stationed bumper to bumper. With their blue lights flashing, they lined up, sometimes twenty-five strong forming another highly visible and enforced barrier to the main arterial routes of the transportation terminals. On the main roads into the camp, police men lined up, with blatant militarised aesthetics; black armour-plated shoulder pads, heavy duty helmets, tear gas cannons strapped over their shoulders, pistols fastened to their thighs. Also, driving through the border points at the ferry terminals (on both sides), my car was thoroughly searched, and my intentions scrutinised. This was a process that many of the other volunteers experienced, particularly those with vans or non-Caucasians. This intense tightening of the border has created a bottleneck through which fewer and fewer refugees are able to pass, and means that the refugees are forced to create a more permanent (or at least, less temporary) home for themselves to wait out their best opportunities to attempt to cross the border. Hence the growth of the Jungle rapidly at this time. Second, the ‘push’ factors from the Middle East are only increasing. The ‘permawar’ (Graham 2004) in Middle Eastern countries is intensifying pushing people out of the area and into Europe, often through dangerous boat journeys across the Mediterranean Sea. The rise of ISIS (itself, argued to be a relational product of the West’s continued ‘war on terror’ [Kundnani 2014]) and their violence towards particular ethnic and religious groups is causing millions to flee the region, in fear of their and their families’ lives. I spoke to many young men who had fled across Europe because of violence perpetuated on their families. One young man (he told me he was seventeen, but he looked a lot younger) spoke of how he witnessed his parents and older brother killed in an explosion at this home in Singar, Iraq (the origin of which he was not sure). This story was not unique, with other young men recounting



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the horrors of ISIS’ brutal regime and their desperation to escape, often paying local people traffickers to get them to Europe. Many of the people in the Calais and Dunkirk camps were hoping to get to the United Kingdom in order to meet up with relatives or because friends of theirs have already made it over the border (often illegally). These push factors only increase the number of people shunting up against the closed borders to the United Kingdom, swelling the numbers and the need for more durable accommodation. Third, since the Jungle entered the popular media narrative across Europe (I witnessed many news and radio crews from the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom, particularly in Dunkirk), there was an influx of volunteers wishing to help. The fact that the French authorities refused to recognise the Jungle as a refugee camp means that NGOs were hamstrung in what they could do ‘officially’. Many of the charities that were present in Calais and Dunkirk seemed not to be doing much at all – it was the volunteers who were providing the majority of services (in terms of shelter, food, medical, legal and social services). The influx of people from across countries in Northern Europe (although most of the people I encountered were from the United Kingdom, but some from the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and France) created a cadre of workers, all offering their labour for the common goal of improving the living conditions for the refugees in Calais and Dunkirk. As the visibility of the camp increased via mass media (as well as the deterioration of conditions throughout winter), the numbers of volunteers swelled in early 2016 providing further opportunities for people to increase the capacity of the Jungle’s living conditions. This happened most notably with the rapid construction of prefabricated homes. This was a process I was involved with readily, and the process of replacing tents with more sturdy and warmer shelters became a very efficient practice. The ‘prefabs’ were constructed offsite, and then assembled in the Jungle with the help of the people who would inhabit them. The speed of construction was impressive, with up to twelve of these prefabs going up daily, and those were just the ones assembled by the team I worked with. There were at least two more groups of volunteers building other types of housing, and a ‘Caravans for Calais’ charity that periodically brought over caravans as shelter. As well as shelter, the wider range of skills and expertise of the people who volunteered meant more diverse services being offered in the Jungle. Many of these services mirrored the formal state-led or NGO provisions often seen in other camps, slums and subaltern urban spaces. And like those spaces, the Jungle was very much characterised by informality, as discussed by AlSayyad and Roy (2003) in which they problematise the established dichotomy between the formal and informal. Modern urban conditions under capitalism have created pockets of informality among the formal ordering of the city, but also sees informality as part of capitalist processes themselves

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(see also McFarlane 2012). Hence in the Jungle, there were youth centres, theatres, educational services, playground construction, immunisation programs, cooking programs and even an embroidery class, all being offered by the volunteers. They mirrored provisions that should have been offered by absent-NGOs (and hence had a streak of formality being offered by qualified lawyers, doctors, etc.) but also had a much more visceral sense of informality given their ad hoc application and the fact that they often encouraged illegal practices such as theft. Also, in some sort of perverse analogous process to Jane Jacobs’ (1970) famous urban development model of import-replacement, the services being brought into the Jungle were then adapted by the refugees and became permanent provisions. They brought their own unique skills too, combining them with the material provisions from the volunteers and donations to create their own services, activities and instances of urbanity. For example, the ‘Good Chance Theatre’ was erected in Calais and provided theatrical, performance and artistic pursuits for the refugees (BBC 2016b). Over time though, the refugees were able to begin running their own workshops and events based on their own cultural inflections, entirely independently from those who set it up. So as the volunteers increased in number and resourcefulness, the opportunities to create more provision in the Jungle also increased; and the more the refugees have the opportunity to create an urban space of their own. JUNGLE URBANISM These three metanarratives coalesce to produce the Jungle as it existed at its ‘peak’. All of them had a particular spatial consequence, which created a particular kind of urban in the Jungle, an urban that was interstitial, precarious and experimental. This proved to be a viable opportunity, but paradoxically also deepened the vulnerability of the refugees. It was an opportunity, because it provided a space for entrepreneurial urbanism. The growth of the social services on offer in the Jungle were matched by the growth of restaurants, cafes, barbers, bathing rooms and other leisure services that could be bought and sold. It highlighted similar processes that are championed by the famous economic policy guru Hernando de Soto (2000), who advocates ‘slum entrepreneurship’. The work of de Soto centred on the fact that human capital needed to ‘succeed’ economically, something very much embedded in slum life. He argued that policies that reward such behaviour (such as land-titling and micro-financing) should be implemented to encourage development, turning ‘dead capital’ into ‘liquid capital’ thereby facilitating new arenas of capital accumulation. While the Jungle is a world away from being such a space (it was not an officially recognised slum or



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camp, and indeed de Soto’s ideas have been roundly criticised as neoliberal ideologies that exacerbating existing inequalities, create slumlords and fuels a black market (see Roy 2011), the ‘grassroots’ of entrepreneurship were evident throughout. Precisely because it didn’t receive any ‘official’ form of financial aid or incentives, it forced people to create their own surplus wealth through entrepreneurial activity. The longer-term presence of the volunteers and the services they provided created a system of production that allowed for iterative design. For example, the design of the prefab itself was a trial-and-error process; with very few qualified carpenters on the build team, the structure was based on internet searches, and a feedback system that altered the design and construction process via interactions with the final product. Iterative design is a recognised procedure in software design vernacular, taking place via the use of open-source technologies, wikis and other modes of open communication. It is implemented to road test particular beta software, and is a recognised way of finessing the functionality and usability of particular kinds of software. Such a design process is dependent upon a receptive community of users who engage in open forms of communication, it is inherently democratic. The design of the prefabs in the Jungle followed a similar process in that the builders and users of the dwellings were able to feedback into the design processes, and recommend changes and alterations. For example, it became clear over the course of a few colder days that a particular kind of tarpaulin retained heat better. It was thicker, and hence more laborious to cut, transport and manoeuvre into position (particularly in windy conditions), but it provided more appropriate accommodation for the refugees, and so it was used (until we ran out of it at the warehouse). Another example involved the use of particular nails that were not suitable for hammering in a particular kind of insulation; after many unsuccessful attempts to secure a think piece of recycled foam insulation to the roof beams, we came back the following day with more appropriate clout nails. So the whole process of design and construction was a democratic one; it involved the volunteers and the refugees, and created a dynamic feedback loop that was able to adapt individual prefabs to particular needs. Such a process of democratic humanitarianism would not be possible without the uniquely experimental urban – and indeed informal (cf. McFarlane 2012) – conditions offered in the Jungle. Despite these opportunities for experimental entrepreneurial and humanitarian activity, the Jungle’s in-betweenness made it an urban space for which to ‘test’ methods of societal control and enforcement. The Jungle very much displayed characteristics of the camp. Minca (2015) notes that refugee camps are ‘biopolitical laboratories’, used as experimental political technologies of biometrics, surveillance and legal tenure. Such experiments that go on in

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the vast array of camps across the world (detention, refugee, concentration, military, etc.) influence global processes of mobility and control; he argues, ‘We are all indeed affected by the presence of camps’ (Minca 2015, 80). So it was with the Jungle; what went on ‘inside’ the camp had an effect on the procedures that impinge upon ‘citizens’ across Europe today; from heightened border controls when ‘officially’ crossing borders, racial profiling at checkpoints and cultural stigmatisation leading to racism in the mainstream media and in certain parts of society. Because of its status as a non-legal, unofficial camp, the Jungle was vulnerable to biopolitical experimentation. This was no more clearly evident with the imposition by the French government of the containers as living modules. The whitewashed façades, wired perimeter fence, patrolling security guards with attack dogs and overtly detention camp aesthetics were an imposing presence in the Jungle. These containers offered warm, clean and semi-permanent shelter for refugees (although who was picked to go into them remains a closely guarded secret, and rumours were that stays were limited to a few weeks), but crucially required the surrender of biometric data to use them (in the form of a palm print). The camp inhabitants I spoke to were highly suspicious of these new living quarters, as they saw it is a refugee-databasing technique by stealth, which could potentially hamper their chances of asylum in the United Kingdom. Moreover, the police that ubiquitously surrounded the camp were enacting an experimental type of enforcement; one that used arbitrarily defined and indiscriminately imposed buffer zones and seemingly random acts of violence with use of (allegedly) illegal weapons (Feigenbaum and Raoul 2016). The constant police presence on the perimeter of the camp, particularly the long line of vans that perch on the motorway hard shoulder overlooking the camp were a constant visual reminder of the threat of violence and eviction (not to mention their militarised aesthetic). The panoptic presence of the police pervaded a precarity across the camp that was made tangible with sporadic, but often very violent, encounters with refugees. One particular event, the imposition of the buffer zone was initiated just previously to my first visit, and continued while I was there. In early January 2016, the police decided that due to the increased attempts by refugees to gain access to vehicles on the motorway, they would impose a 100-metre buffer zone between the motorway’s edge and the camp. The police gave people roughly four-day notice to move any shelters or structures that were occupying this newly set up ‘zone’. In a mad scramble to move shelters, many of the volunteer and refugee groups ceased their daily activities and set about moving shelters and prefabs to alternative areas of the Jungle en masse. Lorries, low-loading vans, carts, forklift trucks and teams of people lifting and dragging were all used to transport assembled prefabs across the camp. Without the collective



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mobilisation of the refugees and the volunteers, the bulldozers and diggers would have destroyed these shelters, which would have no doubt incurred violent clashes with the police. Moreover, three particular structures of significant social value in the buffer zone – a church, a mosque and a school – were to remain untouched according to the police. However, without warning, the church and the mosque were bulldozed. Such seemingly indiscriminate violence towards these religious institutions, Fraser (2016) has argued, is part of deeper ideology of the marginalisation of religion in French society. It could also be seen as another system of urban control – refusing the refugees structures that pertain to a more ‘homely’ sense of place is a domicidal strategy (Nowicki 2014), one that maintained a state of precariousness and vulnerability for the inhabitants of the camp. OUTSIDE URBAN THEORY? Roy (2011) has articulated her desire for a subaltern urbanism that posits the epistemology of the subaltern as not bound up in identification and therefore hegemonic potential, but in the silence and shadows of history. Global South cities, particularly their slumscapes, have been celebrated as highly entrepreneurial, and are exemplars of human survival ingenuity. But such celebrations mask neoliberal schemas, and co-optive and alienating strategies of urban policy. Roy (2011) argues that extrapolating an urbanism from this singularised subaltern identity risks substituting one identifiable and linearised urbanism with another, furthering the already-existing capitalist urban development discourses. Instead, a subaltern urbanism that allows for heterogeneity is needed, and it is to this, I believe that the Calais Jungle takes us. In other words, the Jungle was a politically, socially and culturally marginalised space. Beyond its marginality, as has been discussed, it was also an embryonic urban space that was cultivating not only new forms of urban socioeconomic formations but also more extreme forms of urban control. A useful lens through which to articulate the Jungle as an urban space is one of the four concepts of subaltern urbanism that Roy (2011) encourages us to engage with, namely the concept of ‘grey space’. Yiftachel (2009, 243) talks of ‘grey space’ as ‘between the “lightness” of legality/approval/safety and the “darkness” of eviction/destruction/death’. He is keen to distance the concept of ‘grey spaces’ from the traditional view of informal urbanism, instead positing greyness as interstitial and emergent from ‘above’ and ‘below’. ‘Above’ in that they are spaces of marginalisation by a power-laden state, but also ‘below’ because they have agency to forge their own urbanisms, to employ tactical modes of survival, and to empower themselves because of

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their ‘in-betweenness’. Yiftachel (2009, 243) goes on to articulate grey space further: Gray [sic] spaces are usually quietly tolerated, while subject to derogatory discourses about their putative ‘contamination’, ‘criminality’ and ‘danger’ to the desired ‘order of things’. The disjuncture between actual tolerated reality and its ‘intolerable’ legal, planning and discursive framing, puts in train a process of ‘gray spacing’, during which the boundaries between ‘accepted’ and ‘rejected’ constantly shift, trapping whole populations in a range of unplanned urban zones, lacking certainty, stability and hence development.

The Jungle was a grey space for just these reasons; it was tolerated to an extent by the French authorities, but the media and political discourses of the site as criminal, dangerous and ‘other’ are highly prominent. David Cameron himself rather inhumanely labelled these people as a ‘swarm’ (Elgot and Taylor 2015) and ‘bunch’ (Mason and Perraudin 2016) (much harsher language by other media commentators), fuelling a metanarrative of the refugees as a racialised other, threatening the security of the homeland. But, as detailed earlier, the very existence of the site was part product of the UK government’s strict border controls (see Mould 2017), yet was tolerated insofar as the inhabitants did not disrupt the global flows of capital between the United Kingdom and Continental Europe. Such tolerance though did not extend to providing any form of humanitarian assistance; it was merely resting on not forcibly evicting them until October 2016, when finally, the weight of the French law, UK funds and local police came crashing down. Yet concurrently, particularly during my time there when the camp’s population was at its highest, there were the counter-narratives espoused by the army of volunteers that operate in the Jungle, the creativity and entrepreneurialism of the refugees, self-organisation and empowerment; so much of which I witnessed first-hand (see Mould 2018). This discourse, again fuelled by the more sympathetic media narratives, tended to legitimise the activities in the Jungle within a framework of grassroots, community activism. Such ‘acceptance’ was itself again tolerated by state power so long as it did not induce any material permanency. This was evidenced by the French police and local authorities banning any building materials in the Jungle other than wood and tarpaulin (clearly now an obvious strategy to make its eventual clearance easier). So, concrete, brick and more durable materials were not tolerated, and violently removed if necessary. This ensnared the Jungle’s architecture into a permanent state of temporariness that was easily removed by the police in the various mini-evictions and the final eviction in October 2016. The installation of the white containers as living quarters in January 2016 by the local



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authorities brought an added dimension to this temporariness – espousing as they did the aesthetics of ‘pop-up’ urbanism that has become so en vogue in global creative city vernacular, but housing all the mechanics of a detention centre such as short-term leases, biometric entry and defensible architecture. In October 2016, there was a violent eviction of the entire camp, with mass burning of shelters, beatings of refugees who refused to move and confrontations between groups of refugees and lines of police firing tear gas. This eviction, while particularly violent and spectacular (it was captured vividly by social media), was the final act in destroying the Jungle. The people who made it their home continue to live in this interstitial space. Either in temporary shelters set up by local charities and volunteers, mass refugee accommodation in other parts of France, or just rough in the streets of Calais, the people who are desperate to come to the United Kingdom to start a new life are being denied a new home by the same forces of marginality that created the Jungle in the first place. What is obvious to the refugees who lived in the Jungle, the volunteers who worked there or the media who visited there was that the intense precariousness and instability were pervasive and deleterious, but did offer moments of hope. It shows that people from different parts of Europe can come together to provide humanitarian services that put established NGOs to shame. But it is also evidence of state-led brutality, a site that was a product of the defensive attitudes and policies of governments too eager to appease the flow of capital and goods, but not people in desperate need of asylum. The Jungle (and whatever site will take its place) therefore was an in-between space, a city caught between the harsh realities of geopolitics, and the rousing collective will of a humanitarian response.

REFERENCES AlSayyad, Nazer, and Anya Roy (eds.). 2003. Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Anon. 2015. ‘Bernard Cazeneuve and Theresa May Sign Cooperation Agreement’ The Embassy of France in London website, http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/Bernard-Cazeneuve-and-Theresa-May-sign-cooperation-agreement, accessed 8 February 2018. BBC. 2016a. Calais ‘Jungle’ Migrants Resist Container Move, BBC News Website, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35322374, accessed 8 February 2018. BBC. 2016b. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Takes Hamlet to Jungle, BBC News Website, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-35481668, accessed 8 February 2018.

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Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmidt. 2014. “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (3): 731–55. Brenner, Neil, Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer (eds.). 2012. Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. London: Routledge. Catterall, Bob. 2011. “Is It All Coming Together? Thoughts on Urban Studies and the Present Crisis: (24) Whose Space Is This Time? Insurrection, Politics—and ‘Magic’?” City 15 (5): 605–12. de Soto, Hernando. 2000. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books. Elgot, Jessica, and Matthew Taylor. 2015. “Calais Crisis: Cameron Condemned for ‘Dehumanising’ Description of Migrants.” The Guardian Online, 30 June 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/30/david-cameron-migrantswarm-language-condemned, accessed 8 February 2018. Feigenbaum, Anna, and Vyvian Raoul. 2016. “Dangerous Weaponry Used on Refugees with No Legal Status in Calais.” New Internationalist Magazine, http:// newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2016/01/29/dangerous-weaponry-used-on-refu gees-in-calais/, accessed 8 February 2018. Fraser, G. (2016) “France’s official blindness to religion only masks religious hatred” The Guardian, 4 February, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ belief/2016/feb/04/frances-official-blindness-to-religion-only-masks-religioushatred, accessed 8 August 2019. Graham, Stephen. 2004. “Vertical Geopolitics: Baghdad and after.” Antipode 36 (1): 12–23. Ibrahim, Yasmin and Anita Howarth. 2015. “Space Construction in Media Reporting: A Study of the Migrant Space in the ‘Jungles’ of Calais.” Fast Capitalism 12(1), http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/12_1/Ibrahim-Howarth-SpaceConstruction.htm, accessed 8 February 2016. Jacobs, Jane. 1970. The Economy of Cities. New York: Vintage. Jazeel, Tariq. 2018. “Urban Theory with an Outside.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (3): 405–19. Kundnani, Arun. 2014. The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. London: Verso. Mason, Rowena, and Frances Perraudin. 2016. “Cameron’s ‘Bunch of Migrants’ Jibe Is Callous and Dehumanising, Say MPs.” The Guardian Online, 27 January 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/27/david-cameron-bunch-ofmigrants-jibe-pmqs-callous-dehumanising, accessed 8 February 2018. McFarlane, Colin. 2012. “Rethinking Informality: Politics, Crisis, and the City.” Planning Theory & Practice 13 (1): 89–108. Minca, Claudia. 2015. “Geographies of the Camp.” Political Geography 49: 74–83. Monte-Mór, Roberto. 2005. “What Is the Urban in the Contemporary World?” Cadernos de Saúde Pública 21 (3): 942–48. Mould, Oli. 2015. “A Limitless Urban Theory? A Response to Scott and Storper’s ‘The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory’.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40 (1): 157–63. Mould, Oli. 2017. “The Calais Jungle: A Slum of London’s Making.” City 21 (3–4): 388–404.



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Mould, Oli. 2018. “The Not-So-Concrete Jungle: Material Precarity in the Calais Refugee Camp.” Cultural Geographies 25 (3): 393–409. Nowicki, Mel. 2014. “Rethinking Domicide: Towards an Expanded Critical Geography of Home.” Geography Compass 8 (11): 785–95. Roy, Anay. 2011. “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (2): 223–38. Ruddick, S., L. Peake, G. S. Tanyildiz, and D. Patrick. 2018. “Planetary Urbanization: An Urban Theory for Our time?” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (3): 387–404. Schindler, Seth. 2014. “Understanding Urban Processes in Flint, Michigan: Approaching ‘Subaltern Urbanism’ Inductively.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (3): 791–804. Scott, A., and M. Storper. 2015. “The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39 (1): 1–15. Simone, Abdoumaliq. 2016. “It’s Just the City after All!” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40 (1): 210–18. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Travis, Alan, and Heather Stewart. 2018. “UK to Pay Extra £44.5m for Calais Security in Anglo-French Deal.” The Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2018/jan/18/uk-to-pay-extra-445m-for-calais-security-in-anglo-frenchdeal, accessed 25 May 2018. Wachsmuth, David. 2014. “City as Ideology: Reconciling the Explosion of the City Form with the Tenacity of the City Concept.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (1): 75–90. Yiftachel, Oren. 2009. “Critical Theory and Gray Space: Mobilisation of the Colonized.” City 13 (2/3): 246–63.

Part II

EVERYDAY MARGINALITIES

Chapter 5

Contrasting ‘Ghetto’ Pride A Comparison of the Sense of Belonging for People Who Live Outside of Their Local Neighbourhoods: London and Mexico City César Rebolledo and Joy White

In this chapter, we compare a sense of belonging between residents from stigmatised communities in Mexico City and London. In this context, identity is often a struggle for recognition particularly in those places that are categorised as ‘ghetto’ or ‘the hood’. As important as recognition is the sense of pride that comes with belonging to a stigmatised community. At the same time as generating this sense of pride, residents usually want to articulate and demonstrate the realities of their existence. We use the work of Bourdieu (1980) to explore how the values and tastes of the dominant group shape perceptions and stereotypes. The existence and (re)production of stigma (Goffman 1975) is often used as a way to remove the rights of those categorised as such. Stigma removes the possibilities of difference. And yet, we argue, people from marginalised communities find ways to invert that stigma and invoke a sense of pride. To explore this issue, we make a comparison between two distinct geographical areas: East Mexico City (Iztapalapa) and East London (Newham). Using Loic Wacquant’s (2007) definition of the ‘ghetto’ as a starting point, we discuss how it relates to notions of home and belonging in London and Mexico. Specifically, we draw on interviews with former residents of both areas (Iztapalapa and Newham) to compare how people recognised themselves, and articulated their identity, once they were in a new neighbourhood. In Mexico City, we also examined online commentary on social media,

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looking at how residents were portrayed. We conclude by discussing how ‘ghetto’ or ‘hood’ pride contributes to a sense of belonging for those from stigmatised communities. THE IDENTITY EDGES OF BELONGING From a sociological angle, the discussion about urban marginality requires getting into the subject of cultural identities and the related neighbourhoods to which they are related a priori. The social representation of the other always starts by recalling the place of residence. The expression ‘I’m from . . .’ gives preference to the homeland prior to the individual characteristics, giving more importance to their origin attributes that are shared rather than singularity. The residential stereotypes work as a mirror in which series of generalising ideas about the other are reflected and valued – and at the same time, they imagine their values and behavioural patterns in a particular way. It is worth remembering that the theme of identity positioned itself in academic disciplines through certain marginal groups, which demanded the right to be recognised and be socially included throughout the world in the late 1960s. The questions raised highlighted the disdainful fixation and the segregationist power of cultural stigmas, at the time they also stressed the latent conflict that lies under the social representations about identity and its household spaces. Speaking on this matter, the idea of ghetto allows handling identities in terms of neighbourhood belonging, as well as working urban marginality under the lens of semantics. Thus, while the term ‘marginality’ can be merely metaphoric, it is necessary to insist on how its usage ultimately refers to the division of social space. The figure of the outsider becomes illustrative for observing what we understand as outside and inside, when talking about the limits of geographic space. To put it in colloquial terms: inequality usually comes with a specific address. That is why we understand identity as an attempt of symbolic recuperation of the social space against segregation. The idea of urban marginality refers to the limits of social confinement that usually exist in Western cities. The fight for recognition is an act of displaying within the social space, which puts under the spotlight the other’s need to recognise themselves and eventually, to differentiate from the stigmatised environment, in physical, moral and social terms. A stigmatised group’s demand is normally attached to geographic or socioeconomic positioning but, for the purpose of this chapter we stand on the grounds of the symbolic aspect of the residence to frame our thoughts on marginality and identity. In her analytical framework for the study of belonging, Nira Yuval Davies (2006) argues that people can belong in many different ways and form a



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variety of objects of attachment. A sense of belonging can be stable, contested or transient. Belonging relates to social and economic locations at particular historical moments (Yuval-Davis 2006, 199). Belonging is cognitive, but it also reflects emotional investment in place and relationships. It is about feeling safe and at home. Identity is also constructed along multiple axes of difference, for example, gender, class race and ethnicity. Group identity is relational: the identity manifestations we explore in this chapter constitute acts in which the members of a group show who they are by making themselves visible, in order ‘to show the reality of their existence against those who neglect seeing or recognizing it’ (Giménez 2009, 59). The popularity of identity as an academic research theme is related to the urge of researching social conflicts, precisely under the hypothesis that every single social relationship ultimately holds a fight for positioning and being recognised. Following this logic, the effervescence of the identity movements is understood as a symbolic response against social marginality and inequity. For the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1980, 66), the fight for recognition is usually defined as an act in which ‘a practical, virtual, ignored or neglected group becomes visible and manifested to the rest of the groups, as it is to itself as well, in order to give testimony of their existence’. Bourdieu’s thesis allows us to conceive this fight on two different levels. If ‘existing is, in social terms, to be perceived as distinct’ then specifying will be needed as: (1) such recognition is ascribed under a valuation process depending on one another (2) and, from the sociologist’s perspective, this judgement faculty belongs to the dominant class, which rises as the holder of the legitimate identity. The first level places us on the social dimension of identity. According to Gilberto Giménez (2009, 57), ‘The value of a person is fundamentally reduced to their social identity. . . . Therefore, the idea a person holds of themselves, that inner feeling, linked to the values of self-love, honor and dignity is conditioned to the external valuation’. It is important to clarify this is the reason why we always put an emphasis on the social character when speaking about identity, because even if we were referring to a certain individual in particular, it would be impossible to consider them in an isolated way to refer to their difference. The second level takes us to the question of categorisation or stereotyping. The identities are always object of social valuations, and these are always given in positive or negative terms: ‘There exists a tendency to systematically stigmatize the overpowered identities, under the coverage of discriminatory ideologies such as racism, aristocratism, classist elitism or the imperial superiority conscience . . . feelings of repulsion and hatred fed by denigrating stereotypes’ (58). Paraphrasing Giménez (57), it is not about reversing the stigmatised or unqualified features of a group against a generic opposite one but about founding each group’s autonomy to be defined on their own terms, in other

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words, ‘the objective of the fight is not so much to reconquer a denied or suffocated identity, but to reclaim the power of building and evaluating one’s own identity autonomously’. LIVING WITH STIGMA According to Erving Goffman (1975, 11–12), the Greeks coined the term ‘stigma’ to designate certain body marks, destined to expose the people who were considered unusual, despicable or undesirable within a community. These marks were engraved on the skin with a knife or incandescent iron and they proclaimed the carrier to be a slave, a criminal or a traitor, an infamous, ritually impure individual who others should avoid and keep at a distance, especially in public places. These marks would be used to socially discriminate against those individuals whose attributes were considered inappropriate. In other words, the stigma was a mark of exclusion and resulted in the loss of rights for those who carried it to interact socially. But beyond describing the use of the word ‘stigma’ to indicate the misfortune in the ordinary, Goffman’s inferences on its primitive significance revolved around its conceptual scope in the present. Through the years, the stigma evolved from being just a body mark to become a rather symbolic branding. Goffman observes that the term is currently used in a sense quite close to the original, but applies more to the misfortune itself (for the carrier), rather than its bodily manifestation. Goffman’s definition refers to stigma as an act of delegitimisation in which rights are removed from individuals whose characteristics are considered deplorable within the system of social deliberation. By becoming an imprint, the stigma cancels the possibility of difference, homogenises, reduces and, in one way or another, is an evidence of the denial within identity recognition. In other words, it is common for us to think that a person carrying a stigma is not entirely human. Starting from this postulate, we practice all kinds of discriminations, by which we effectively reduce their opportunities – even unconsciously. In order to explain its inferiority and to justify that they represent a danger, we conceive a theory, an ideology of stigma, which is also useful – sometimes – to rationalize an animosity based on other differences, such as class. We use all kinds of terms every day, designating a stigma specifically: bastard, vile . . . to make a source of images and metaphors, without always thinking about its primary significance. (Goffman 1975, 15)

According to Alain Testart (2011, 7, our translation), ethnocentrism underpins the application of stigma to certain communities: It consists of finding the customs that are not their own, strange, bizarre or laughable. It is followed by an unfavorable prosecution, a certain condescension



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in the best case; a contempt, at worst. In all cases, a lack of understanding. For the Western, the other has been the barbarian, the infidel, the primitive savage throughout history.

Our focus in this chapter is on social stigmatisation and the way in which it brings together a series of negative stereotypes about certain social actors (person or group), and how, in this context, it influences identities and the sense of belonging. THE INVERSION OF STIGMA The word ‘pride’ carries two opposing meanings relevant to the discussion of identities. It refers both to the self-overvaluation (haughtiness) against the appreciation of another and to the feelings of self-satisfaction, fairness and fulfilment that come with an achieved quest in the context of exclusion. On the one hand, pride can be understood as a negative feeling in which the other is devalued, but pride can also be understood, from an alternative perspective, as a method whereby achievements and struggles are brought to the fore as a guarantee of distinction. In the context of this research, the term ‘pride’ is a sensor that allows the measurement of feelings such as belonging and group differentiation in a qualitative and positive manner. At the same time, it opens the door to the study of what we call ‘the inversion of stigmas’ (Rebolledo 2015). We previously stated how stigma could be transformed into statements of selfrecognition. Gay Pride is an illustration of this concept, revealing how stigmas can be reappropriated, neutralised or inverted. That which is offensive to some can become a triumphant celebration of what it actually identifies. Studies on ethnicities and racial identities show accurately how symbolic oppositions are born in response to the positive categorisation that comes with being identified as ‘white’, Western and civilised. The inversion of stigma is a redefinition of the diminishing adjective, a confiscation of the oppressive speech. Following this logic, one is able to understand the slogans of resistance within both the North American (‘Black is beautiful’) and the Latin American (‘I’m indio, so what?’) contexts.

GHETTO IS HOME; BUT HOME IS NOT GHETTO The title of this section settles the semantic problem within the current research about stigma and urban marginality. In a traditional way, to speak about the notion of ghetto in social sciences is a lens through which to discuss processes of involuntary segregation and ethnic or cultural exclusion in the

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West. From the Jewish ghettos in Europe to the black ghettos in the United States, this kind of analysis tends to emphasise the need to bring the walls and symbolic boundaries of social exclusion down. From this point of view, the ghetto is not only all about a space of social confinement and restriction but also about political organisation and social engineering, which lead to poverty and reproduce ostracism. The common analysis about the ghetto brings an active concern within, in terms of justice and human rights. Either in racial, ethnic or religious terms, the analytical concern is that ‘ghetto’ is descriptive and heightens stigmatisation and widens existing inequalities. But at the same time, the everyday use of the word ‘ghetto’ puts under the spotlight an emerging phenomenon of appropriation and gives a new significance to the peripheral residential space by its inhabitants. This appropriation has been insufficiently studied in scholarship focused on residential stereotypes and ’hood stigma in Western countries, since the usual focus has been merely critical. The positive use of the term ‘ghetto’ by the globalised hip-hop culture reveals the group revaluation of a word that has historically recalled segregation, poverty and crime. The exhibit Hip Hop, du Bronx aux rues arabes (held in Paris, in 2015) accurately shows how there is a propagation of an anti-establishment speech within youngsters from marginal neighbourhoods worldwide, which vindicates their identity and desire to be recognised as distinct. Using the slogan hors du commun (out of the ordinary), the exhibition makes visible how the countercultural tone of hip hop has promoted an inverted signifying scheme all around the world, which we can interpret as identity pride. It is necessary to observe the complexity of the social recognition from an angle that transcends the canonical understanding of stigma. The concept of ghetto not only allows us to study the material-spatial dimension of exclusion, but it also allows us to get into the depths of a ‘strong machinery of collective identity’ (Wacquant, 7). The ghetto forces its inhabitants to reassure their sense of singularity with regard to others. Their living conditions provide them with the possibility to feel unique and apart from society at the same time. In symbolic terms, the notion of fashion clearly reveals the desire to be perceived as different, as an outsider, exotic or extravagant. This phenomenon feeds existing negative stereotypes about the natives at the bordering areas, at the time it produces a socio-symbolic cohesion among its inhabitants. As Wacquant (2004, 7) writes: ‘The Ghetto is a cultural combustion engine that melts division amongst the confined group and fuels its collective pride even as it enters the stigma that over it’. In this respect, the ghetto represents a home – or a shelter, if preferred – which provides safety against an excluding environment, but at the same time, generates a permanent alert of inner violence that qualifies it as uninhabitable. From this point of view, the expression ‘you can take the boy out of the country . . .’ can be interpreted as a pointing



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desire for transcending the social barrier of marginality; meanwhile, the complement ‘but not the country out of the boy’ speaks about a pride, which stays and increases when someone manages to get out of confinement. The notion of ghetto in this chapter works therefore as an indicator of group belonging, serving as a contrast to measuring the levels of appropriation of the stigma. The new significance of the term ‘ghetto’ then leads us to think on how the semantics of marginality are disrupted within two contexts apparently so different from each other, Mexico City and London. In the case of Mexico, ‘ghetto’ is a word from hip-hop culture and is used as a synonym of slum; it perfectly correlates to the use of the expression ‘hood’, referred to it as home. In the case of London, ‘the ends’ and ‘the hood’ are often interchangeable with ‘the ghetto’ as colloquial terms used by young people in urban settings to denote their local neighbourhoods (Reynolds 2013; White 2016). Often, these are locales that have little in the way of material resources. In other words, these are areas that have experienced, and continue to endure joblessness, social exclusion and relatively high crime rates (Aldridge et al. 2015). FOR POVERTY, LOOK EAST The idea of ‘pride’ is used in this comparative research to analyse how people spoke about territory in two very different contexts, namely East Mexico City and East London. The idea of doing this sort of comparison came from the academic workshop where this volume originated, where topics such as urban marginality and identity were discussed comparatively. While debating if it was possible to study such two different regions (UK-Mexico) through the same disciplinary lens, there was an old North American proverb which (the gendered language notwithstanding) encouraged our curiosity: ‘you can take the boy out of the country, but not the country out of the boy’. In the workshop, the question of stigmatisation was brought to the conversation over and over again, but the subject of pride was completely ignored. So it seemed appropriate to start a comparison between the ‘hood pride in Mexico and London because, to us, the phrase was against the grain of established research orthodoxies in both locations, and was important to examine for both analytical and political reasons. At the time we were defining the project, we agreed on locating the focus on the East of each one of our cities. First, because it seems interesting to observe how imaginaries of marginality are developed at a symbolic level, according to territorial coordinates. The East side is a stereotyped spot of poverty and violence in multiple cities in the world. From Paris to New York, Toronto to Helsinki and Mexico City to London, the idea underscores the mysterious concentration of zones

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of relegation in the Western world. Our aim is to analyse the emergence of ‘hood pride in both our latitudes and do so without academic sensationalism. In both cases, the East side represents an emblematic identity contrast that helps us understand how the senses of belonging or distinction are configured within a specific territory, and how these dense urban settings moderate the symbolic and the social correlation. Iztapalapa in East Mexico City is known to be one of the most marginalised districts in the city; its image is stereotypically related to poverty, the lack of urban services, violence, insecurity, crime and school desertion. Nevertheless, Iztapalapa is also known as a land of opportunities. It is well known that whoever wins the elections in Iztapalapa, wins Mexico City’s government, due to the historic concentration of 20 percent out of the city’s total electorate. For investors, Iztapalapa is then an economic pole of great importance. Therefore investment in the infrastructure of this district has been a matter of great importance. Subway lines, malls and museums have recently been built here. Improvements to the main square involved the use of luxury Brazilian granite. At the same time, the news headlines underscore the multiple and contrasting ways in which Iztapalapa is understood. What is the most dangerous district in CDMX? Clue: it is not Iztapalapa; Iztapalapa has the biggest market in the world; Iztapalapa makes the biggest enchilada worldwide; the biggest Baby Jesus figurine in the whole world is in Iztapalapa; Iztapalapa receives more potable water than Paris or Barcelona; Iztapalapa is bigger than some of the countries in Central America. As these examples reveal, it is not uncommon to discuss Iztapalapa in superlatives. As a result, existing statistics are ambiguous: the district with the largest amount of poor people can be, at the same time, the precinct with the largest number of businesses and investment. The most violent district could be the one with the most vibrant culture. East London is a historically poor area; however, in London as a whole, privilege and poverty sit side by side. When Charles Booth carried out his study into the levels of poverty in London in the late nineteenth century, East London was viewed as a foreign land situated in the shadow of the wealth of the City and populated by communities of poor people and migrants (Booth 2012). For a long time, the ‘East End’ has had a reputation for poverty and widespread dereliction (Eade 2000), it was a symbol of the dark underbelly of the nation – despite prosperity elsewhere. In the Victorian era, the more welloff workers moved out to the new suburbs, thereby creating a residual community that was uniformly poor (Booth 2012, 16). According to a more recent study, the East London area contains the highest proportions of young people living in impoverished circumstances (Hanna and Bosetti 2015). East London



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has a history of movement and migration. It contains a predominantly young, multi-ethnic and multicultural population. These marginal areas have experienced, and continue to endure pervasive joblessness, social exclusion and relatively high crime rates (Aston Mansfield 2011; Aldridge et al. 2015; London Borough of Newham 2017). Although both the inner and outer areas of the east end of London have begun to change recently, with gentrification, rising house prices, and the arrival of a wealthier demographic (Hanna and Bosetti 2015; Burns 2016; White 2017), entrenched hardship remains a reality for many. For example, the East London borough of Newham is ranked eighth in the United Kingdom (UK) on the Index of Multiple Deprivation (London Borough of Newham 2017). In London, the capital city of one of the wealthiest countries in the world (OECD 2016), it is estimated that 27 percent of Londoners live in poverty (Aldridge et al. 2015). The majority are not families that rely on benefits but working families. METHODS Throughout this research, several interviews were carried out with people who have come from these stigmatised neighbourhoods (located on the East side), and who now live in other parts of the city, country or even the world, due to reasons of employment, school, marriage, gentrification, security or violence. The objective of the interviews was to analyse changes in their identity construction, considering social stereotypes and stigmas that they carry as newcomers from impoverished East areas; we focused on measuring the senses of belonging or distinction through the variable degrees of pride. The interviews are supported by the analysis of the social imaginary about territory and wealth. The London interviews were carried out between 2010 and 2011 during extensive regeneration in preparation for the London 2012 Olympics. We both decided to do research on the stereotyped representation of the territory to visualise the individual way of identifying or distancing from social attributes. Since this is a comparative work, both researchers chose to create batches of different questions designed specifically for each context. We did so because we intended to discuss the same topic considering the particular characteristics for each culture, well crystalised in expressions, such as: ‘Te falta barrio (Yo’ ain’t hood enough)’ or in London: ‘You’re a sell out’. In the case of Mexico City, we took advantage of the wide dissemination of social media commentary about stereotypes and territories, and we used these themes to shape and structure the interviews. It was upon a series of viral memes that stigmatised the Eastern part of the city that a schema was built, in order to classify the comments of inhabitants who identified or distanced

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themselves from their neighbourhood’s negative image. In East London, we interviewed young people who were involved in the urban music economy in some way. Their creative work had allowed them to travel outside of their usual bordered territories. The next two sections include an interpretation of words of the people we interviewed, case by case, based on their location. In the end, we attempted a comparative analysis in which we discuss up to what point the same conceptual apparatus works in order to interpret two evidently distant realities.

‘FROM IZTAPALAPA, TO THE WORLD’: Reinversion of the Hood Stigma in Mexico In 2018, a series of memes about social differences between Mexico City habitants went viral on Facebook (Figure 5.1). The distinction was based on the stereotyped relation between territory and wealth, not only materialistic wealth, such as clothes or luxury, but symbolic wealth as well, like skin colour, urban landscape or idiosyncrasy. In the case of the Iztapalapa district, the stereotype within its inhabitants is common and can be well synthetised in its nicknames: Iztapa-lacra (Trashland) or Indiapalapa (Indioland). Descriptions of the Iztapalapa inhabitants

Figure 5.1.  Memes generated by ‘Metro Tacubaya’ profile. Source: Facebook



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are almost always accompanied by adjectives that can actually be found on the replicas of those described memes: poor, indios, criminals, addicts, ignorant, jackals, swines, to name a few. On one meme, one can see a group of armed kids, posing on the street right in front of the camera. They show off a scooter and dress in a hip-hop style. This is a picture taken in another country, but the message emphasises the prejudice: Iztapalapa is a dangerous area, a violent and poor territory, lost and marginal. The comments around this meme synthesise the levels of territorial identification in a polarised and cartoonish matter: ‘a huevo, de aquí soy’ (I’m from this hood, fuck that!) vs. ‘We’re not all like that’. Despite humour and playfulness being the motifs of the regular meme, it is necessary to remember that consenting to or contesting its dominant meaning is a highly illustrative political indicator. The meme is a vehicle of meanings that activates the circulation and construction of the sense around an object, topic or character (Shifman 2013). Regarding the discussion about identities and territory, the interaction around the image allows us to appreciate the tones of pride or rejection that are produced by the stereotypes between users from Iztapalapa. While the image translates the fierce and recklessness in a community in resistance to some, for others, the meme recalls a violent and depressive landscape from which they distance themselves. We analysed more than 300 online comments from inhabitants, in which we noted the repetitive polarisation of identifications and estrangements regarding this stigma. Along with some examples, Table 5.1 shows the way we grouped the common answers, through variables of identification and estrangement. It is important to mention that the classification was made by taking into account the users’ answers about their origin, and that those outside the territory were dismissed. It is also necessary to anticipate that the number of answers equals majorly the identification variable, thus, it does not necessarily mean there is no distance or lack of pride in the estrangement speech. Those beliefs were confirmed in the interviews that were held on site with people from Iztapalapa, who now live in other areas, states or countries. During this dynamic, we decided to approach to them with a phrase that is very present up to this day in the country’s media memory: ‘from Iztapalapa to the world’. The expression comes from a renowned pop music band from this district. Under the social mobility flag, the phrase eludes the other face of the stigma. Iztapalapa exports artists, culture, and standards. And once in the outside, it is recognised as cradle or homeland. The common reticence at the prejudice also states the existence of ‘good people’ in that territory, ‘not everybody takes the wrong path’ and ‘Iztapalapa is much more than that’. In this sense, we found a pattern of paradoxical estrangement in the replies of people that are presently living in residential areas, whether they are inside or outside the city, or even the country.

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Table 5.1.  Identification and Estrangement Identification 

Estrangement 

You can say whatever, but Iztapalapa is ‘THE ORIGIN OF MEXICANITY’

I don’t know, I live in Lomas Estrella, and you can’t find people like those in there . . . 

I’m proudly from Iztapalapa and yes, not all of us are like that, we are much worse hahahaha

I don’t think so, I live in Iztapalapa and not everybody is like that; don’t judge everybody the same out of how some of them are 

Yeah, Iztapalapa rules, ma niggas! 

Woh, woh, woh! There are levels, don’t generalise regarding Iztapalapa 

You can say whatever about Iztapalapa, we I’m from Iztapalapa unfortunately, and yes, there’s only chunties (social waste) are the ‘the flow’ of Mexico City, we have hahaha, I support the image  everything everywhere, but fear! Haha  Money doesn’t make balls and in Iztapalapa there’s never a lack of them. Proud to be from Iztapalapa 

I read the comments and I find it clear why it’s called Iztapalacra hahaha and it’s true, most of them look like that and it’s not about discrimination, ok??? 

Alejandro (thirty-nine years old, business man), for instance, emphasises his distinction using an ironic tone for it: ‘Not from Iztapalapa, from Lomas, poppa’. Lomas Estrella is a wealthy neighbourhood in Iztapalapa that seems to be – in his opinion – one of the few exceptions in the area. The sarcasm underlines the way social generalisation caught the land in which he grew up and how the stigma nullifies the possibility of diversity: ‘They see us as if we were all the same, they think we all talk the same and we all live fucked up lives’. Alejandro’s observation can be understood as a defence against the stigmatisation of his neighbourhood of origin: ‘I always tell them you can find anything in Iztapalapa, that is bigger than their shitty town. If they say things just to bother me, turns out that I love being an ass too’. But more than the distinction that he uses to distance from the stigma, there relies a level of identification with the spirit of his place of origin: ‘Nobody can hide their true colors, when they hear me talking, they can identify me as a cábula (hustler). I don’t hide where I come from, is part of my origin, my friends are still there’. In the case of Alejandro, it is clear how denying the stigma can contain an ambiguous sense of identification itself. The cábula adjective refers to that one who is cheating, one who has fun twisting the sense or rules. The cábula (as a noun, the game or the trick) seems to be exclusive to the ghettos in CDMX (Mexico City), and in this context, its cultural value is some sort of trading currency of distinction against other territories. Thus,



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Alejandro distances himself from the violence and crime stigma; he identifies with a way of being in terms of character, with a model of cunningness and inoffensive naughtiness: ‘I’m a high class tacky guy’. When referring to what is stigmatised (the lack of education or taste) he opposes his lineage, his distance. The game of inversions allows him to neglect the pejorative generalisation about his place of origin and, at the same time, emphasises the qualities he inherited by living there and he still keeps by visiting his friends. In an opposite direction, we could find cases where the rejection and estrangement are decisive. Paulina, for instance (entrepreneur, thirty-eight  years old), also recognises the negative stereotype that is applied to her place of origin. She has moved within the city on two different occasions, and remembers the comments of her new neighbours in residential areas: ‘From Iztapalapa? Here’s my wallet’, ‘Wow, that means you’re from the hood sista?’ or ‘How come you don’t have a ghetto accent?’ For her, it is completely normal to handle those prejudices, so much that she doesn’t even feel uncomfortable about it: ‘I just don’t care’. However, there is a noticeable rift from the stereotype in Paulina’s answer. The social image of Iztapalapa enables her to state ‘I am not like that, I’m different’ and from there, she defines herself way beyond the territory she grew up: ‘I’m not only from Iztapalapa, I also grew up there, but that doesn’t define me’. Paulina doesn’t feel proud when people connect her with the dominant image of Iztapalapa; and at the same time, she seems to take for granted that the image of Iztapalapa is coherent: ‘Bunch of wannabes, I hate them’. She usually doesn’t talk about her place of origin and even if she does, she highlights her singularity: ‘There are different levels in Iztapalapa. I was always seen as the preppy, the spoiled girl who had it all. The place where you grow up doesn’t define your education level, that goes beyond the house where you live’. In this case, the pride variable doesn’t seem to play a significant role. The estrangement represents a definitive rupture. It doesn’t have emotional strings attached to the place of origin, and she has never come back since she was fourteen years old. In this respect, Paulina’s reply brings us to the other pole of the measurement: the affront. And some way or another, it forces us to think about the weight and scope of stigmatisation. So, we could find a negotiation of the symbolic capital contributions for the sake of the social positioning, for both cases. Following Bourdieu’s (1980) logic, we could state that distinction is a medium mechanism of the social interactions. The negotiations of the stereotypes or stigmas have important influences on the social transition and positioning of the individuals. This influence can be visible through a different lens in the case of Perla (forty-three years old, fashion manager): ‘Being from Iztapalapa has saved me from scraps on several occasions while in downtown. The gang tells me “ok, case closed” and then chit-chat starts’. After living more than ten years

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in the district of Cuauhtemoc in CDMX, Perla says she feels distant from Iztapalapa, but still close to the hood. She now lives in a popular neighbourhood and the moving did not represent a major issue: ‘Here, nobody cares where you come from, we all come from different places. They’re more interested in how you grew up, that’s what they ask you about’. She previously lived in Neza City, on the outskirts of Mexico City, a place which is also a common object of stigmatisation. It turns out interesting how her changing neighbourhoods record makes her speak indistinctively about the transversal stigma that comes with her since the first moving: ‘It’s normal they see you as a chaka (tackass) or they think you are a thug if you are from Iztapalapa, Cuauhtemoc, Neza, it’s all the same. People have very dumbass classy ideas about the others. I’m not saying there are no assholes, but there are people that work their asses off every day’. For Perla, the stigma is not only a question linked to the district but to the popular neighbourhoods in CDMX: ‘You are from the hood, that [automatically] means you are poor, ignorant, punk; that’s how they think. To tell you the truth, I also say it sometimes, well: there’s all kind of people, right? [Laughter]. I hang around with all them queers and don’t make a stink when muckin’ around, with fuckin’ travesty or a fuckin’ tranny’. If we were talking about inversion, it is important here to highlight the ludic appropriation of the stigma that is at stake. During our field work, we constantly found language games. Using the adjectives with offensive humour in order to make fun of oneself singles out the symbolic outburst of the semantic power. With an exclusiveness message, the inversion of the stigma itself constitutes the destruction of the social meaning towards one with a sense of community: ‘perro no come perro (there’s honor among thieves)’. CREATING A SENSE OF BELONGING IN AN EAST LONDON NEIGHBOURHOOD In the UK, social mobility is at its lowest level for two decades. The opportunity to improve life chances, living standards and opportunities has been severely curtailed (Dorling 2015). A long-standing neoliberal agenda means that policies aiming to improve social mobility are informed by an individualised, market approach to inequality. Since the 1980s, social policy has aimed to reduce public expenditure, increase reliance on market forces and enhance consumer choice (Bauman 2007). Furthermore, the multicultural urban environment is being pushed towards an assimilation model where young people are taught the ‘British values’ that should connect us all together. In this climate, poverty is seen as an individual failure and it is more difficult to talk about structural inequalities that operate along race, class and gender lines.



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East London contains the boroughs (municipal areas) of Newham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest. According to the Office for National Statistics, Newham and Tower Hamlets are two of the most economically and socially deprived boroughs in the UK (MacRury and Poynter 2009; London Borough of Tower Hamlets 2005; London Borough of Hackney 2005; London Borough of Newham 2005). East London is close to the UK’s major financial districts: the City of London and Canary Wharf. After a long period of economic decline from the late 1970s, it is now undergoing a further cycle of transformation, in part due to the ‘legacy planning’ of the London 2012 Olympics (Hackney, Newham and Waltham Forest were host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games). However, East London is still a site of poverty and marginalisation. In Newham, for example, people ‘die younger, earn less and are more likely to be unemployed’ (Newham Council Communications 2014, 4) than in other parts of London. The old manufacturing base has been replaced by jobs in the retail, education and health/care sector (NOMIS 2017) and these occupational sectors where people are likely to find work are fragmented and insecure with high levels of casualisation, low pay and zero-hour contracts (Dar 2015; Furlong and Cartmel 2006; Murray and Gayle 2012), leaving young people more vulnerable to the vagaries and fluctuations of the labour market. The respondents in the UK study had a connection, through residence or performance, to East London. The social and cultural context of their lives was, on the whole, one of disillusion with the education system in terms of what they had learned and how they had been taught. This aspect was underpinned by a lack of interest in formal education. All of the respondents were involved, in some way, as participants in the urban music economy. They were DJs, MCs, event promoters and music producers. Their involvement in the sector was on a formal as well as an informal basis and nourished by a passion for their particular craft. In poor urban areas, people seek out opportunities in the informal sector as an alternative or a supplement to ‘poverty wages with no benefits’ (Wacquant 2007, 66). The respondents in the UK appear to belong to ethnically coded stigmatised communities, Loic Wacquant’s ideas are therefore useful to consider whether the concept of advanced marginality has an impact on narratives of belonging and narratives of differentiation. It is possible, within this context, to reject the notion of an ‘underclass’ occupying a disorganised and deviant space which has dominated the discussion of race and poverty since the 1980s (Wacquant 2007). Instead, the debate regarding inequality and marginality must be situated in the dismantling of post Fordist-Keynesian economics and the intersection of poverty, racial division and post colonial immigration.

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Poverty and its effects are woven into the fabric of marginal areas such as East London (Shildrick et al. 2010; Aldridge et al. 2015). Over the past two decades, there has been regeneration and redevelopment on a significant scale including the extension of the Jubilee Tube Line to Stratford in 1999 and, in 2012, the opening of Westfield, the third largest shopping centre in the UK. It is evident that both the inner and outer areas of the East End of London have changed with increased gentrification and extensive redevelopment. Despite being three of the host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympics, the East London boroughs of Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets still contain some of the most deprived areas in London (HM Government 2007). Although wealthier residents have moved into these areas, a recent study indicates that 40 percent of households earned less that 60 percent of national median income (Hanna and Bosetti 2015). Citing Denis-Constant Martin, Yuval-Davis (2006, 202) argues that ‘identities are narratives, stories people tell about themselves and others about who they are and who they are not’. These narratives are evident in the stories that the UK respondents told about who they were. Charlotte, for example, an eighteen-year-old young woman of Nigerian and English heritage refers to growing up in Beckton in the London Borough of Newham. Alluding to the conflicted and contested sense of belonging to a particular place, Charlotte said: It’s OK, people describe it as the ‘the hood’, but I’m not really involved in that. It is a bit rough, but I don’t think it’s that bad. People call places in London ghettos or whatever but there are places in Brazil and places like that, that are so much worse off than us.

Charlotte identified and resisted the clear residential stereotypes that related to her neighbourhood, a place that she had lived in all her life. For those who had come from beyond the East London area, the ability to adopt a new group identity was a key characteristic, as illustrated by Gillian a twenty-seven-year-old graduate of Caribbean heritage who Joy interviewed in 2011 in Hoxton, East London. She had grown up in the north of England, in Manchester, but had moved to East London as her informal business as a make-up artist and stylist had evolved. Gillian presented herself as a person who could fit into both the corporate world and the informal creative economy. She explained how she had adapted her accent for life in East London, rubbing the more obvious edges from her Mancunian (Manchester) accent. Another graduate was Steven who came from a white working-class background. He was the managing director of an online TV channel and through his interest in music he had also moved away from his local area into urban East London. His sense of belonging came through his work and the connections he was able to make while, in his words, ‘creating something magical’.



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On the other hand, George, a twenty-six-year-old Caribbean music producer, saw himself as an outsider. He had grown up in a marginalised area of urban East London and then, through his studies and creative music practice had experienced living and working in other, more affluent areas of outer London. He worked closely with Helen, a white singer songwriter whose family had a long history of residence in East London. While Helen positively enthused about the benefits of ‘living in a multicultural area with people from all around the world’, George was a little more circumspect. Speaking in response to a question about how he would describe his area, George said: Not pleasant. If I had children myself I wouldn’t like them growing up around here. The people around you see what you’ve got, they see what you’re striving to and they try to pull you back. Cos they don’t like to see you go forward’.

George’s narrative was one of being a striver, and doing slightly better than his peers. He said that now he had moved to the suburbs, he (and the people around him) had a ‘different mental attitude’. George had absorbed the stigma of place, rejecting what he saw as negative characteristics of those who lived in those areas. By contrast, Victor had used his technical skills and social character to forge a new identity (Giménez 2009). Victor was of Caribbean heritage. A DJ of twenty years standing, he was interviewed in 2011. He liked to present himself as ‘a bit of a character’ who despite his taciturn image was ‘a bit of a talker, I like to stick around at the end of a rave and talk to people’. He took pride in the fact that he was seen as an influencer, someone with networks and a modicum of power ‘they call me the key to the underground’. His identity was grounded in being from a particular stigmatised place but having a reach into a wide range of communities. Eric was a former pirate radio DJ who now has his own show on a mainstream national channel. He was ethnically ambiguous and chose not disclose his cultural background. He talked about learning to DJ in his bedroom and then hanging around pirate radio stations until one day ‘a DJ didn’t turn up, and I got my break at 2 o‘clock in the morning, it was the best feeling ever’. Being headhunted by a new, legal radio station to work on one of their channels gave him a sense of pride and achievement: ‘They taught me everything’. In an effort to give something back, Eric acted as a talent scout for his organisation in order to offer young people from ‘the hood’ an opportunity to advance in the creative sector. As he now operated within the dominant class (Bourdieu 1980), perhaps Eric saw himself as now holding a more legitimate identity, hence his reluctance to reveal his cultural background. Adam, eighteen, was born in Uganda, but had lived in a poor area of East London for most of his life. He was an aspiring Grime MC and had set up a

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studio in his bedroom where he could record his own tracks. Adam was not quite a college dropout; he went in often enough to fill the gaps in his technical knowledge. In 2010, he spoke of his hopes for the future. ‘I can see this taking me to a whole other level, I’m tired of writing a track, putting it on the internet and getting 100 views, I want everyone to see what I’m doing. Got to keep pushing’. In his own words, he was one of the ‘troubled kids’ and certainly not a star pupil. He was surprised that he finished school without getting kicked out. Adam wanted his work to expand the boundaries of his existing situation. Fully aware of the limits of living in a marginal, stigmatised community (Wacquant 2007), Adam saw music as a way to open up new horizons. Colin was a twenty-four-year-old music producer of Indian heritage. He produced rap and grime tracks as well as film scores. Colin described his area as a bad place ‘where you grow up doing wrong things thinking it’s normal’ but at the same time, his childhood memories of growing up there were good, he enjoyed school, being with his friends, and developed a strong sense of brotherhood and belonging. For Colin, his area provided safety, despite the negative aspects of urban marginality (Wacquant 2007). Despite the focus on what is lacking in ‘the hood’ in terms of material goods and socioeconomic aspiration, it can also be argued that these areas actually provide comfort zones and allow those people resident within them to acquire social capital. They are places that provide validation, recognition, stability and safety even after the person has left the neighbourhood (Reynolds 2013). The participants in the UK study inhabited identities as artists and entrepreneurs. Being from ‘the hood’ mattered because of the grounding they felt it gave them, but while there was the desire to leave, they also wanted it recognised that they were more than their environment. George, in particular, accepted that for some he was a ‘sellout’ for moving to the suburbs and liking it. Tracey Reynolds (2013) uses the concepts of getting on, getting by, getting stuck and staying put to articulate the desire to validate original stigmatised locations while at the same time not wanting to be stuck in a landscape of limited possibility. Apart from Steven and Helen, all of the participants in the UK study had at least one parent from a minority ethnic group. Crul and Schneider (2010), when looking at the offspring of migrant parents in a number of European cities, outlined three key factors affecting identity and belonging. For young people from migrant backgrounds, these factors are the political (how stereotypes, hierarchies and citizenship operate), the social (the ability and opportunity to develop relationships) and the media (how people are portrayed and represented). The respondents in the UK study articulated a sense of belonging in their East London neighbourhoods that was tempered by a realistic understanding of the constraints of belonging to a particular place.



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CONCLUSION Ghetto pride is a cultural indicator we create to contrast the senses of belonging and differentiation which are activated within the parameters of social mobility. The idea of doing comparative research came from questioning the similarities and differences in the sense that comes from the phrase ‘you can take the boy out of the country, but not the country out of the boy’, in each one of our countries. We approached this comparison through a cultural lens. While the concept of ‘ghetto’ refers us to the question of social exclusion, these differences are geographically specific. In London, we focused on segregation and multiculturality, while in the case of Mexico City the focus was on racial mixing and stigmatisation of poverty. The comparison allowed us to understand, through the voice of the respondents, that the phrase condenses a recognition strategy which is very similar in both contexts: inverting the stigmas related to colour as signs of pride. We consider pertinent to use the idea of ghetto pride, in order to compare the subjective logics of the identitary speech in two geographical spaces. At first, we describe the way in which a person coming from the ghetto represents themselves in the context of their new place of residence; second, we would measure the levels of belonging to the neighbourhood and the moments in which exaltation or dissimulation show up when interacting in a new context. The difference in contexts allows us to understand the mechanisms of resignification of how the ghetto operates globally in very similar ways. On the one hand, ferocity is highlighted, along with resilience, slyness, malice, improvisation ability and slang. On the other hand, an ambiguous personal distinction is produced, at the time it plays or sets apart stigmatised aspects, such as delinquency, drugs usage and violence. Whether we are talking about a resident in London or Mexico City, or if it is a person coming from African, indigenous, mestizo origins, the neutralisation of stigmas operates under the stigmata of a redundant classism within the race and ethnics. Maybe, that is the angle from which the phrase ‘out of the country’ gets its sense, as a limit for usage and traditions, as a boundary for values and norms, as a specific and situated form of legitimisation. We consider that the senses of belonging from stigmatised groups often contain the same logic: there is a strong bond among the group, based on the neutralisation of prejudice. The sense of belonging forms upon a positive valuation of the idiosyncrasy, character and values, even if that incorporates the disruptive and dislocated. If it is delinquency that stigmatises the neighbourhood, among its inhabitants the recklessness is highlighted by the fact of living there; if it is the violence that stereotypes them, they emphasise the character and bravery necessary to survive there; if it is the unemployment that denigrates them, they insist on cunning and improvisation as qualities of their origin.

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Hood pride is a topic that has been recently incorporated into the vocabulary of distinction in Mexico and London. The revaluation of the popular, the rough and ready, and the kitsch does not go any further than the twenty-first century. Expressions such as ‘te falta barrio (yo’ ain’t hood enough)’ or ‘You’re a sellout’ mark a repositioning in the paradigm of the social categorisation. These sayings express a desire to stay true to the hood despite the pull of the wealthy areas; the hood suggests solidarity, impetus, courage, guile, trickiness, resilience and temper. In this semantic context, pride is a sign of empowerment, a trail that witnesses change towards our social representations. When the stigma of scarcity is inverted, the comfort and abundance reveal an equally stereotyped ache: the hood enables subsistence in an unequal and violent society, where the lack of shelter is generalised and disadvantages those who don’t know ‘what cold is’. Using this logic, being from the ghetto or the hood is a blessing and not a curse, in the eyes of those interviewed, it’s a gift not a mark. Although race was not an explicit element in the discussions about identity, ethnicity and conflict matter as do inequality and discrimination. In London, all but one of the interviewees came from a migrant background. In Mexico, the discussion about stigmatised identities refers to the ethnic tension. In CDMX, the social stigmatisation of ‘poor’ is clearly marked by mockery, disgust and scorn. The list of adjectives recognised by our interviewees is replete with words such as: chakas (tackasses), social waste (chunties), ignorants, ñeros (niggas), addicts and indios. This way of categorising the inhabitants of working-class hoods is deeply related to the historic stigmatisation of poverty and marginality in Mexico. The adjectives highlight the social stratification and rejection of a demographic reality that emphasises the poverty conditions of more than half of the population in Mexico, over and over. As the majority of the participants in the UK study were from poor areas and had come from migrant backgrounds, the nexus of ethnicity, poverty and class constituted a state of advanced marginality (Wacquant 2008). A feature of this is that often there is a disconnect from global economic trends in that whatever happens in the world, the conditions for the poor stay the same. In reality, social mobility and material conditions change very little even if aspects of the hood become gentrified. For many in the UK study, once they moved to a different area, the feelings of distinction were exacerbated, both in the place that they had left and the place they now called home. However, once this movement has been made, there is the potential for transformation to occur, not only of the environment that has been left, temporarily or permanently, but also of the individual who is in some way altered by this process. It is evident that their work in the urban music economy enabled a transcendence of the boundaries of the hood. For those who do move to another area, it is possible that if you do not get on, you have the comfort and security of the hood to fall back on (Reynolds 2013). It is important to note,



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however, that this movement is not in one direction only; people get by, get on and return – it is a continuous process. REFERENCES Aldridge, Hannah, Theo Barry Born, Adam Tinson, and Tom McInnes. 2015. London’s Poverty Profile 2015. London: New Policy Institute. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Consuming Life, 1st edition. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Blanden, Jo, and Stephen Machin. 2007. Recent Changes in Intergenerational Mobility in Britain. London: Sutton Trust. Booth, Charles. 2012. Life and Labour of the People in London, vol. 1. London: Forgotten Books. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980. “L’identité et la représentation: Éléments pour une réflexion critique sur l’idée de région.” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 35: 63–72. Burns, Iain. 2016. ‘Newham House Price Boom Creates Winners and Losers, Newham Recorder’. http://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/newham-houseprice-boom-creates-winners-and-losers-1-4668269, accessed 30 September 2017. Crul, Maurice, and Jens Schneider. 2010. “Comparative Integration Context Theory: Participation and Belonging in New Diverse European Cities.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 33 (7): 1249–68. Dar, Aliyah. 2015. ‘Research Briefings - Youth Unemployment Statistics’. 15 July 2015. http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN05871. Dorling, Danny. 2015. Inequality and the 1%. London: Verso Eade, John. 2000. Placing London: From Imperial City to Global City. Oxford: Berghahn. Furlong, Andy, and Fred Cartmel. 2006. Young People and Social Change: New Perspectives, 2nd edition. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Giménez, Gilberto. 2009. Identidades Sociales. Conaculta: México. Goffman, Erving. 1973. La mise en scène de la vie quotidienne, la présentation de soi. Paris: Les éditions de minuit. Goffman, Erving. 1975. Stigmate. Les usages sociaux des handicaps. Paris : Les Éditions de Minuit. Hanna, Kat, and Nicolas Bosetti. 2015. Inside Out: The New Geography of Wealth and Poverty in London. London: Centre for London. HM Government. 2007. ‘Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) 2007 / Neighbourhood Statistics Data.—Dataset—Resource—DGU’. http://data.gov.uk/dataset/ index_of_multiple_deprivation_imd_2007/resource/48aa7db3-b932-4d64-bec8f63bd3290d91, accessed 27 July 2013. London Borough of Hackney. 2005. ‘Hackney Local Improvement Plan’. London Borough of Newham. 2005. ‘Newham Local Implementation Plan’. London Borough of Tower Hamlets. 2005. ‘Tower Hamlets Final Local Implementation Plan for Approval’. London Borough of Newham. 2017. ‘Newham Info’. Newham Info. 2017. http://www. newham.info/factsandfigures.

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MacRury, Iain, and Gavin Poynter. 2009. ‘London’s Olympic Legacy’. A “Thinkpiece” Report Prepared for the OECD and Department for Communities and Local Government. University of East London: London East Research Institute. Murray, Susan, and Vernon Gayle. 2012. Youth Transitions. Colchester: Survey Resources Network. http://www.surveynet.ac.uk/sqb/topics/youth/sqb_youthtran sitions_murray_gayle.pdf. Newham Council Communications. 2014. ‘Newham’s Legacy Story’. NOMIS. 2017. ‘Newham Profile: Official Labour Market Statistics’. https://www. nomisweb.co.uk/reports/lmp/la/1946157255/report.aspx?town=Newham#tabem punemp. OECD. 2016. ‘United Kingdom - OECD Data’. The OECD. 2016. http://data.oecd. org/united-kingdom.htm. Rebolledo, César. 2015. “La tribalité extrème au Mexique”. In Le baroque, edited by Michel Maffesouli, 304–7. Paris: Les Cahiers Éuropéens de l´Imaginaire. Reynolds, Tracey. 2013. “ ‘Them and Us’: ‘Black Neighbourhoods’ as a Social Capital Resource among Black Youths Living in Inner-City London.” Urban Studies 50 (3): 484–98. doi: 10.1177/0042098012468892. Rogers, Simon. 2012. “Social Mobility: The Charts That Shame Britain.” The Guardian 22 May. http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/22/socialmobility-data-charts, accessed 29 October 2013. Shifman, Limor. 2013. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Shildrick, Tracy, Robert Macdonald, Colin Webster, and Kayleigh Garthwaite. 2010. The Low-Pay, No-Pay Cycle: Understanding Recurrent Poverty. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Testart, Alain. 2011. “De moi à eux, les affres de l´anthropologue.” Le Point Références 7: 7–9. Wacquant, Loic. 2004. “Ghetto.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes. London: Pergamon Press. 1-7. Wacquant, Loic. 2007. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge, UK: Polity. White, Anna. 2017. “Where Are London’s Golden Boroughs? Not Necessarily Where You Think.” The Telegraph, 18 February. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ property/house-prices/londons-golden-boroughs-not-necessarily-think/, accessed 30 September 2017. White, Joy. 2016. Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2006. “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging.” Patterns of Prejudice 40 (3): 197–214.

Chapter 6

Music Neotribes Moving from the Margins Catherine Wilkinson and Joseline Vega Osornio

This chapter critically analyses the relationship between urban marginality and the social construction of identity through techno music consumption, particularly rave culture. Considering that, both in Mexico and the United Kingdom (UK), large groups of young people are excluded from privileged urban spaces for entertainment, in this trans-Atlantic virtual dialogue, the authors draw on two key sociological concepts: subcultural capital (Thornton 1995) and neotribalism (Maffesoli 1996) to explore how social life at the urban margins is made and remade through raving. Specifically, the chapter provides insight into how rave culture, displaced out of the cities in the mid1990s, has resulted in a marginal subculture which can be understood through the lens of music neotribalism. While a body of literature identifies urban marginality as a social problem associated with the lack of opportunities and access by the population to services such as education, health and income, as well as urban amenities such as drinking water, sewerage and electricity (e.g. Peña 2003; Lancione and McFarlane 2016; Wacquant 2011), in this chapter we take a broader approach to the conceptualisation of urban marginality in a similar way that Aidi (2004) did in a discussion of Islam, hip-hop and cultural protest. That is, we consider rave as the music and dance of the disempowered (see Goulding, Shankar and Elliott 2002) and look at raves as temporal sites for reducing senses of exclusion due to urban marginality. In this chapter, we focus on the social imaginary of rave culture with a consideration of marginality. Further, we consider how life at the urban margins is made and remade through raving. This chapter is structured as follows. The first section focuses on youth groups in the margins and begins with an overview of conditions of 99

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marginalisation for urban youth both in the UK and Mexico, before moving onto a broader discussion of subcultural capital. The second section introduces the key concept of neotribalism (Maffesoli 1996) and uses this theoretical framing to understand marginalised urban youth. The third section unites the concepts of subcultural capital and neotribalism to critically analyse rave culture in the margins. After this, we turn to a discussion of both small ‘e’ and big ‘E’ ecstasy, positioning this as a neuro-reversal for social fear mediated by oxytocin, a neurohormone. The last section presents the conclusions related to how subcultural capital and a specific form of neotribalism embrace marginalised youthful masses deprived of access to the first quadrant of the city and its relative economic success. Before moving on to the substantive part of this chapter, it is important to offer a brief note on our positionalities. The first author describes herself as an early raver and wrote a thesis on this subject as an undergraduate student (Vega 2007). While the second author has not engaged in raving, her fascination in this topic is an academic one, and she has published on young people and nightlife in Manchester, UK, more broadly (see Wilkinson and Wilkinson 2017; 2018). In the following section, we provide a snapshot of conditions of marginalisation for urban youth, both in the UK and Mexico, before moving on to a broader discussion of subcultural capital. YOUTH GROUPS IN THE URBAN MARGINS: A Snapshot of UK and Mexico In the UK in the 1960s, poverty was high, particularly in cities such as Birmingham, characterised by slums, Glasgow with its tenements, and London with the destitute and homeless (see Wratten 1995). Bad housing conditions were a major consequence of poverty in the postwar era, and millions of families lived in slums, near slums or in grossly overcrowded conditions. A 1967–1969 housing survey of England and Wales found that 11.7 percent of all dwellings were unfit (Townsend and Abel-Smith 1979). While surveys did show some variation in the proportion of Britons that were impoverished, Atkinson (1969, 38) stated that ‘it seems fair to conclude that the proportion of the population with incomes below the National Assistance/Supplementary Benefits scale lies towards the upper end of the 4–9 per cent’. In a study on poverty, Townsend and Abel-Smith (1965) estimated that around 7.5 million Britons lived in poverty. From 1979 to 1987, the number of Britons living in poverty doubled (McDowall 1993). The picture, however, was not all bleak. Alongside this evident poverty and resultant marginalisation, the first teenage generation free from conscription emerged in Britain.



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Young people were finally given a voice (Todd and Young 2012) and they were prepared to use it. Meanwhile, the suburban areas of Mexico City began to grow exponentially in the 1960s, leaving aside the benefits of the metropolis only for some privileged people. In 1970, it was estimated that in the Federal District, 30 percent of the population lived in irregular settlements, rising to 40 percent in 1975, and by 1977 it was calculated at 50 percent (Nivón 2016). As for the conurbation of the state of Mexico in 1982, in sixteen municipalities, a third of the land used for housing had irregularities, estimating an affected population of 4,242,951 inhabitants, which represented 73.64 percent of the total population of the wider Mexico City region (Nivón 2016). Over time, the peripheries have become a kind of uncomfortable and rejected alter ego of the urban area. The expulsion of poor people to the margins of the megalopolis gave rise to one of the largest poor suburban zones in Latin America at grave risk by the voracious expansion of the city. According to Boltvinik (2002), two-thirds of the inhabitants of the metropolitan area of Mexico City are poor. But if we refer exclusively to the urban municipalities of the state of Mexico (8.53 million), poverty is almost 80 percent (6.79 million) (Boltvinik 2002). Most of the early rural migrants to the suburban area gained access to work, but this work was mostly limited to unskilled labour, and thus reproduced economic vulnerability. Following Adler de Lomnitz (1977, 67) ‘one may speak of an occupational structure of marginality as such, which depends but little on the initial conditions or the occupational history of the individual’. This marginalisation affected young people who often joined gangs, using violence as a paradoxical way to build solidarity and cohesiveness (Pietz and Mattson 2015). In such a context of challenging urban marginality, some young people enjoy hearing electronic music in rave parties, rather than choosing hard drugs and crime, generating temporal alternative forms of catharsis and peaceful sociability to get out of the circle of violence that afflicts the suburban communities of Mexico City. SUBCULTURAL CAPITAL In the early 1970s, academics at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies1 (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham began to theorise subculture as a form of working-class resistance to dominant culture (Evans 1997). Before this academic rupture, a classicist vision of culture dominated, privileging the so-called high culture produced and enjoyed by the upper and middle classes and ignoring and dismissing emergent cultural products coming from the lower ones. Hoggart (1957), Williams (1958) and Thompson (1963), in response to the Frankfurt School2 and its Marxist critical theory of mass

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culture (see, e.g. Adorno and Horkheimer 1972), broke down established conceptions of culture, embracing interdisciplinary approaches and overcoming dominant assumptions around race, class, and gender. They did so incorporating diverse perspectives from art and literary criticism, feminist theory and structuralism. ‘Subcultural capital’ is one of the central contributions derived from this pioneering centre in the study of popular culture. While Gelder and Thornton (1997) confidently define subculture as ‘subordinate, subaltern or subterranean’, it is true that the term ‘subculture’ has been recognised as highly contested, vague and polysemous, with critics labelling it a ‘chameleon theory’ (Blackman 2005, 8). Nevertheless, with the progressive and increasingly accelerated evolution of capitalism, both financial and cognitive (Terranova 2013), we consider it appropriate to recover and defend this key concept in order to understand the phenomena of musical neotribalism (see Halfacree and Kitchin 1996; Riley, Griffin and Morey 2010), emerging from the margins of those metropoles dominated by contemporary capitalism. Alternative scenes, subcultures or lifestyles oriented around music and young people (Epstein 1998), including but not limited to musical genres like indie, punk and gothic, have played important roles in the making of urban societies. The notion of ‘subcultural capital’ was coined by Thornton (1995) whose concern was not to celebrate the creativity of dance culture, but rather to understand, through both archival and ethnographic research, the attitudes and ideals of young people that frequent clubs and raves. She paid close attention to the sense of camaraderie felt by young people at venues where their favourite music, for instance ‘techno’ or ‘house’, was played and consumed. In so doing, this book opened up new territory, advancing beyond the understanding of status as related solely to class distinction, instead placing its bearing in the context of popular cultural practice. Thornton (1995) believes that the social and ideological formations of youth subcultures were mobilised by radio stations. Thornton (1995) drew strongly on Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of ‘taste’. Bourdieu (1984, 175) conceived of ‘taste’ as ‘the practical operator of the transmutation of things into distinct and distinctive signs, of continuous distributions into discontinuous oppositions; it raises the differences inscribed in the physical order of bodies to the symbolic order of significant distinctions’. Bourdieu (1984, 242) revealed the importance of this cultural category, arguing that ‘an agent has what he [sic] likes because he likes what he has’. In this sense, Bourdieu (1984) was referring to the properties given to an individual and justifiably allocated to him or her in the classifications. Certainly, taste is a uniting force, connecting people who essentially ‘go together’, in short, taste can be considered a kind of ‘match-maker’ (Bourdieu 1984, 243). Drawing on Bourdieu, Thornton (1995) argues that patterns of music consumption are closely connected with the norms of certain audiences



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whose musical preferences sit neatly within a structure of subcultural capital, through which dance music clubbers or ravers differentiate themselves from ‘mainstream’ clubs and their patrons. Thornton (1995, 12) refers to subcultural capital not as less class-bound than cultural capital, rather, and controversially at the time, ‘defined against the supposed obscene accessibility of mass culture’. In short, subcultural capital is exclusive. Thornton’s (1995) approach was essentially a ‘post-Birmingham’ one that engaged with other interpretative traditions such as Bourdieu’s sociology and his concept of cultural capital. In differentiating between cultural and subcultural capital, scholars of the CCCS viewed social class as fundamental in understanding young people’s participation in youth subcultures (McCulloch, Stewart and Lovegreen 2006; Shildrick 2006). The work of the CCCS principally focused on urban, marginal and working-class youth subcultures, such as the Teddy boys and Skinheads, that is, groups who were tightly bound around a homology of style, argot, territory and music (Cloudsley 2007). Hebdige (cf. 1979), one of the key proponents of subcultural theory, focused particularly on youth subcultures in postwar Britain. Hebdige (1979) suggested that race, rather than class, was the bedrock on which postwar British subcultures were founded. Hebdige (1979) studied ska and reggae and considered the social and cultural meaning of this music, its transplantation to Britain, its partial incorporation by white Skinheads and its use by black ‘rude boys’ to subvert and resist incorporation (see also Hebdige 2002). However, though groundbreaking in many respects, it has been argued (e.g. Thornton 1995 and Redhead 1997) that the CCCS theory of subculture became empirically ineffectual. Thornton’s (1995) consideration of subcultural capital highlighted the importance of considering diversity and heterogeneity within youth subcultures (Griffin 2011), a dissimilar stance to earlier work based on the CCCS framework. Indeed, other authors have attempted to contribute to a rethinking of the notion of subcultural capital (see Jensen 2006). The relationship between subcultural styles and social class has generated much comment within the literature (see, e.g. Muggleton 2005). Skeggs (2001, 2005) offers a fascinating window on this theme, articulating that class is not in decline, as suggested elsewhere in the literature. Rather, for Skeggs (2005), class is so deeply implicated in the personal construction of self and culture that it is omnipresent. Along this train of thought, using data collected through interviews with young people in Edinburgh and Newcastle, McCulloch, Stewart and Lovegreen (2006) argue that young people’s subcultural styles and identities, for instance chavs, are inextricably linked with social class. Building on the insights of other authors (e.g. Blackman 2005; Hesmondhalgh 2005), McCulloch, Stewart and Lovegreen (2006) argue that inequality and social class are central issues in the lives of young

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people, thus adding credence to the idea that subcultural membership is largely an expression of class identity. More than this, the authors find that young people’s subcultural affiliations are less fluid than previously suggested by authors such as Bennett (1999). From the findings of this study, the authors make a persuasive point that a young person’s socioeconomic status directly impacts upon choice of their subcultural affiliation. Perhaps more significantly, McCulloch, Stewart and Lovegreen (2006) found that, for the young participants in this study, affiliation with a group was decisively shaped by their locality. From this vantage point, geography is central to the construction of identity. While UK scholars were focused on the concept of subcultural capital, French sociologists were developing the concept of ‘neotribalism’ (Robards and Bennett 2011). It is to a discussion of neotribes that we now turn. NEOTRIBALISM AND MARGINALISED URBAN YOUTH For some scholars, subcultural theory has been grossly misused. For instance, Blackman (2005, 1) argues that while the work of the CCCS prioritised the ‘collective’, postmodern subcultural writing is overly concerned with the ‘individual’, and that this results in a diluted understanding of the collectivities in the cultural practices of young people. Writing in defence of neotribes, Bennett (2005, 255) argues that his intention was not to celebrate consumerism, rather ‘to situate it as a motor-force in late modern society and a key resource for individuals in the construction of social identities and forming of social relations with others’. There may well be some validity in this argument; for example, Maffesoli (1996) argues that in postmodernity, culture has become so fragmented that the formation of subcultures is no longer adequate or indeed possible. As a result, the idea of ‘neotribes’, centred around shared lifestyles and interests, form and reform has substantial theoretical purchase. Maffesoli’s (1989) phenomenological sociology is considered today an important contribution to the social study of youth tribes that operate on the margins of culture and its centres of capitalistic production in privileged urban areas. Accordingly, youth tribes emerge and evolve, generating new forms of sociality. Maffesoli (1996) specifically refers to the neologism of ‘neotribalism’ to explain how reflective consciousness becomes saturated and intuitively expresses communitarian ideals, which emerge in an auto-organised fashion. For Maffesoli (2004, 76), neotribalism is distinguished by ‘fluidity, occasional gatherings and dispersal’. In this sense, the effervescence of youth groups responds to the overload of a static social style, inherited from modern institutions, producing new temporal laboratories of postmodernity.



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He argues that the modern project has no success in postmodernity, given the disappointment felt among young generations generated by the rationalistic excess of modern productivism, whereas the new affective sociality produces a renewed enthusiasm with the world. The proliferation of stimuli in everyday life, characteristic of the modern metropolis since the late nineteenth century, became exacerbated in our postmodern megapolis. After the defeat of the modern project and its ideology of progress, whose mythical figure is Prometheus, we witness the return of ‘Dionysus’ as a social paradigm, in which emotion and affect predominate over reason (see Maffesoli 1997). Postmodernity is thus related to those paroxysmal moments in which there is only the desire for group fusion through a symbolic exchange. Postmodern tribes revive young generations’ desire to share emotional ties, returning to the ritual state of congregation, in which the place makes the link. Collective emotion as an anthropological structure is expressed metaphorically in postmodern tribalism (Maffesoli 2004). Further, in everyday life, this nomadic tribalism is manifested in periodic groupings of music and consumption through networks of comradeship supported by portable technologies and social media, promoting relativisation of values and ideological disengagement in a generalised somatic culture. Thus, following Maffesoli (2008) postmodern tribalism has to do with an inherent energy and a vital force.

RAVE CULTURE IN THE MARGINS: Uniting Subcultural Capital and Neotribalism Our emotional state is ecstasy, our food is love, our addiction is technology, our religion is music, our option for the future is knowledge and for us politics does not exist. —Manifiesto Raver, 2018

While raves come in many forms, a widely accepted definition of a rave is an allnight dance party, where loud, techno music is typically played (Hutson 1999). At raves, people – usually but not always young – gather to dance to electronic music (Merchant and Macdonald 1994), such as techno, house, trance and drum and bass. Though raves are often small-scale events, they sometimes attract more than 20,000 attendees (Weir 2000). Raves have been historically located in makeshift, secret locales and have often involved the underground occupation of fields, abandoned buildings, carparks or other large, open spaces in which a sound system can be set up (Goulding, Shankar and Elliott 2002; Hill 2002; Martin 1999). The official history of raves in the UK began in 1988, during the ‘second summer of love’, where there was an attempt to reproduce the same environment of peaceful manifestation through the occupation of factories

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and abandoned warehouses. In 1991, there was a second wave of raves that came from ‘the travellers’, a nomadic collective that travelled throughout the UK making land-based festivals, which had already provoked a repressive response from the government in Beanfield in 1985. In the UK, the rave movement was radicalised at the moment when the parties became a focus of police intervention. During the government of Margaret Thatcher, a law was passed which forced urban clubs to close their doors at two in the morning. The first free and clandestinely organised techno music festival in the UK was the Castlemorton Avon Free Festival in May 1992. This rave brought together thousands of ravers for three days, demonstrating the power of this new alliance. On 3 November 1994, the English parliament voted in favour of clause 58 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act where raves were condemned in the following words: ‘A Rave is an outdoor meeting of more than 100 people, authorized or not to occupy a place, in which the music of repetitive pulsations lasts all night’. After raves in the form of ‘acid house parties’ became difficult to organise in Britain (Critcher 2000; McRobbie and Thornton 1995), the all-night parties gained popularity by moving outside the city. The legality of raves began to be increasingly contested (Redhead 1991); Hutson (1999, 54), for instance, describes them as ‘semilegal’. Ravers wanted to be distinguished from mainstream music culture through their emphasis on collectivity, social bonding and communal state of euphoria (Measham, Parker and Aldridge 1998), while opponents saw them as illegal events, involving trance-like tribal rituals (see St John 2008). One of the first ethnographers of rave parties who considered them to be a significant cultural practice, defined them as ‘a new social phenomenon that is more than just spontaneous events that bring together a large number of people in different locations with the sole purpose of dancing’ (Kahn-Egan 1998, 35). The first raves in Mexico in the early 1990s did not exceed 200 people. They were mostly in fashionable clubs and exclusive neighbourhoods of the city, such as Roma, Condesa and Juárez neighbourhoods and they were very influenced by British and American electronic music such as house and techno. At first, flyers and other advertising paraphernalia were scarce. Invitations were generated by word of mouth. Little by little, as the rave movement grew, the mainstream media and the authorities demonised these parties by presenting them as places where drugs were consumed, complicating their organisation and realisation. In so doing, Mexican ravers were also forced to leave the city, looking for more friendly environments, often in more rural locations. It was from 2000 that finding such alternative locations out of the city added a great element of attraction; these parties became bigger, longer and even more anti-establishment. They were held in the vicinity of the



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Teotihuacán pyramids, in the ruins of sugar estates of Morelos, on the shores of Tequesquitengo Lake and Lagoons of Zempoala, at the Ajusco mountain, in the Ecological Park of Xochimilco and at the Desierto de los Leones. The grottos and water parks of the states of Hidalgo and Morelos hosted wet raves. The exile from the city introduced a culture of camping. Raves began to include new musical genres, such as psychedelic trance or psytrance coming from India or they added ritual elements of pre-hispanic origin, as a way to peacefully demonstrate against modern capitalist cities such as Mexico City. In Mexico, unlike in the UK, there is very little published academic research on rave culture (see Vega 2007). Mexico’s subordinated economic status, the control of the political and media spheres by the economic, political, cultural and Catholic religious elites has resulted in rave culture being violently expelled from the urban centres, as well as from official media sites and from academic research. It was not until the arrival of social networks in the early 2000s that rave culture strengthened, as a result of the ability to share information and document in an informal manner its own existence, generating a common feeling between its participants. Raves are of sociological interest as they seem to promote new forms of generosity, including gift-giving, performance and belonging (McCall 2001; Wilson 2006). As McCall (2001) notes, the ethos of attending such parties lies in sharing with others another kind of social bonding mainly through music and dance. It is in this sense that rave parties might be sociologically interpreted as cases of ‘subcultural capital’ and ‘neotribalism’. This is because, following Reynolds (1999, 9), ‘rave is more than music plus drugs; it’s a matrix of lifestyle, ritualized behavior and beliefs’. To the participant, raving carries the same bearings as a religion, while for the observer it might be considered a ‘sinister cult’ (Reynolds 1999, 9). Yet rave culture often stands in radical opposition to capitalism and urban modern values, also to urban temples, including those devoted to music consumption. The association between the rise of raves and a dramatic increase in drug-taking (Blackman 1996) resulted, as noted earlier, in raves being displaced from urban centres in both the UK and Mexico, by legal acts of prohibition, often achieved of the refusal by local authorities to grant permits to organisers. In both countries, official media took charge of generating campaigns to discredit electronic music events, linking them with the consumption of illegal drugs such as Ecstasy (MDMA), acid, ketamine, LSD and GHB (Critcher 2003). As a result, organisers found it easier to promote their events in suburban areas and were able to summon the assistance of young people from urban margins. These rave parties outside the city clubs swiftly became ‘free parties’, creating a special place for young people to socialise through dance and music. It is to the use of drugs at raves that our discussion now turns.

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RAVE AND ECSTASY: A ‘Social Fear’ Neuro-Reversal Much academic debate on raves positions these technorituals as escapism from the social order or as a form of resistance (Tagg 1994; Russell 1993). According to this literature, raves continued in the tradition of countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s by rejecting the dominant social order of capitalism. For Maffesoli (2002), the rave is an eternal present that halts time. It is the speed of techno music that arguably provides a sense of detachment, through generating an impression of stability in movement. Other interpretations go further. Hutson (1999) rejects the interpretation of rave as escapism, arguing that raves increase self-esteem, release fears and anxieties, bring inner peace and improve consciousness. Rave culture, seen as purely hedonistic by the establishment, is frequently regarded as a spiritual event by those involved (Partridge 2006; Takahashi and Olaveson 2003). Hutson (1999; 2000) positions rave as a form of socially produced spiritual healing, while St John (2004) questions whether rave can be considered a religious movement (see also Gauthier 2004). Specifically, Hutson (1999, 54) argues that the DJ acts much like a shaman who, aided by key symbols, guides ravers on an ecstatic journey to paradise. For ravers, DJs became ‘superstar’ celebrity beings (Anderson 2009, 311) and artists who were skilled in creating and regulating moods (Ott and Herman 2003). The experience of ‘small e’ ecstasy, seen as a mass discharge, is possibly the most important event that takes place in rave or free parties. Arguably, ‘big E’ Ecstasy is one of the key facilitators of this mass discharge for ravers in both UK and Mexico. While the use of drugs at raves is by no means mandatory, and consumption is dependent both on personal preference and availability, to discuss raving without discussing ‘big E’ Ecstasy would be to ignore a large and influential part of the culture (Martin 1999). Arguably, Ecstasy enables ravers to ‘open’ themselves, dancing, talking and flirting all night long (Reynolds 1999). It is not by chance that Ecstasy along with other psychedelic substances, such as LSD, became one of the favourite companions for ravers (Millman and Beeder 1994). Ecstasy, the drug of choice for most ravers in the 1990s (Hutson 1999), promotes the subjective experience of eternal instant (Maffesoli 2000) in which all feel like equals. Further, users report that the drug makes all sensations more vivid and that ‘dancing on E feels like being inside the music’ (see Ott and Herman 2003, 258). As Saunders (1995) states, ‘The fundamental effect of Ecstasy is to remove fear’. Ecstasy is named the love drug in the sense that love is letting go of fear. Similarly, Merchant and Macdonald (1994, 22) describe the short-term effects of Ecstasy as ‘positive, inducing feelings of empathy, alertness and love’. It is for these reasons that Ecstasy has become widely known as both a ‘dance drug’, allowing the user



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to dance for hours without stopping, and a ‘hug drug’, making the user feel closer to those around them (Martin 1999). In sum, it is a drug that has huge impact on person, mind and body (Leneghan 2011). The desire to rave is thus commonplace for young adepts, erasing fragments of memory of the working week and helping them to forget mundanity (Goulding, Shankar and Elliott 2002). Anthropologists have well described those techniques for erasing memories, because forgetting is an essential step in the formation of cohesive social groups based on deep trust (Olick and Robbins 1998; Climo and Cattell 2002). Raves are places for unlearning neoliberal codes of behaviour and nuclei for digressions, and for ‘shedding’ the identity of the responsible worker (Goulding, Shankar and Elliott 2002). As Gómez Mont Ávalos (2007) makes clear, this ability of un-learning has specific neuromodulator mechanisms. Paradoxically, the brain has the ‘Apollonian capacity’ to learn, but also the ‘Dionysian motivation’ to unlearn, which produces empathy outside established urban impersonal ways of sociality (Clynes 1990). Thus, it can be argued then, that to become a raver implies to unlearn your acquired moods and attitudes to experience other possibilities for sociality. CONCLUSION: Towards Music Neotribalism With this chapter we argue that, for the study of emerging youth groups in the urban margins and their wide range of (sub)cultural manifestations, ‘subcultural capital’ and ‘neotribalism’ might be considered key concepts. Taking Thornton’s (1995) work as a starting point, we outlined the main trajectories of sociological work in the UK surrounding the social phenomena of music consumption and urban marginality, revealing the key concept of subcultural capital. In contextualising this discussion, we referred to the theoretical antecedent of the CCCS of Birmingham and key proponents of critical thinking of culture in the 1960s which left its traces locally and globally though the evolution of the sociological discourse for a half century, particularly in France with Bourdieu’s culture theory and Maffesoli’s phenomenological sociology. In a general sense, the study of rave culture leads us to recognise how subcultural capital and a specific form of neotribalism embrace marginalised youthful masses deprived of access to the first quadrant of the city and its relative economic success. Particularly, Ecstasy is used in raves as a recreational drug that artificially dampens any feeling of social fear or rejection related to class; its consumption unfortunately lacks information about its side effects and dangers. In the absence of legal access, multiple tragic consequences

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might emerge. In the United States and Canada, as in the UK, a culture for ‘dance safe’ has emerged through harm-reduction initiatives (see Moore 2004). Proof of this are the numerous websites and blogs aimed at spreading a culture of prevention of substance abuse (Sanders 2016). The clandestine status of raves, based on laws of secrecy and low-profile sociality to maintain loyalty to their beliefs, mean it is difficult to gain a clear understanding of rave culture. This is particularly so as participants may decline to participate in ethnographic studies and also qualitative interviews, in order to preserve the social form of a deinstitutionalised religion. This chapter suggests that the theories of subculture and neotribalism are useful in understanding raves and ravers in the context of conditions of urban marginality, including their motivations for and experiences of raving. There is a need for future work in theorising and empirically examining music neotribalism specifically in order to address the significance and meaning of raving for those who rave and the forms of oppositional politics that raves engender.

NOTES 1. The CCCS was a research centre at the University of Birmingham, England. Between 1964 and 2002, the Centre played a major role in developing the field of cultural studies. 2. The Frankfurt School is a school of social theory and philosophy associated in part with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University Frankfurt.

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Chapter 7

Popular Religiosity and Struggles for Urban Justice in Mexico A Decolonial Analysis of Santa Muerte Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn In July 2016, we visited one of Mexico’s thousands of Santa Muerte altars: the Majestic Altar to the Santa Muerte on 9 Norte in downtown Puebla (see figures 7.1 and 7.2), a few blocks northwest of the city’s historic centre. The cult of Santa Muerte, which spread dramatically throughout Mexico during the late twentieth century, is a form of popular religiosity that involves the worship of a controversial skeleton saint. As we prepared to enter the altar, two women sitting in a nearby parked car gestured to say they wanted to speak to us. They warned us about entering the sanctuary, and cautioned that if we proceeded with our visit, the power of the Santa Muerte is such that we would likely leave with severe headaches. We told them we were interested to go in all the same, and asked if they were opposed to the worship of the Santa Muerte. They said that they were neither devotees of Santa Muerte nor opposed to the cult, but urged us again to take care, as the saint ‘is very powerful and is capable of making things happen’. Before we turned to enter the altar, they added: ‘If you do go in, you will see her wearing some very beautiful dresses’. When we entered, one of the devotees who was looking after the altar and attached shop offered a warm welcome. He told us the Majestic Altar had strong international connections and often received visitors and worshippers from the United States, Spain and Italy, but that we were the first from Scotland. He established the group’s connections with both the precolonial indigenous past and the popular digital present by emphasising Santa Muerte’s direct links to Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec God of Death, and noting the temple’s very active Facebook page. In the year preceding our visit to the altar in Puebla, we developed a growing interest in the Santa Muerte phenomenon and it began to resonate with 117

Figure 7.1 and 7.2.  The Santa Muerte altar in Puebla. Source: Photos by the authors.



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the theoretical concerns of our ongoing research projects. For the past decade, we’ve been focused on the question of media convergence and exploring how changes in the media environment are facilitating new modes of struggle for democratisation, decolonisation and cultural citizenship. We brought these intellectual concerns into dialogue with questions of urban marginality as part of our contribution to the workshop in Mexico City that is the basis of this volume. Like many popular cultural forms, Santa Muerte is both vilified and adored. She is ferociously condemned by the Catholic Church, the state, the military, political and intellectual elites and much of the mainstream and alternative media, despite, or perhaps because of her millions of followers’ adoration for her. Along with El Niño Fidencio, Jesús Malverde, La Santa de Cabora and Juan el Soldado, she is one of a number of folk saints celebrated in Mexico that lack the approval and accreditation of the Catholic Church and are indeed actively disapproved of in many circles. In fact, our interest in Santa Muerte intensified when, a year prior to our visit to Puebla, we were exposed to some of this social disapproval. We were having dinner in Mexico City with a middle-class Mexican colleague and asked her about the Santa Muerte. She had a very unfavourable view of the cult and urged us to instead study a ‘positive’ aspect of Mexican culture such as the Virgin of Guadalupe.1 As cultural studies scholars, we take popular culture seriously, and some of our previous work has focused on cultural objects and practices that are often dismissed as trashy, dangerous or in poor taste by the middle classes, such as supermarket tabloids, daytime talk shows and suburban Christmas lights that evoke ‘crassness’ and ‘Americanisation’ in an Anglophilic postcolonial context (Glynn 2000; Cupples 2009). As Pierre Bourdieu (1984) and other scholars (see Fiske 1989; Hartley 2003; Cook 2000) have noted, the rejection of the tastes of subordinated classes is fundamental to the production of distinction, and therefore privilege, inequality, and domination. ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’, thus reproducing and naturalising powerful affects and discourses that hierarchise and legitimate social differences (Bourdieu 1984, 6–7). When elites, middle-class journalists and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church vilify Santa Muerte, they are discursively activating and mobilising meanings of Mexico and Mexicanness that silently or implicitly assert the supremacy of white or mestizo culture over indigenous cultures and other popular sectors. Our Mexican colleague’s anxiety over this extremely popular and rapidly growing cultural phenomenon, along with her patriotic endorsement of a more ‘respectable’ alternative supernatural icon, made us even more interested in it. After reviewing the discourses circulating around the Santa Muerte in mainstream and alternative media sites, it rapidly became apparent to us that the phenomenon contains many of the ingredients of a moral panic (Cohen 1972), the exploration of which would provide insight into questions of urban marginality in Mexico.

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This chapter discusses the Santa Muerte cult as a phenomenon that is both an object of moral panic and a site of popular cultural struggle against neoliberal urban marginality. Our aims are threefold. First, we seek to add to the debates that link the Santa Muerte cult to urban marginality by analysing the disdain it has provoked. Second, we read this cult through an explicitly decolonial lens, drawing in particular on the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD) research paradigm (otherwise known as ‘the decolonial option’), a body of literature that emerges out of Latin American cultural studies,2 and the theoretical frameworks advanced by Ramón Grosfoguel (2011a; 2011b; 2013) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007; 2014; 2015). Third, we briefly explore the importance of practices associated with the new, convergent media environment for the articulation of a decolonial, subaltern, urban cultural politics that contests the neoliberal status quo. In these ways, we seek to add several analytical layers to existing scholarly debates on the Santa Muerte phenomenon. We argue that participation in and engagement with this phenomenon, both in person and online, are providing low-income and subordinated Mexicans with new modes of articulating counterdiscourses and enacting forms of identity and refusal in the face of systems that seek to position or ‘station’, oppress and marginalise them.3 We conclude by suggesting the potential for the forms of popular religiosity associated with Santa Muerte to be articulated with broader counterhegemonic and activist struggles. URBAN MARGINALITY, MEDIA CONVERGENCE AND DECOLONIAL THEORY We gathered in Mexico City in July 2016 to explore the question of urban marginality and in particular to focus on the ways in which contemporary modes of urban governance have tended to benefit affluent populations and widen social and spatial inequalities. As noted in the introduction (see Slater this volume), the aim of the workshop was to extend existing debates around gentrification, territorial stigmatisation and urban speculation by focusing not just on how urban marginality and dispossession are produced, but also on how they are negotiated and contested both materially and culturally, in order to think about how the city might be geared towards the production of more inclusive forms of belonging. To achieve such aims, we believe we need simultaneously to maintain an awareness of the macropolitical forces identified by much work in political economy and urban studies, along with a concern for everyday and subaltern modes of agency and creativity, and popular pleasures, practices of sense-making, and modes of cultural citizenship more often found in cultural studies.



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We believe that these cultural politics can only be understood conjuncturally. Conjunctural analysis is an anti-essentialist form of radical contextualism that ‘seeks to identify the balance of conflicting forces at work within a particular social formation’ (Adams et al. 2017, 52). It focuses upon points of social and cultural crisis, contestation and struggle as a strategy for denaturalising the present and revealing its contingencies (see Fiske 1991; Grossberg 2010; Hall et al. 2013). ‘Thinking conjuncturally allows us to historicise the present’ and thus reveal opportunities ‘to take steps towards a new way of organising society’ (Grayson and Little 2017, 62). Our broader research project focuses on four key aspects of the current global conjuncture, all of which are pertinent to urban marginality in Mexico. The first involves the rise of neoliberalism, which can be traced back to Chile in the 1970s. Neoliberalism spread to Mexico and the rest of Latin America after the 1982 Mexican default, led subsequently to what has become known as Latin America’s lost decade, and is now arguably more contested, unstable and precarious than ever. Neoliberalism in Latin America works through racial categories to produce a contemporary extension of coloniality and despite its instability and precarity, neoliberalism, like capitalism more broadly, seems continuously to find new ways to reconfigure and reproduce itself. Mexican cities illustrate its persistence in their displays of some of the world’s most shocking juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, such as luxury condominiums and shopping malls located in close proximity to informal settlements where abject poverty and hunger predominate. For de Sousa Santos (2015, 1035–36), such outcomes are embedded in a global ‘neoliberal movement away from the social contract and toward possessive individual contractualism’. This once unthinkable (to liberals) collapse of the social contract, which is usually understood to ensure access to socioeconomic protections, opportunities and upward mobility, takes both postcontractual and precontractual forms. On the one hand, some social groups who were previously included now find themselves excluded from the social contract, as their homes are repossessed or their job security vanishes. Others, such as low-income youths in global cities, who once expected to gain access to the social contract, now find such access instead to be endlessly deferred (ibid.). The second dimension of the current conjuncture we identify is the intensification of racialised surveillance and securitisation in the post-9/11 era. Under the pretext of needing to contain both terrorism and drug trafficking, securitisation has allowed the proliferation of for-profit companies in an expanding security-industrial complex that produces and operates many things ranging from privatised prisons and armies to drones, and that thus participates in the curtailment of civil liberties, the restriction of mobility, the inducement of fear and the surveillance of particularly those who threaten what Cedric Robinson (1983) called racial capitalism.

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The third dimension in our analysis is the intensification of political mobilisation among indigenous and Afro-descendant movements and anticapitalist activists (see Cupples and Glynn 2016). The escalation of both racist practices and capitalist accumulation strategies that dramatically exacerbate existing inequalities has led to intensified ‘horizontal’ social movement activism, especially in Latin America, where high-profile exemplars such as the Zapatistas, APPO, MST, piqueteros, and CONAIE have challenged racism, capitalism and marginalisation in highly creative ways (see Zibechi 2012; Cupples this volume). Finally, the preceding dimensions occur in parallel with and are partly facilitated by profound and ongoing transformations in the global media environment. These transformations have given rise to new democratising as well as hegemonising forces and tendencies that have been effectively captured in the work of Henry Jenkins and other media and cultural analysts (see, e.g. Jenkins 2008; Jenkins et al. 2016; Castells 2012; Martín-Barbero 2011). With reference to US political culture, Jenkins et al. (2016, 195–98) suggest that the current conjuncture can be characterised in terms of a profound crisis of democracy involving, on the one hand, a widespread sense of the failure of democratic institutions and mechanisms to serve the needs and interests of anybody but a powerful and privileged few, and an intensification of controlling forms of power as manifest through surveillance in particular and, on the other hand, ‘an expansion of the communicative and organisational resources available to everyday people (and grassroots organisations) as we become more and more accustomed to using networked communications toward our collective interests’. Hence, transformations in the contemporary media environment have made it easier for the ‘power-bloc’ (Hall 1981) to both track and monitor activists and customers, but have also provided means for the dominated to mobilise, challenge and disrupt the systems that subordinate them. Digital tools and the ability to produce, modify and share media texts are increasingly in the hands of marginalised people and constitute resources that can be harnessed to contest marginalisation. Indigenous, Afro-descended and lowincome mestizo communities across Latin America have been producing their own media in order to ‘participate in horizontal networks with states and civil society, to contest colonial relations of power, to circulate counter-discourses and -representations, to promote cultural revitalization, and to engage more effectively in activism in pursuit of social justice’ (Cupples and Glynn 2018, 15–16; see also Castells 2012; Glynn and Cupples 2011; Martín-Barbero 2011). The contemporary media environment is thus a highly complex, fractured, unstable and contradictory one in which a plurality of voices can find spaces in which to be heard, and where established discourses can be amplified, countered, disarticulated and rearticulated as they are challenged, reappropriated and recirculated across an expanding array of platforms.



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Scholarship associated with the ‘decolonial option’ (or MCD paradigm) locates the origins of modernity not in the European Enlightenment but rather in the conquest of America at the end of the fifteenth century. It also emphasises the mutually constitutive entanglements between coloniality and capitalism that have given rise to the contemporary global capitalist order, and thus diverges from and even challenges the historical foundations and emphases of much postcolonial theory. Moreover, for the MCD scholars, non-Eurocentric epistemologies, ontologies and spiritualities must occupy a central place in emancipatory projects capable of dismantling colonial oppressions. The decolonial option draws on a corpus of Latin American indigenous, popular and subaltern thought, and a variety of historical and contemporary indigenous and Afro-Latin social movements, such as the 1780 Tupac Amaru rebellion in Peru, the Haitian revolution and the Zapatista movement in Chiapas. MCD holds that coloniality created the conditions for border-thinking, transmodernity and interculturality. It aims to bring non-linear, situated and non-Eurocentric modes of thought to the fore, and encourages activists and scholars to think with social movements and ‘from the perspective of the excluded other’ (Escobar 2007, 186, drawing on Dussel 1996). MCD takes from world-systems analysis the premise of the international division of labour and the notion of an economic core and periphery but asserts that the conquest of America produced several entangled global hierarchies, including asymmetrical racial, sexual, epistemic and spiritual orders that hierarchise European over non-European peoples, European patriarchy over other gender orders, heterosexuality over other sexual identities, Christianity over non-Western spiritualities and Western knowledges over non-Western ones. Aníbal Quijano (2007) refers to this series of entangled hierarchical orders as the colonial power matrix, while Ramón Grosfoguel (2007) calls it the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’ that was implemented as a consequence of colonialism. Grosfoguel (2011a; 2011b; 2013; 2018a) draws creatively on the work of Frantz Fanon (1967) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007; 2010) to develop the analysis that the hierarchies of coloniality produce two zones divided by an abyssal line that constitutes a Zone of Being, where the humanity of people is not in question, and a Zone of Non-Being, where it is. Both zones are internally heterogeneous. In the Zone of Being, there are those who may be subordinated by class, gender or sexuality, but are nonetheless privileged by race. In the Zone of Non-Being, there is also subordination by class, gender and sexuality, but these are aggravated by racial difference. Each zone has its own mode of conflict management. In the Zone of Being, conflict is managed through regulation and ongoing struggles for emancipation. People experiencing gender or sexual subordination can therefore fight for civil rights, so the Zone of Being tends to be characterised by peacefulness

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punctuated by moments of violence. In the Zone of Non-Being, by contrast, conflict and contestation are managed through force, coercion, repression, and dispossession; the upshot is ongoing violence interrupted by occasional moments of peace. Grosfoguel (2018b) posits the difference between workers in a factory in Seattle and a maquiladora in Ciudad Juárez on the Mexican border to illustrate. The Seattle workers might strike for better wages or working conditions, but don’t put their lives in danger to do so. By contrast, if maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juárez organise for better working conditions, they might not make it home alive that night. These insights suggest a need for great care in the selection of theories we use to study the reproduction and contestation of urban marginality. In the words of de Sousa Santos (2014, viii), ‘emancipatory transformations in the world may follow grammars and scripts other than those developed by Western-centric critical theory’, so we need to recognise and engage with forms of knowledge production that diverge from Eurocentric epistemic matrices (which does not mean that we may not also draw upon European critical theory. As Grosfoguel (2018a) observes, the aim of decolonial theory is not to exclude European thought from the universe of what matters, which would simply reverse the long-standing European exclusion of non-Western knowledges). In his discussion of the epistemological dimensions of José Martí’s Nuestra América, a text in which Martí stresses the importance of Latin American perspectives on Latin American, de Sousa Santos (2014) asserts that Nuestra América is Caliban’s America, not Prospero’s. But Prospero’s America is also alive in the South among the intellectuals and political elites who reject the African and indigenous origins of their nation-states and embrace Eurocentrism as the prime aspirational model to be adopted. The growing popularity of Santa Muerte in contemporary Mexico is a cultural phenomenon that emerges within a context of urban marginality, in the Zone of Non-Being, and over which an ongoing moral panic rages. The now familiar concept of moral panic was initially formulated in the United Kingdom by Stan Cohen during the early 1970s and extended considerably by Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Hall et al. 1978). Cohen (1972) explored the reaction of the media, the public and agents of social control to the seaside fights between mods and rockers, whom he characterised as ‘folk devils’ of the British 1960s. According to Cohen, a moral panic starts when somebody or something is nominated as a threat to dominant values or a symbol of social decline. Such ideas are readily taken up by the media and often become objects of public concern, hostility, and calls for intervention by authorities. In times of moral panic, folk devils or others made to signify ‘deviance’ become tools for the reproduction and legitimation of accepted moralities. Moral panic involves disproportionate social reaction and constitutes ‘one



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of the most effective strategies of the right for securing popular support for its values and policies’ (McRobbie 1994, 192). In the United Kingdom, the social and political activation of folk devils has targeted working-class black youths, people on benefits and immigrants. In urban Mexico, a moral panic around popular religiosity has led to nominations of the marginalised urban poor as contemporary Mexican folk devil. SANTA MUERTE Santa Muerte (literally: ‘Saint Death’) is a form of popular religiosity that involves devotion to a Mexican skeleton saint that appears at thousands of altars all over the country. It’s estimated that there are some 1,500 altars in Mexico City alone, as well as many shops, stalls and websites that sell Santa Muerte figurines, candles and other paraphernalia. Santa Muerte altars attract a multitude of worshippers, who come to ask for favours or for protection from violence, incarceration, ill-health, adultery and unemployment. Devotees bring candy, fruit, beer, tequila and bread as offerings. Santa Muerte has become a magnet for marginalised urban inhabitants, including prisoners, the LGBT population, unemployed teenagers, drug addicts, street children, garbage pickers, and migrant and informal sector workers. Indeed, according to Juan Antonio Flores Martos (2007, 290, our translation), Santa Muerte attracts people who ‘hope to survive and get ahead in a reality where neither macro trends and statistics, nor micro experiences and needs, offer any type of hope or guarantee of improvement and stability’. For many devotees, she symbolises both protection and justice, and they affirm that she’s helped them through challenging times. Santa Muerte is a hybridised and syncretic religious figure that potentially draws (its exact origins are not known) on a range of indigenous, Catholic, revolutionary and esoteric antecedents, including Mictlantecuhtli (the Aztec God of Death), San Pascualito (a skeleton saint worshipped in the colonial era by indigenous groups in Chiapas and Guatemala),4 the Virgin of Guadalupe (Mexico’s patron saint) and the Calavera Catrina (a skeleton figure that has appeared in the murals of José Guadalupe Posada and Diego Rivera, and is ubiquitous in Mexican material culture). A 1775 church edict that prohibited the worship of the image of death drove such practices underground (Gil Olmos 2012), where they nevertheless survived against the odds, like many indigenous traditions whose persistence is a product of long-standing struggles to sustain them. In the barrio of San Pascual in Chiapas, for example, as David Lomnitz (2008) writes, the San Pascualito skeleton went underground after it was banned from Holy Week processions in the seventeenth century and then re-emerged in 1872, only to go underground once again in the 1930s in the context of the religious

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persecution that followed the Mexican Revolution. In 1960, after the Catholic Church had engaged in an anti-Pascualito campaign, many devotees openly abandoned the Church. Lomnitz (2008) suggests that it is possible Santa Muerte is an evolved form of San Pascualito, although contemporary Santa Muerte followers do not ever make connections to it. But either way, death worship came roaring back and into the open in the late twentieth century and has grown dramatically in recent decades. The practice has now spread north to the United States and south to Central America, as well. Mexico has a geographically specific, familiar and culturally hybrid attitude to death. According to Lomnitz (2008, 20), not only was death nationalised and converted into the ‘cornerstone of national identity’, but it proves to be a highly malleable cultural entity that is used for a range of political, religious, nation-building, celebratory and satirical purposes, and traverses both ‘high’ and popular cultures, as well as mestizo and indigenous ones, with ease. Santa Muerte is articulated to both precolonial and postcolonial understandings of death and draws on and extends both pre-Conquest and Catholic spiritualities. While Santa Muerte altars can be found all over Mexico, some of the largest have appeared in barrios that have been hardest hit by neoliberal economic change and that have in many cases been stigmatised as crime-ridden and violent by local governments and in mainstream media. Laura Roush (2014) remarks that many Santa Muerte worshippers live literally close to death, so their choice of saints should perhaps not surprise us. One of the most famous altars in Mexico City is that of Doña Queta, the leader of the Santa Muerte congregation in Tepito, a neighbourhood that is often described in the tabloid and mainstream press as extremely violent and dangerous. Indeed, we had an interview set up with Doña Queta, but were forced to cancel because her husband, Raymundo, was gunned down in the entrance to their home in a drive-by shooting just days before our appointment (Gilet 2016; La Prensa 2016). Tepito features a mural called, ‘The Mural of the Absent’, which was painted by local artists to honour those who have died prematurely (Matloff 2013; Roush 2014). The barrio is a locus of working-class resistance and a site of highly creative entrepreneurial activity, where low-income inhabitants negotiate the exclusions of globalisation by openly selling all manner of contraband, fake perfumes, pirated DVDs and counterfeit brand label jeans. In the wake of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the neighbourhood’s social fabric was substantially destroyed by World Bank funds and local government planners who demolished the Casa Blanca housing project and banned the traditional colocation of work and family life, which drove people from their homes and into the streets. A Tepito resident and self-appointed local historian, Alfonso Hernández, has attempted to document these changes in order to destigmatise the neighbourhood and emphasise the diverse economic



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survival strategies in place ‘in a city that is more and more chaotic’ (ejeCentralTV 2013a). Hernández runs walking tours around Tepito to demonstrate the nefarious effects of neoliberalism on a vibrant neighbourhood, and viewers can also experience these tours through YouTube (see Russo 2016). Discourses that stigmatise and scapegoat Santa Muerte devotees and, metonymically, the marginalised neighbourhoods in which they live have, as noted, hegemonised large sectors of the media and middle-class Mexican common sense. These discourses articulate the practice of Santa Muerte worship to both organised crime and the broader cultural phenomenon of narcocultura: the music, movies and fashion that celebrate and glorify the violence of Mexico’s drugs war. The ensuing moral panic thus redirects blame for the crisis afflicting contemporary Mexico downward in the social hierarchy, and thereby helps to stabilise the neoliberal status quo. When drug traffickers or other criminals are busted, the media often emphasise figurines or altars to the Santa Muerte found at the crime scenes, or Santa Muerte tattoos displayed on the bodies of those arrested (see, e.g. Fuentes 2016), while ignoring the Guadalupe tattoos, santería statues and other religious paraphernalia and esoterica that are also often involved (Perdigón 2008; Harlan Reed 2015). In the North, anti-organised crime measures have included the systematic destruction of Santa Muerte altars by the Mexican army, which has led devotees to mount organised countermeasures in defence of their practices (Roush 2014). However, the overwhelming majority of devotees are neither violent nor engaged in the drug trade; they are simply people who are struggling to survive. Thus, despite the hegemonic articulation of Santa Muerte to criminality and narcocultura, ordinary worshippers struggle to break such links and so disarticulate and rearticulate these elements. We must understand and analyse the expansion of neoliberalism, drug trafficking and Santa Muerte worship as elements of the same conjuncture. The violent and greed-fuelled illegality of the narco-economy is entangled with and inseparable from the violent and greed-fuelled legality of the global capitalist order that opens ‘international markets to increasingly deregulated trade systems’, through which both the narco- and the ‘legitimate’ economy are constituted as intersecting processes within ‘the organisation and reproduction of contemporary modes of . . . accumulation’ (Neilson 2003, 102–3). Hence, the narco-economy flourishes as a mode of alternative entrepreneurialism under the forms of neoliberalism advanced by multinationals and global governance institutions. Nor can the expansion of Santa Muerte’s popularity in recent decades be disentangled from these accumulative processes and practices. The cult came out of hiding when Mexico entered one of the worst crises in its history, around the time when millions of Mexicans became victims of poverty, hunger, corruption and state neglect, as well as of both drug- and state-led violence (Flores Martos 2007; Olmos 2012). Roush

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(2014, 145) suggests links between Santa Muerte’s revival, ‘the state’s abandonment of national welfare’, and ‘the Church’s retreat from the “preferential option for the poor” ’. Roush outlines the ways in which the monthly rosary in Tepito laments the loss of social protections: the notion of abandonment or neglect (desamparo) is central to the prayers and practices undertaken by those who attend these services, devotees focus on the failures of the public health and criminal justice systems in which the urban poor are ignored or unjustly incarcerated, and their ‘language points to experiences that came with [the introduction of] neoliberal reforms and securitization’ (Roush 2014, 146). For Lomnitz (2008, 485), the rise of Santa Muerte is linked to the ‘state’s loss of prestige’ and as a result it is now death rather than the state that occupies the site of sovereignty in Mexico. While death is subject to a diverse range of sense-making and discursive strategies by a wide range of differentially positioned actors, ‘there is no inventor, no owner, no meaning that can contain death, that can tame it’ (Lomnitz 2008, 483). Consequently, Santa Muerte has become an important means through which to negotiate Mexico’s violent political realities, and one that exceeds, interrogates and rejects state impunity and indifference. For Mexico is a country of massacres, police corruption, extralegal executions, disappearances, torture and mass graves. It is a country in which press freedom is highly compromised, and state power is directed towards the criminalisation of activists and the poor, as well as towards the securitisation of elite wealth (Jaffe and Aguiar 2012, 153). In the past fifteen years, more than 100 independent journalists have been murdered (Morales and Avizu 2015) and many ordinary citizens, including children, students, street sellers, campesinos, factory workers and indigenous activists have lost their lives in state-led disappearances, executions and sexually motivated killings that are met with official indifference. The names of the places where such tragic events occur – Aguas Blancas, Acteal, Ciudad Juárez, San Salvador Atenco, Hermosillo, Tlatlaya, Atozinapa, Nochixtlán – are kept alive through diverse practices of activist and online memorialisation.5 While mainstream media outlets, particularly state-owned television channels such as Televisa and TV Azteca, are frequently accused of merely reproducing official accounts of events and thus protecting government impunity, recent violence and injustices have nevertheless generated widespread national and sometimes international solidarity. For instance, expressions of solidarity with the Ayotzinapa 43 are highly visible in many physical and online spaces, and the Nochixtlán repression in June 2016 has led thousands to march and rally around the country in protest against the criminalisation of teachers. Moreover, the internet has become a key site for activists to produce and share powerful expressions of opposition in the face of state-led violence, and to circulate counter-narratives that challenge official accounts of events.



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Alternative media organisations such as Brigada Informativa Altavoz and the #YoSoy132 movement make full use of YouTube, Twitter and other social media sites to document police and army brutality and torture. Meanwhile, other social movements have temporarily occupied radio and television stations in order to broadcast their messages (see, e.g. Zires 2009 and Gravante 2011 on the APPO in Oaxaca). The new media environment is thus functioning increasingly as a site of opposition and contestation for the marginalised – one in which the image of the Mexican government often fares badly. Within this wider context of expanding inequality and intensified securitisation, contestation and solidarities, Santa Muerte has become an important arena of popular sense-making around questions of urban marginality and neoliberal abandonment and has given rise to practices that effectively mobilise affordances of the new media environment. The internet is thus proliferating new understandings of the cult, and devotees are taking to YouTube and other social media sites in large numbers to counter the stigmatising representations of their practices that dominate much of the mainstream media. Roush (2014) notes, for instance, that YouTube is used by many devotees to demonstrate devotional protocols and challenge the incessant fear-mongering propagated by non-devotees. Similarly, Pérez Salazar et al. (2014) emphasise the use of Facebook by Santa Muerte followers to collaboratively construct forms of collective identity and to counter ‘trolls’ who question their faith. The internet content develops from and converges with pro-Santa Muerte glossy magazines such as Devoción a la Santa Muerte and the Revista de Santa Muerte (the latter of which is produced in the United States). Moreover, the transmediality of the new media environment – the capacity for media figures and narratives to propagate across different and interconnected media forms and platforms, and for intensified activities of appropriation and reappropriation, disarticulation and rearticulation of these figures and narratives by media makers and users – means that the figure of Santa Muerte has become available for an expanding set of storytelling and sense-making practices that now includes Hollywood movies such as Man on Fire and popular TV dramas such as Breaking Bad and The Blacklist. The Santa Muerte’s constant and expanding traversal of contemporary mediascapes (the Mexican army and the Catholic Church cannot, of course, destroy media images as they do physical altars) renders her a living cultural figure for the articulation of a popular refusal to submit to marginalisation, stigmatisation, insecurity, precarity and dislocation in the face of the state’s inabilities and unwillingness to care and provide for its citizens. In this way, despite the demonisation of the cult in some media sites, the cultural dynamics of media convergence are enabling the circulation of alternative meanings and discourses around the figure of Santa Muerte and the practices of her devotees.

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This growth of alternative media circulation around Santa Muerte devotion is in part a product of the democratisation of access to media production and distribution that is often associated with the new, digital media environment, as devotees are increasingly making and sharing their own videos on the cult (see, e.g. the YouTube channels produced by Yamarash, Templo Santa Muerte Kansas Internacional, Russo, and Enrique Hernández). Moreover, Santa Muerte has emerged on YouTube as a figure of intense contestation, as is amply revealed by the many expressions of both adoration and vilification that can be found in the comments that proliferate beneath each user-generated video.6 While Mexican journalism has been an important site for the production of stigmatising, abnormalising, and otherwise ‘Othering’ accounts of Santa Muerte worshippers, an interesting genre of user-generated Santa Muerte videos has appeared that reappropriates and rearticulates the visual and discursive conventions of TV news for the purpose of promoting Santa Muerte devotion. In this way, popular knowledges and practices that are typically excluded from or derided within socially authoritative media discourses such as journalism are here used to constitute an alternative mode of ‘journalistic’ storytelling that is instead inclusive of marginalised voices and perspectives. A set of these stories that centres on Enriqueta Vargas and the cult in Tultitlán, for instance, has been uploaded by user-producer Enrique Hernández and forms a YouTube channel called Santa Muerte Internacional Televisión.7 Such sites and activities reveal how ‘contemporary mediascapes multiply the textured spatiality of places, endowing it with new dimensionalities that facilitate the extension of practices of visual place-identity contestation’ (Glynn 2009, 9). Moreover, it appears that the recent media proliferation of alternative and marginalised perspectives has pushed conventional journalists to go beyond the demonising and stigmatising representations of the Santa Muerte phenomenon that have dominated the Mexican mediasphere, and to begin to give extended voice to devotees in their reporting. Consequently, for instance, Alfonso Hernández and Doña Queto of Tepito, and Doña Enriqueta Vargas of Tultitlán, have all been interviewed repeatedly by local and international media, and have in the process become prominent media figures and articulate spokespeople for their respective neighbourhoods (see, e.g. Salgado Ponce 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2012d, 2012e; ejeCentralTV 2013b; Pau S. R. 2014; Harlan Reed 2015; Arias 2016). As our projects on the cultural politics of disaster, anti-austerity activism and indigenous media have revealed (Cupples and Glynn 2014, 2016; Adams et al. 2016), patterns of discursive circulation within the convergent mediasphere facilitate forms of rearticulation that sometimes favour the interests and perspectives of the dispossessed. The ‘spreadability’ (Jenkins et al. 2013) of grassroots perspectives within and beyond participatory cultures (Jenkins 2008) thus disarranges



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and reconfigures the discursive landscape of contemporary media; hence, ‘in recent years, we find a growing emphasis on the cult as something other than criminal or diabolical’ (Lomnitz 2008, 493). Indeed, Santa Muerte is not the only saint to be harnessed to the cause of urban justice. As Ernesto López Morales (2019) writes, in two rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods in Mexico City, Colonia Juárez and Colonia Santa María La Ribera, folk saint Santa Mari La Juarica is mobilised by residents to struggle against gentrification, real estate speculation and the social whitening of the neighbourhood. López Morales (2019, 512) describes Santa Mari La Juarica as ‘an icon that combines Mexico’s cultural religious past which appeals to indigenous syncretism with a hipster visual element’. A DECOLONIAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT? Santa Muerte devotees are not generally considered to constitute an anticapitalist and decolonial social movement. Especially in light of the religious foundations of the Santa Muerte movement, most leftist scholars would demur at the suggestion that devotees of this saint of death might have a place alongside the Zapatistas in southern Mexico, the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil or the Recovered Factories Movement in Argentina. Dussel (1985, 89–90) makes the important observation, however, that although universalising European knowledges ‘scorn’ indigenous Latin American cultures as ‘illiterate’ and ‘barbaric’ forms that are akin to ‘witchcraft’, these popular cultures are the most likely progenitors from which ‘new alternatives will emerge’ that will not merely replicate ‘the structures of the center’. We are also dissatisfied on Gramscian grounds with the conventional critique of popular religiosity as either a retrograde formation or a political dead-end that should be dismissed. Conjunctural analysis requires that we pay attention to those points of potential articulation between movements like that around Santa Muerte and those with broader or more overtly politicised objectives for the achievement of social and territorial justice. Moreover, as existing regimes of power founded in neoliberalism and coloniality come under transformative pressure, the kinds of change most likely to occur will involve the movement of marginalised cultural values, orientations and identities from the fringes of society towards its centre – however impossible it may be to predict which particular ones may contribute to dislodging rapacious neoliberal individualism and controlling coloniality from their current centrality (Fiske 1993, 48–49). de Sousa Santos (2015) has developed a detailed analysis that is attuned to potential points of articulation between religiosity and social justice movements. While he makes no reference to Santa Muerte or other

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non-official folk cults, his long-term involvement with the World Social Forum has led him to encounter a variety of religions and spiritualities that he believes provide important frameworks for radical social change. He clearly distinguishes between fundamentalist and reactionary variants of both Christianity and Islam, on the one hand, and ‘pluralist, progressive theologies and community-based religious practices’ (de Sousa Santos 2015, 1277–78), on the other. The latter possess an ‘insurgent humanism’ (1281) that is aligned with anti-capitalist and decolonial struggles, and ‘a kind of radicalness’ (1459) that stems from these theologies’ ‘creation of ethics of care and engagement based on visceral reactions of intersubjectivity between self and neighbor’ (1433–34). de Sousa Santos argues that this radicalness is missing from most secular social movements because of the ‘political, cultural, discursive, and institutional mediations’ that have constituted the latter within the public sphere over the past 200 years and that have engendered a multidimensional ‘trivialization of human suffering’ that is characteristic of Western modernity (1413–14). By contrast with secular politics and movements, religion’s coexistence with Enlightenment thinking in modernity has required its consignment to the private realm. Latour (1993, 32) alludes to this privatisation of religion in his discussion of the ‘crossed-out God’, who no longer has a role to play in the dichotomised social and scientific settlement that constitutes Western modernity. The modern privatisation of religion has enabled religious practice to function autonomously, largely without subjection to state regulation or control, and thus to maintain ‘a kind of premodern or transmodern radical engagement with the lives of people’ (de Sousa Santos 2015, 1455). This has in turn enabled progressive religiosities to sustain a ‘counterhegemonic potential’ that ‘resides in the articulation they strive for between the visceral engagement in a succoring gesture or nonconditioned care, and the political struggle against the causes of suffering as part of the unfinished task of divinity’ (1445–46). Santa Muerte devotion was not only consigned to the private sphere but forced into hiding, such that worship could only be practised covertly. Since its emergence into the open in the context of one of the most dramatic political and economic crises in Mexico’s history, its defiance of the status quo has been radically multifaceted and multiaxial, as it has adopted an anti-market and anti-state stance, and has promoted inclusivity and acceptance of gender and sexual nonconformists, the incarcerated, the addicted and others who exist outside the social contract. This has engendered opposition from both church and state, as Santa Muerte devotion expresses a popular crisis of faith in political parties and state institutions, as well as in traditional religious symbols and practices (see Alfonso Hernández’s comments in Harlan Reed 2015). Through Santa Muerte worship, ordinary people are constructing



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alternative understandings of life and death in ways that threaten the control of mainstream churches, both Catholic and Evangelical, over the realms of faith and metaphysical speculation. We wish to tentatively suggest that the Santa Muerte cult’s openness to difference and inclusivity has important progressive and decolonising dimensions, even if the devotees wouldn’t necessarily describe their involvement in such terms, and that these dimensions are at least partly responsible for the mainstream anxieties and disapproval the devotion has engendered, which are symptomatic of its embeddedness within a neoliberal conjuncture that mobilises surveillance and biopolitical monitoring to target consumption and religious practices alike (see Alfonso Hernández’s comments in Harlan Reed 2015). Moreover, these progressive aspects of Santa Muerte worship are open in some measure to articulation and alliance formation with other social and territorial justice movements. Santa Muerte celebration constitutes clear connections with indigenous ways of knowing and being, including forms of native spirituality that survived colonial evangelisation. But Santa Muerte devotion also intervenes in the contemporary capitalist conjuncture and provides a clear critique of urban marginality, state-led violence, stigmatisation and criminalisation. And like social movements such as Occupy, Santa Muerte devotees assert spatial goals through their efforts ‘to reclaim public space for public persons’ (Jenkins et al. 2016, 1). Precisely in the context of the ongoing privatisation and fragmentation of public space, Santa Muerte masses and rosaries bring thousands of people into the streets for many hours, disrupt the everyday social order and facilitate the revival of alternative ways of being together that are traditional for the indigenous peoples of Mexico. During such moments, public space and the collective life of the community are at least relatively and temporarily subject to the control of different forces and interests, as food such as tamales and gifts such as bone carvings that have been laboriously produced by prisoners are randomly given away to strangers without any expectations of or demand for reciprocity. Roush (2014) describes the unity that accompanies the final part of the Tepito rosary service as an example of the horizontal and non-hierarchical social relations that Victor Turner called communitas. John Fiske (1993, 68) argues for an understanding of communitas as ‘a social formation whose main, if not only, purpose is to produce identities and relationships that are in the control of its members by means that are denied to them by the dominant social order’. The construction of communitas thereby disrupts the hierarchising forms of power and control exerted through what Fiske calls practices of stationing. This mode of utopian, affective and disruptive sociability, and the decanonisation and subversion of Eurocentric Catholicism, driven by a desire for social emancipation and a critique of the neoliberal status quo, can be understood as an instance of what de Sousa Santos (2014, 16) calls

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the ‘reenchantment of common sense’. Santa Muerte worship in Tepito and other urban sites where large numbers of marginalised people come together to share food and other gifts and to articulate their hopes and desires for a better world, exert a destabilising force against the neoliberal common sense that grips much of Mexico. Similarly, the devotees’ practices within interactive media spaces disrupt the cultural politics of moral panic that reinforce the neoliberal social order and instead assert meanings of social identity, place and belonging that are under the control of the celebrants rather than that of the state, corporations, and the guardians of morality. Santa Muerte’s followers passionately refuse incorporation into the meanings that neoliberalism strives to impose upon their social experiences, identities, and everyday spaces. In this way, their concerns and practices defy proliferating moral panics to create opportunities for alliance-formation and the rearticulation of decoloniality, cultural citizenship and radical democratisation within contexts of expanding urban marginalisation and other landscapes of inequality. The sites and spaces of their engagement and struggle are expanded via the networked dynamics and transmediality of the contemporary convergent media environment. Engagement with such popular cultural assertions and the places and concerns of their practitioners must be part of the dialogues of others who are concerned with questions of urban justice in Mexico.

NOTES 1. The Virgin of Guadalupe is a much-loved mestiza and dark-skinned version of the Virgin Mary. She is said to have appeared to indigenous peasant Juan Diego in 1531. These apparitions led to the construction of a cathedral on the site where an Aztec temple dedicated to the Goddess Tonantzin had been located before its destruction by the Spanish. The Virgin of Guadalupe is therefore a hybrid figure that combines both indigenous and Catholic elements, but one that is officially endorsed, and whose worship is widely understood to be an act of patriotism. 2. For an excellent introduction to the MCD paradigm, see the special issue, “Globalization and the De-Colonial Option,” Cultural Studies 21 (2–3) 2007. 3. John Fiske (1993, 12) writes that “a station is both a physical place where the social order is imposed upon an individual and the social positioning (stationing) of that individual in the system of social relations.” 4. The worship of skeleton saints by indigenous peoples in the colonial era is well documented. 5. In Aguas Blancas, Guerrero in June 1985, seventeen protesting campesinos were murdered by state forces. In Acteal, Chiapas in December 1997, forty-five Tzotzil activists at a prayer meeting were massacred by paramilitaries. In May 2006, street flower sellers who were protesting in San Salvador Atenco in the state of Mexico



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were threatened with displacement; two people died, dozens were arbitrarily detained, and some were sexually assaulted by state forces. In Hermosillo, Sonora in June 2009, state officials set fire to a building in an attempt to destroy public documents; the fire spread to the day nursery next door, and forty-nine children died. In Ttlatlaya in June 2014, twenty-two suspected criminals were extra-judicially executed by soldiers. In September 2014, forty-three students of the Ayotzinapa Teachers College in Iguala, Guerrero disappeared by state forces while they were travelling to attend a protest in commemoration of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. In Nochixtlán, Oaxaca in June 2016, a decade after the 2006 teachers’ protest that was violently repressed, teachers protesting educational reforms were attacked by state forces and eleven of them were killed. In Ciudad Juárez, hundreds of young women, many of them factory workers, have been murdered since the 1990s, and the crimes have gone largely unpunished. 6. For an example, see the comments in the video at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=34JzLVRsKIE, where Santa Muerte and Doña Queta are defended and admired, and where Mexican devotees are also painted as ignorant. In this thread, one poster points out how the Spanish colonisers saw Tlaloc and Quetzalcoatl as Satan, and burned and raped indigenous peoples in the name of Christianity. She also states that being critical of others’ religious practices today does not make one a decent person. For another good example, see the comments posted at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ksxhdURk9QA. 7. Tultitlán is the site of a highly controversial, twenty-two-metre-high statue of the Santa Muerte.

REFERENCES Adams, Paul C., Julie Cupples, Kevin Glynn, André Jansson and Shaun Moores. 2017. Communications/Media/Geographies. New York: Routledge. Arias, Diana. 2016. “Santa Muerte de Tultitlán por Diana Arias.” Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU9Xn2_-_LQ. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Castells, Manuel. 2012. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge: Polity. Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Cook, Jon. 2000. “Culture, Class and Taste.” In Cultural Studies and the Working Class, edited by Sally Munt, 97–112. London: Cassell. Cupples, Julie. 2009. “Remaking the Anglophilic City: Visual Spectacles in Suburbia.” New Zealand Geographer 65: 23–34. Cupples, Julie, and Kevin Glynn. 2016. “Neoliberalism, Surveillance and Media Convergence.” In The Handbook of Neoliberalism, edited by Simon Springer, Kean Birch and Julie MacLeavy, 161–75. London: Routledge. Cupples, Julie, and Kevin Glynn. 2018. Shifting Nicaraguan Mediascapes: Authoritarianism and the Struggle for Social Justice. Cham: Springer.

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Grayson, Deborah, and Ben Little. 2017. “Conjunctural Analysis and the Crisis of Ideas.” Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture 65: 59–75. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2007. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn.” Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 211–23. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2011a. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking and Global Coloniality.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1 (1): 1–38. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2011b. “La descolonización del conocimiento: Diálogo critic entre la visión descolonial de Frantz Fanon y la sociología descolonial de Boaventura de Sousa Santos.” In Formas Otras: Saber, Nombrar, Hacer, Narrar, edited by Alvise Vianello and Bet Mañé, 97–108. Barcelona: CIDOB. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2013. “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11 (1): 73–90. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2018a. ‘Author Evening with Ramón Grosfoguel and Julie Cupples’. Islamic Human Rights Commission, London, 11 December. https:// www.facebook.com/109724959498/videos/504689490040028/. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2018b. “What Is Racism?” In Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University, edited by Julie Cupples and Ramón Grosfoguel, 264–73. London: Routledge. Grossberg, Lawrence. 2010. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1981. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular.” In People’s History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel, 227–40. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts. 1978. Policing the Crisis. London: Macmillan. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts. 2013. Policing the Crisis, 2nd edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Harlan, Reed. 2015. “Entrevista Alfonso Hernández Centro Est. Tepiteños México DF. Tepito y la Santa Muerte 2 de 3.” Daily Motion, 24 August. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x32w7rz. Hartley, John. 2003. A Short History of Cultural Studies. London: Sage. Jaffe, Rivke, and José Carlos G. Aguiar. 2012. “Introduction: Neoliberalism and Urban Space in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 33 (2): 153–56. Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, updated edition. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta KliglerVilenchik and Arely M. Zimmerman. 2016. By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. New York: New York University Press, (Kindle Edition).

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La Prensa. 2016. “Despiden a esposo de la líder de la Santa Muerte en Tepito.” La Prensa, 8 June. http://www.oem.com.mx/laprensa/notas/n4192119.htm. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lomnitz, David. 2008. Death and the Idea of Mexico. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. López Morales, Ernesto. 2019. “Just Another Chapter of Latin American Gentrification.” In The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development, edited by Julie Cupples, Marcela Palomina-Schalscha, and Manuel Prieto, 503–16. London: Routledge. Martín-Barbero, Jesús. 2011. “From Latin America: Diversity, Globalization and Convergence.” Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 8 (1): 39–64. Matloff, Judith. 2013. “Take a Tour of the Barrio Most Mexicans Won’t Visit— If You Dare.” Aljazeera America, 8 December. http://america.aljazeera.com/ articles/2013/12/8/a-cultural-tour-ofthefiercebarriomostmexicanswontvisit.html. McRobbie, Angela. 1994. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Morales, Alberto, and Juan Avizu. 2015. “PGR: 103 periodistas asesinados en los últimos 15 años.” El Universal, 24 February. http://archivo.eluniversal.com. mx/nacion-mexico/2015/suman-103-periodistas-muertos-en-ultimos-15-aniospgr-1079838.html. Navarrete, Carlos. 1982. San Pascualito Rey y el Culto a la Muerte en Chiapas. México: UNAM. Neilson, Brett. 2003. Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle:. . . and Other Tales of Counterglobalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pau, S. R. 2014. ‘Enriqueta, la guardiana de la Santa Muerte, los rostros de nuestra CDMX’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34JzLVRsKIE. Perdigón Castañeda, J. Katia. 2008. Santa Muerte: Protectora de los hombres. México: CONACULTA Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Pérez Salazar, Gabriel, Francesco Gervasi, and Basilia Fernanda Cuevas Cuevas. 2014. “Expresión de identidades religiosas en línea: El caso de la Santa Muerte en Facebook.” Memoria Encuentro AMIC 2014. http://amic2014.uaslp.mx/g1/g1_02.pdf. Quijano, Aníbal. 2007. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 168–78. Relea, Francesc. 2008. “El barrio que venera a la Santa Muerte.” El País, 15 June. http://elpais.com/diario/2008/06/15/eps/1213511216_850215.html. Robinson, Cedric. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Books. Roush, Laura. 2014. “Santa Muerte, Protection, and Desamparo: A View from a Mexico City Altar.” Latin American Research Review 49: 129–48. Russo, Fabrizio. 2016. “Alfonso Hernández en la Casa Blanca de Tepito.” YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MHcAZHPAqk&t=31s. Salgado Ponce, Jorge. 2012a. “01 Santa Muerte documental Alfareria 12 Parte 01  México Tepito.” Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZugaIn0eX4. Salgado Ponce, Jorge. 2012b. “02 Santa Muerte documental Alfareria 12 Parte 02  México Tepito.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKlKj935n50.



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Part III

MARGINALITY BY DESIGN AND DESIGNING OUT MARGINALITY

Chapter 8

Cultural Marginality and Urban Placemaking The Case of Leicester and Ouro Preto Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos and Tom Hulme It is now almost thirty years since Robert Hewison (1987) published his classic polemic on the rise of the heritage industry in Britain. Hewison, in accord with others (Lowenthal 1985; Wright 1985), scornfully identified a process that commodifies and sanitises, creating what he saw as a false past while also stifling cultural development and creativity in the present. Though the ‘heritage industry’ may have begun in Western Europe, it is clear that it has now spread from being ‘the concern of a handful of enthusiasts and specialists in one part of the world to something that is considered to be universally cherished’, and is now represented by several globally remitted bodies, such as UNESCO (Harrison 2012, 3). The industry has only grown since the end of the last century, with observers now talking of a ‘memory fever’ or ‘heritage craze’ – pathologising language, as Sharon Macdonald (2013, 3–4) points out, that expresses the anxiety of those doing the identifying. Heritage, as these critics would argue, does not exist as a ‘thing’, but more as a social and cultural process – one that creates ways of understanding and engaging with the present through the lens of the past (Smith 2006, 2). Things and places are given meaning and value, refracted through contemporary cultural and social values (Madgin 2010, 9–11, 73). Writers such as David Lowenthal (1998) have pointed out that this makes ‘heritage’ different to ‘history’ – at least in its ideal – and the ‘heritage fashioner’ different to the ‘historian’. Though heritage cannot fully ignore ‘history’, lest it lose respect, as a process it is concerned with enhancing certain ideas, places, or peoples. History on the other hand, and despite its limitations, at least aims to ‘convey a past that is consensually known, open to inspection and proof, continually revised and eroded as time and hindsight outdate its truths’ (ibid., xi). 143

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The blossoming of heritage studies in the period since the 1980s has (mostly) acknowledged this tension between ‘history’ and ‘heritage’. Given the discipline’s critical foundations, it has also usefully intersected with other approaches. In urban studies, scholars have recognised how the economic and cultural regeneration and vitality of cities has centred on the attraction of mobile capital and consumers (Caust and Vecco 2017). Cities, to compete, have to offer something that feels ‘unique’ – a conjoining of features and attractions, such as public art, theatres and architecturally notable buildings, with cosmopolitan places to live, work and drink (Bell and Jayne 2004, 4). In anthropology, scholars have also been concerned with the process of hailing a place (Brumann 2009; Yarrow 2017) and those directly associated with it (Collins 2009) as historic. Despite this, given the enthusiasm more broadly for heritage, it is unsurprising that regenerators or promoters have sought to incorporate a notion of ‘urban heritage’ into their reorganising of cityscapes, validating certain social groups over others – and thus embodying the central tensions mentioned earlier (Macdonald 2013, 18). Governmental authorities and corporate partners have increasingly joined forces to encourage regeneration through inward investment, with the result that certain ‘cultural sensibilities’ or ‘historical visions’ were deemed unprofitable (Kearns and Philo 1993). Invariably, more culturally palatable forms of art and creativity have thus merged with the demands of gentrification (see Courage and McKeown 2019). This chapter is a comparative attempt to analyse how narratives of ‘heritage’ have been used by city governors and urban planners in two distinctly different contexts. In our first case study of the United Kingdom, we discuss the ways in which the St George’s area of Leicester was transformed into the ‘Cultural Quarter’ in the 2000s; how this regeneration project obscured organic ‘counter culture’ in the neighbourhood; and what historians can do to challenge this narrative. In our second case study of Brazil, we discuss which narratives have been created for the city of Ouro Preto, when it was hailed as a national monument in the 1930s; how other residents have followed this narrative afterwards and how these (often competing) narratives coexist. In each case study we demonstrate how certain understandings of ‘history’ have been selected in order to create a sense of the city that excludes conflicts, nuance or contestation, and that cements (sometimes quite literally) a safe and profitable reading of the past. In doing so, we attempt to demonstrate how more inclusive narratives of urban life, both past and present, have been occluded in the search for a sanitised and more ‘sellable’ image. To be culturally marginalised, in this case, was to have one’s identity – both past and present – obscured or even erased as the fate of local neighbourhoods was put in the hands of ‘placemakers’. We make a case, in response, for the role of the scholar in challenging and contesting the marginalising narratives of neoliberal placemaking, and for the



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utility of people-centred approaches such as oral history and ethnography. Of course, given that the past is always subject to representation and interpretation and (re)invention in light of cultural change, the making of ‘history’ can be carried out by professional historians as much as heritage policy-makers. Creating or shaping ‘heritage’ is not a ‘passive’ process of preservation, then, but ‘an active process of assembling a series of objects, places and practices that we choose to hold up as a mirror to the present, associated with a particular set of values that we wish to take with us into the future’ (Harrison 2012, 4). To acknowledge this is to emphasise the role that scholars should reflexively play in challenging heritage narratives – a role that we attempt to fulfil in this chapter. URBAN REGENERATION AND HERITAGE IN LEICESTER The creation of Leicester’s Cultural Quarter where the St George’s neighbourhood once stood reflects the broader trajectory of urban regeneration in Britain in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From 1979, the Conservative government imposed ideologically driven budgetary constraints on local public expenditure, while simultaneously removing controls on private business to encourage market-led development in the United Kingdom’s deteriorating inner-cities. When New Labour came to power in 1997, it largely accepted the previous government’s diagnosis of urban problems, and continued to argue that the cause of urban deprivation lay in cities themselves, rather than in any wider social context. Government now focused on supporting the private sector by providing the initial promotion, infrastructure and public buildings that would kick-start regeneration. Through Labour’s so-called Third Way – the joining of Thatcherite neoliberal policy with postwar social democracy – the market and the state were brought more closely together (see Tallon 2013; Ashworth and Voogd 1990, 1–12). This shift was epitomised in the government’s Urban Task Force report, Towards an Urban Renaissance (1999), and the Urban White Paper on policy, Our Towns and Cities – The Future: Delivering an Urban Renaissance (2000). Calls for urban regeneration were now conjoined with the logic of gentrification – the absence of the latter term in policy documents demonstrating the lack of honesty about the effects that ‘state-led gentrification’ would come to have in terms of displacement and social polarisation (Lees 2003). Leicester, from the 1970s to 1990s, had seen its manufacturing base of hosiery and footwear collapse (Gunn and Hyde 2013, 98–100). Responding to New Labour’s White Paper, the Leicester Regeneration Company was formed in 2001. Led by senior figures from the private sector with public

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representatives from government, academia and community groups, it was a conduit through which the City Council hoped the economic fortunes of the city could be improved. Funding came from the East Midlands Development Agency (a central-government body charged with creating jobs, assisting business start-ups and investing in deprived areas), English Partnerships (a national regeneration company funded by the central Department for Communities and Local Government), the Leicester City Council, and – for individual projects – public arts bodies such as the Arts Council of England and the National Lottery. The Company sought to capitalise on St George’s strengths – the central location and proximity to transport links, architectural merit (with many listed buildings), the relatively high level of City Council building ownership and its supposed lack of a cultural identity. Following New Labour’s enthusiasm for ‘creative industries’, a new performing arts venue, creative industry workshop, art galleries and cinema aimed to create a ‘vibrant, mixed environment’ (Leicester Regeneration Company 2002). Central to the regeneration of St George’s has been the articulation of a specific sense of heritage for the area (Shorthose 2004). An accompaniment planning document, prepared by the firm Landmark Planning, was taglined ‘Respect the past, respond to the future’, while the website for ‘munro + whitten’, a landscape architecture, urban design and practice that is based in the area, notes how ‘the area fuses together elements of Leicester’s more traditional architecture with a modern twist to create a cosmopolitan cultural environment’ (munro + whitten, accessed 2018; Landmark Planning c. 2004).1 The moment-in-time chosen to situate this ‘past’ is mostly Leicester’s Victorian and Edwardian industrial heritage. Case in point is Maker’s Yard, a conversion of a Grade II listed 1850s hosiery factory (the oldest surviving in the region) into a workspace for creative artists and designers, portrayed as a resourceful reinvention of Leicester’s industrial heritage.2 Public artworks and information boards mostly prioritise the history of St George’s as a place of work and industry, though some artworks remember other aspects of the area’s history, such as the former refugee shelter, the Secular Society, the St George’s Church or the former Guild of the Disabled (Leicester City Council 2008). An ‘audio trail’, commissioned by the council and created by a local media company called Watch This Space, also combined historical research, interviews with local people, and soundscapes to give a more nuanced description of the area’s transformation. The heritage priority, however, it could be summarised, has been industrial history (from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s); limited social history (the narrative ending in the 1970s) and architectural (particularly focusing on the Victorian and Edwardian periods). The 1980s and 1990s, when both industry and most social organisations had left, thus appears as a ‘blank canvas’: a moment that enabled a new cultural vision to be imprinted when the political



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agenda of regeneration fully arrived in the early 2000s. Heritage, by definition, is a process of creation that invests meaning and value in certain aspects of the past, while forgetting others (Smith 2006, 1–3). In terms of the city, an area is presented as ‘then’ and ‘now’, or ‘before’ and ‘after’. Transition is merely a brief (and essentially empty) stage that led to a present reimagining of the urban environment. In those years of heavy industrial decline, however, St George’s was actually the site of organic cultural reuse. Minority communities (such as Afro-Caribbean and LGBT people) and movements that frequently met with public disapproval (rave culture and swingers) took advantage of the post-industrial ‘urban twilight’ – its seclusion and affordability – to create new spaces of activity. The ‘authorised heritage discourse’ of the Cultural Quarter has failed to capture this past, and has made history ‘safe and sterile, shorn of danger, subversion and seduction’ (Urry 1995, 52). In doing so, less powerful or mainstream cultural voices have been marginalised and ultimately sacrificed on the altar of gentrification and profit. The decisions over what is conserved and valued, who does the conserving, for what motives and how this is managed brought a power dimension to the transformation of de industrial space into post-industrial space (Madgin 2010, 11). What role, then, can historians play in restoring the people of ‘deindustrial’ Leicester to these narratives? In 2013, I (Hulme) was employed in an Arts and Humanities Research Council project that aimed to create a new mobile phone app that detailed the history of the Cultural Quarter. Ostensibly, the brief was modest – to find out what industries and firms had been active in the St George’s area, and to show how they had been reused in the noughties as part of the Cultural Quarter transformation. Because little archival material remained for constructing the social history of the area, oral history interviewing was one of the central approaches we took. In carrying out this research, however, it was the marginalised voices of St George’s in the 1980s and 1990s that came to the fore. Oral interviews, as historians have acknowledged, can provide a deeper and richer understanding of the experience of urban life. Personal testimony shows how those on the fringes of public acceptability actively shaped the urban landscape to create their own meaning and identities. Such an approach can give those who made and experienced history a central place in its telling through their own words (Herbert and Rodger 2007; Thompson 1978). In what follows, I use some of these interviews to tell an alternative history of the Cultural Quarter. I place these alongside some of the aforementioned interviews carried out by Watch This Space; importantly, much of the material they recorded did not make it into their tightly and non-contentiously conceived audio trail.3 As keen local artists and musicians, they themselves certainly recognised the more diverse history of the area, noting how ‘they’re building this big expensive, um, theatre . . . but there has been, like, loads of

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just little kind of clubs [already]’.4 One such club was Dielectric, an infamous rave venue until its closure in 1998. Such a place has not featured in any descriptions of the Cultural Quarter. It was situated in the basement of the Victorian Grade II listed Queen’s building – formerly used for industry – at the centre of the Cultural Quarter. Empty by the late 1980s, in the early 1990s its inner walls were painted with big yellow smiley faces, and it was reimagined as a key site for happy hardcore and techno rave. An interview with a former ‘raver’ made it clear that Dielectric was a notable and ‘happening’ place, and drew attention to how the transient nature of St George’s allowed the club to thrive: I started to hear stuff about Dielectric and the scene in Leicester. . . . I was living in London, and travelling up to Leicester at the weekends to take part in raves. . . . Dielectric had that original [countercultural] feel. . . . [It] looked really innocuous from outside, cos it just looked like this old building, it just didn’t look like a venue if you know what I mean? (Hulme 2013b)

After Dielectric shut down in the late 1990s (following a drugs raid), the building was again reused from around 2002 until the early 2010s – this time as a provocatively named swingers club, G Spot. Like Dielectric, G Spot benefitted from the secluded nature of St George’s. When attention was brought to the area with the construction of the Curve theatre (2005–2008), however, this benefit of the de industrialised neighbourhood vanished. G Spot’s manager demanded compensation for the damage he perceived the theatre’s proximity caused to his business, but it finally closed its doors around 2012 (Leicester Mercury 2008). Unsurprisingly, G Spot does not feature in the promotion of the Cultural Quarter either. Any attempt to bring back a permanent nightclub in the Queen’s Building has failed, at least partially due to complaints from residents in the new nearby apartments created from converted factories, and the building is currently being converted into ‘luxury’ flats (Elvin 2012). Rave is not the only musical culture to have blossomed in St George’s. The Herbert Marshall Music Depot, just down the street from the Curve, was originally constructed in the 1870s as a piano showroom. Until the 1980s, it was then home to a whole host of local boot and shoe firms. Gradually less and less of the available space was used as the surrounding industries declined until, in 1983, the building was reopened as Helsinki – a bar, café and nightclub catering to the New Romantics and nascent LGBT scene. As Anna Mee, a local woman who worked in the St George’s area in the 1970s and 1980s, described: It wasn’t a place where the old guys, the old townies, went; it was just ultratrendy people . . . you’d get guys that wore make-up, and, you know, you’d get



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the gay scene that went down there as well, yeah, it [was] really alternative. (Hulme 2013a)

In response to a question about the supposed novelty of the bar to gay people, or those with ‘alternative lifestyles’, such as ‘men dressing up as women’, a former bouncer at the club laughed and described how Yeah, there was a few of those, yeah, most certainly, but [I] had no issues with that. . . . Helsinki’s was accommodating . . . to everyone, you know, regardless of your sexual orientation, you know, whether you’re a cross-dresser . . . they had no issues with that at all, as long as they behaved themselves, and had a good evening, that was fine. (Hulme 2013c)

The venue is still loved by those who passed through its doors, with communities on Facebook communicating through a group affectionately called ‘I Spent My 80s Weekends at Helsinkis and the Central Bar.’ Sometime in the mid-1990s, the bar shut, and remained empty for several years. However, as new life was given to the area following public and private investments; Helsinki reopened in the early noughties. It has stayed open until the present day, but has not featured in the public promotion of the Cultural Quarter. Other minority cultures also found the St George’s area a safe space. Before the Curve Theatre was built, the site was a mismatch of underused or empty spaces and unloved or empty buildings. One building was taken over in 1977 by the Leicester United Caribbean Association (known as LUCA), which had formerly been based in nearby Highfields, originally an Afro-Caribbean area of the city. It was funded in part by the City Council and reflected the need for a dedicated Caribbean institution after the influx of Caribbean migrants during the 1950s following labour shortages and unrestricted migration and the hostility that many black people in Leicester faced (Chessum 2000, 247–49). The building was modified to create space for seminar rooms, offices, a restaurant, exhibition space and an area for discos and dancing. Classes were held to teach reggae, ska and calypso music. As David Cole, now assistant manager at the African Caribbean Centre and formerly involved with LUCA, explained, it was the centre of black culture in Leicester: This place was the hive of activity in terms of arts and stuff, because everybody used to come to us to see what we could organise . . . nearly every kind of arts you could imagine, we had it at one stage there, or we used to direct people where to go . . . [funding] stopped in 19 . . . [pauses] was it 1990? And as far as I’m concerned there has been nothing able to fill the gap since then.5

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It was the secureness of the St George’s area, and its distance from the racist hostile city centre, that made it so suitable for an organisation like LUCA. Cole remembered that You could guarantee every single time on a Friday or Saturday night, coming from Luca . . . lot of white boys, alcohol, think they’re Tarzan, fights. Every single weekend that went on for. . . . In the seventies or eighties it was rough, to say the least.6

But St George’s offered a respite. Cole described how ‘people saw Luca as that sort of on the outskirts of the town, where I don’t have to go into the heart of town where most of the trouble was.’ Steve Hawkins, a youth worker in the area in the 1970s and 1980s, corroborated this, remembering that ‘large number of young fellas who come down from Highfields and that side of town was still not really developed as town, and it was the area that you could go and not get too much hassle’.7 Eventually, as funding dwindled in the late 1990s, LUCA moved to smaller premises in another part of the city. When an area is gentrified, as has happened with the transition from St George’s to the Cultural Quarter and with the preservation of Ouro Preto as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (as we will discuss), older uses are quickly rendered problematic. Sex and sexuality, drugs and dancing or local institutions no longer given funding, do not fit the image that publicprivate coalitions of regenerators usually want to create (Guy, Henneberry and Rowley 2002). But historians, working with the public and with new technologies, can visualise this past. In doing so, they cannot overcome the social effects of the ‘continuing embourgoisement of central city locations,’ but they can provide an increasingly necessary critical interjection (Slater 2006, 738). The story of the rise, fall and reinvention of St George’s is now thus presented through a multimedia trail containing short histories of twenty-six key buildings in the area, historic and contemporary photographs and extracts from these oral history recordings. Users can explore the content via a map showing their own location within the Cultural Quarter and the position of each of the twenty-six buildings. Using this app, visitors to the cultural quarter can now come to what I hope is a much more balanced conclusion about the history of the cultural quarter. St George’s industrial heritage has not been erased or challenged, but the counterculture that was so vital to people in Leicester has been reinserted. History and heritage are not synonymous, and both are contested and problematic, but it does not follow that the historian should stand by and do nothing as culture is defined from above for solely economic reasons.



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IMPERIALISM AND MARGINALITY IN OURO PRETO Brazilian mega-cities have called international attention as sites of urban inequalities and violence. Fear of crime has led to the outmigration of families from urban centres. Looking for security by fencing off private spaces in exclusive condominiums, suburbs became popular in places such as São Paulo especially after the 1980s (Caldeira 2000). However, the abandonment of public and central spaces by the upper class did not leave these areas empty. The urban poor have occupied abandoned central buildings around important transportation hubs in that city, but they fight for the right to reside there, especially in São Paulo’s Crackland, so called because of the concentration of drug consumption (de Souza Santos 2018). Housing for marginalised groups competes especially with gentrification, as government policies in the 2000s have promoted cultural policies to attract middleclass residents back to the ‘centre’, hoping to turn that area of the city into a historical and cultural zone and reducing the possibility of social housing. Regeneration policies are infused with a sense of nostalgia that arises in the face of crime, violence and segregation. An imagined past promotes an idea that life was safer when cities were smaller (Holston 2009, 283). The perception of the past of cities is however disputed and a sense of romanticism does not always resonate if the reality for many then residents was one of colonial suppression. Nevertheless, when life in mega-cities becomes associated with violence, cultural heritage and memories of an imagined past are promoted as solutions, throwing historic cities like Ouro Preto and Paraty in Brazil or Oaxaca and San Cristobal de las Casas in Mexico into the spotlight. Ouro Preto, one of a few preserved colonial cities in Brazil, is a place where the city centre is a sought-after location to live, in contrast to many towns and cities in the country. Because the centre has varied shops, hotels, galleries, museums and open spaces for cultural events, it is perceived as a dynamic location at all times. However, the city centre has not always been a coveted space to live. In the early twentieth century, the city lost the majority of its residents to the recently built new state capital of Belo Horizonte and most houses in central Ouro Preto were abandoned. When preservation laws gained momentum in the city, there was a shared sense of hope that a new economic engine would emerge. However, the new status of a preserved city brought with it more regulations governing the use of built space, making it hard for large families to cope. As was the case with Leicester’s post-industrial collapse in 1970s–1990s, those who remained in Ouro Preto were not the focus of the heritage-developmental agenda. Limited by houses unable to change as families did, many residents have moved to the outskirts.

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In addition, aluminium industries moved to town and operated in the peripheries, generating centrifugal growth. Central areas became popular amongst students and tourists. These groups are usually able to cope with increasing accommodation prices, either because of their short stay in the city or because of university subsidies in the case of students. Wealthier residents who have permanent jobs, such as in public administration, can also cope with rising rents, while for those in temporary and precarious positions in tourism or in mining companies, squatting is a viable option. Different groups of residents thus meet in the city centre, where commerce and leisure happens, but usually in a hierarchical relationship, where ‘meeting does not mean mixing’, as described to me by a resident. The city has patterns of segregation, mainly visible through places of residence; however, the public use of central areas may still give an idea of a non-segregated city at first sight. The role of the ethnographer in a town such as Ouro Preto is thus to understand the urban marginality that is happening not only despite but also because of its central cultural heritage site status. Analysis of the history of Ouro Preto involves looking at its many changes of economic fortunes: gold mining started in the beginning of the 1700s, but later the city oscillated from population growth to decline when the gold that seemed so endless ‘dried up’ after little more than half a century of violent exploration. Some city dwellers remained and others arrived when the city became the administrative capital of Minas Gerais, and politics its new gem. But politics left in 1897 when the capital of Minas Gerais moved to Belo Horizonte. And it was at that moment of loss of both people and political status that preservation efforts gained impulse. The construction of a tangible national memory shaped a distinctive representation of the past for Ouro Preto (Chuva 2009). Through history, emphasising heroes and architecture, the city was hailed as a ‘theatre of happenings of great historical relevance in the formation of [Brazil’s] nationality’ (Decree 22928, 1933), and the preservation of its colonial layout followed. However, historic and aesthetic parameters did not advance population and economic growth, which happened only with the arrival of new industries post-1950s, marking the beginning of a peripheral growth on the slopes of surrounding hills. Migrant workers along with other residents of Ouro Preto and visitors are familiar with the historic centre, which mainly celebrates Tiradentes, a hero of Brazil’s most known independence struggle against Portugal, the Inconfidência Mineira (Maxwell 2004). Tiradentes was executed in Ouro Preto during the colonial era and post-independence Brazil recognised his struggle by erecting a monument in celebration of the 100th anniversary of his death in the centre of the Independence Square,8 currently known as Tiradentes Square, where his head was displayed after the failure of the Inconfidência Mineira. The Square that once symbolised colonial power, now celebrates



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independence. However, the city has not prompted a shared communication of a past of heroism for the majority of residents. The city’s cultural heritage is perceived differently by different groups of people who have decided to live or visit the town. While some residents live centrally and may enjoy cultural festivals and the offer of education and leisure opportunities, usually those possibilities cater mainly for ‘those coming from elsewhere’: university students and tourists.9 For residents who feel excluded from central housing and events, more than merely preserving monuments, the town freezes aspects of privileges and segregation echoing its colonial days. As a resident of Ouro Preto explained, ‘The problems of today have contemporary narratives, but are similar to those from the past: a resentment towards those from the outside by those who are from here’ (9 April 2013). Conflicts are at the heart of everyday narratives of the city. Ouro Preto’s architecture expresses more than the typical religious dualism of Baroque style ‘of apprehension and hope’ (Ávila 2001, 116), but evokes oppositions between Ouropretanos and ‘those coming from elsewhere’. To diminish aspects of unfairness, and bridge interests, local governments have repeatedly offered cultural opportunities through educational programmes with schools: such as by organising visits to museums, art galleries, and tours around cultural and historic sites outside preserved central areas. Familiarising residents with what the city offers for ‘those coming from elsewhere’ is intended to diminish perceptions of exclusion. But executors of such programmes highlight the challenges because learning about the monuments of the city is also learning that residents’ idea of home threatens preservation.10 Because houses in the outskirts, often far from central areas, are visible from the centre due to the hilly aspect of the city, and preservation parameters were set on aesthetical basis. In addition to that, ideas of preservation and permanence have little to do with lives that are connected through a sense of improvising and change, typical for informal settlements in Brazil. The connection residents then express with the city is servile, based on opportunities to cater for tourists and students. Finally, the history one learns in Ouro Preto, represented in Tiradentes Square is also selective, revealing heroes of an independence movement related to a Brazilian-born elite, while the history of the majority of the people who used to live in Ouro Preto, such as slaves and their descendants, is mainly represented through a recollection of torture objects in local museums (Hale 1997, 396). In Ouro Preto, Cuzco or in other preserved cities in Latin America, residents ‘have multifaceted and contradictory relationships to ancient remains . . . most obviously because the descendants of those who created the admired ancient civilisation have been socially denigrated’ (Silverman 2002, 883). Consequently, local inequalities have not been reduced, nor centrally attended through outreach programmes. While most residents would not

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seriously challenge the importance of maintaining the Tiradentes statue, or the many other local monuments, relationships with those monuments and commemorative celebrations are diverse. Residents have not collectively adopted the normative ideal of inclusion and identity through the preserved cityscape. Despite the fact that permanent residents of Ouro Preto have expressed the opinion that the town’s main preserved areas reveal legacies of colonialism, such as exclusion, disagreeing with dominant aesthetical and historical values is often associated with a ‘lack of education’. This means that residents express exclusion privately, but often agree publicly with the importance of preserving the city’s architecture to avoid being considered ‘non-cultural’. The voice of discontent is thus revealed during day-to-day private conversations, making ethnography key to understand the relationship between residents and heritage. The idea that preserving the city would enshrine one interpretation of history and economically re-signify the city has thus failed. In Ouro Preto, when cultural heritage focused on the symbolism of national uprisings that took place in town, it simplified history to a dualism between colonisers and colonised. Today’s residents in everyday narratives also seem to incorporate ideas of dualism, this time between permanent residents (often poor), and temporary visitors and students (wealthier than the first group), often referring to the latter as ‘colonisers’. However, Ouro Preto, as any other city, is home to a ‘plurality of worlds’ (Das 1986, 1), and as such, an ethnographer is invited to perceive the multiplicity of voices and movement in people’s routines. Giving voice to the contradictions and dynamics in a preserved city is important to disrupt the perception that conflicts of today are a merely continuation of those of the past. The search for a common enemy in the creation of a national identity allowed the nation to look away from struggles amongst the colonised, a diverse group formed by indigenous groups, former slaves, Brazilian-born people of different classes (Chasteen 2003, xviii). Colonial history is narrated emphasising an idea of ‘Brazilianness’ that underplays or erases ethnic differences. Dominant narratives shaped by conflicts between Brazilians and colonisers deny specific group identities and suppress the importance of complexities in a mining economy. This simplified antagonism of colonisers and the colonised goes further in history and is nowadays replaced by a resentment about those who come from outside against those who are from the city. Through monuments and official narratives, we have the overshadowing of the complexity of Ouro Preto’s colonial society, which included not only Portuguese colonisers as local oppressors, but also other Brazilianborn groups who enslaved and killed indigenous groups in the search for gold (Fausto 1999, 47–51). Artisans and different religious groups were also part of that complex society (Maxwell 1973, 92). The enslaved were



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also diverse in faith, ethnicity and place of birth. Ouro Preto’s contemporary complexities tend to be glossed over in similar ways. Natives, who consider they belong to the city, consider that the city does not belong to them. Preservation, which should supposedly allow people to identify with the place, has instead generated identification not by locals but amongst those who visit the city and segregation between visitors and residents. However, while materially excluded from the city, natives do not form a cohesive group. In an economy that depends on tourism and on temporary industrial jobs (mainly related to mining), there is a strong competition for the few permanent employment positions available. Many residents open small businesses in town, usually offering services as tour guides, renting rooms to tourists or students or opening small cafes and restaurants. Those residents then compete against each other and will complain about the privileges displayed by students and tourists while at the same time relying on them for income. Similar conflicts of interests over space have been described in the context of Johannesburg, South Africa (Simone 2004). A challenge for those involved in urban planning lies in ‘practic[ing] ways of seeing and engaging urban spaces that are characterised simultaneously by regularity and provisionality’ (ibid., 408). In Ouro Preto, urban preservation means maintaining the city while incorporating the diverse oppositions and collaborations between citizens within and outside the context of preserved sites. Ethnography – using interviews, archives, bibliographic analysis and participant observation – revealed the city of the past and its contemporary everyday life as part of an open-ended conflict. Sharing varied city interpretations and city histories is a work in progress. There are several versions of the past that should gain space in Ouro Preto: biographies of slaves, religious syncretism and informal economies (beyond mining). With ethnographic writing published in journal articles and blogs, and with visits to the city for events and meetings, the ethnographer can add a polyphonic voice to a city that has learnt about itself through a national narrative emphasising dualism between colonisers and the colonised. One result of my (de Souza Santos) research is the creation of an Annual Forum on Social Governance.11 The forum, which had already two editions in 2017 and 2018, is a space to discuss, together with the university, social movements, the local government and residents, how we can diversify economic activities in the city, the interpretation and the use of local monuments and how we can expand the existing knowledge of the city’s history using multiple sources, including family stories. This multiplicity may allow us to know more of the past of slavery so far pushed aside and in the long run correct the mistake of making a narrative (through hegemonic historic and cultural interpretations as well as economic uses) where a narrative already exists.

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CONCLUSION In the case of Leicester, history was simplified or collapsed in order to provide a ‘blank slate’ for regeneration. The twilight years of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, when St George’s was home to several countercultural movements, were downplayed in favour of a safer – and more established – version of the civic and industrial past. In Ouro Preto, the preservation of the historic city centre has focused on national uprisings in order to enable the creation of a simplistic version of the past in which colonisers as ‘common enemy’ allowed a new inclusive identity for the colonised to gain power. In allowing the culture of this past to fix meaning in the present, however, specific group identities and ethnic differences have been collapsed or ignored. In summary, the regeneration discourse of both these places has laid claims to specific ideas of heritage; it has cherry-picked from the past in order to provide a politically and publicly palatable tool for shaping the present. We have shown how this is problematic in terms of ‘history’, in that the past was more complex than these ‘urban heritage’ stories allow, but we have also shown how selective history has the ability to undermine and nuance contemporary urban complexities, impeding the integration of different groups in the city. By bringing these two case studies together, we can see how both the logic and techniques of cultural marginality transcends both geographical boundaries and nationally specific political-economic regimes. To acknowledge these similarities is to consider more fully the power dynamics of the actors that define the image of the city – and for what economic or social purposes. When Henri Lefebvre (1968) influentially elaborated the term ‘the right to the city’ at the end of the 1960s, he was referring to the right to difference, and the right to inhabit and to participate in the city as a citizen. Today, Lefebvre’s point still stands. To expand, however, we would argue that the right to the city is not only about physical presence or inhabitancy, but also the right to be included in the present and future cultural narratives of the city. With current governments en thralled to city branding, large corporations and finance capital, it seems unlikely that publicly supported gentrification is going to disappear. Researchers such as ethnographers and oral historians, then, will likely not stop social cleansing. Even if still inhabiting the city, those deemed marginal to the projects of the urban elites are (and will likely continue to be) expelled from the branding of the city as the ‘class and race contours’ of neighbourhoods ‘rubbed smooth’ in the quest for a ‘palatable past’ (Smith 1996, 25). As the old cores of cities change before our eyes, more socially active scholarship is thus one small way that urban marginality can be contested and lived culture preserved – if only as memory.



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NOTES 1. Shorthose compared the professional- and institution-led development of Leicester (‘engineered’), with the informal and DIY approach of Nottingham’s cultural quarter (‘vernacular’). He drew attention to the use of new architecture in this first period of Leicester’s regeneration (pre-2004), but, in the intervening years, the recycling of industrial buldings has clearly come to the fore as well. 2. See also the various information boards that were created in collaboration between the City Council and University of Leicester c. 2015–2016. 3. All material quoted from Watch This Space interviews by kind permission of Steve Gibbs. 4. “Interview with anonymous.” Watch This Space (2008). http://www.watch-thisspace.org.uk/. 5. “Interview with David Cole.” Watch This Space (2008). http://www.watch-thisspace.org.uk/. 6. “Interview with David Cole.” Watch This Space (2008). http://www.watch-thisspace.org.uk/. 7. “Interview with Steve Hawkins.” Watch This Space (2008). http://www.watchthis-space.org.uk/. 8. Lei 3 from 25 September 1891. From a visit to the Municipal Archive of Ouro Preto on 4 December 2013. 9. In an interview in September 2013, the then Principal of the Federal University of Ouro described that until 2005, only 10 percent of the students at the Federal University of Ouro Preto (UFOP) were from Ouro Preto, all others commuted to study at the institution. In 2013, that number rose to 30 percent. While this is a substantial increase, it does not change the fact that the university mainly caters for students from elsewhere. 10. Interview conducted with executors of educational programmes with communities from poor backgrounds on the 19 September 2013. 11. For more, information please visit http://www.ouropreto.mg.gov.br/noticia/49 (in Portuguese only).

REFERENCES Ashworth, Gregory J., and Henk Voogd. 1990. Selling the City: Marketing Approaches in Public Sector Urban Planning. London: John Wiley. Ávila, Affonso. 2001. “The Baroque Culture of Brazil.” In Brazil: Body and Soul, edited by Edward J. Sullivan, 114–28. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Bell, David, and Mark Jayne. 2004. “Conceptualizing the City of Quarters.” In City of Quarters: Urban Villages in the Contemporary City, edited by David Bell and Mark Jayne, 1–12. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Brumann, Christoph. 2009. “Outside the Glass Case: The Social Life of Urban Heritage in Kyoto.” American Ethnologist 36 (2): 276–99.

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Caldeira, Teresa P. R. 2000. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caust, Josephine, and Marilena Vecco. 2017. “Is UNESCO World Heritage Recognition a Blessing or Burden? Evidence from Developing Asian Countries.” Journal of Cultural Heritage 27: 1–9. Chasteen, John Charles. 2003. “Introduction: Beyond Imagined Communities.” In Beyond Imagined Communities, edited by Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, ix–xxv. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Chessum, Lorna. 2000. From Immigrants to Ethnic Minority: Making Black Community in Britain. London: Taylor & Francis. Chuva, Márcia Regina Romeiro. 2009. Os Arquitetos da memoria: Sociogênese das praticas de preservação do patrimônio cultural no Brasil (anos 1930–1940). Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ. Collins, John F. 2009. “Historical and Cultural Patrimony in Brazil: Recent Work in Portuguese.” Latin American Research Review 44 (1): 291–301. Courage, Cara, and Anita McKeown (eds.). 2019. Creative Placemaking: Research, Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Das, Veena. 1986. “Varieties of Life and the World.” In The Word and the World: Fantasy, Symbol and Record, edited by Veena Das, 1–8. New Delhi: Sage Publications. de Souza Santos, Andreza Aruska. 2018. “Risky Closeness and Distance in Two Fieldwork Sites in Brazil.” Contemporary Social Science 13 (3–4): 429–43. Elvin, Laura. 2012. “Residents Oppose Nightclub Bid at Former Site of G-Spot Sex Club in Leicester.” Leicester Mercury Online, 27 November. Accessed 1 December 2012 (no longer available). Fausto, Boris. 2014. A Concise History of Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gunn, Simon, and Colin Hyde. 2013. “Post-Industrial Place, Multicultural Space: The Transformation of Leicester, c. 1970–1990.” International Journal of Regional and Local History 8 (2): 94–111. Guy, Simon, John Henneberry and Steven Rowley. 2002. “Development Cultures and Urban Regeneration.” Urban Studies 39 (7): 1181–96. Hale, Lindsay. 1997. “Preto Velho: Resistance, Redemption, and Engendered Representations of Slavery in a Brazilian Possession-Trance Religion.” American Ethnologist 24 (2): 392–414. Harrison, Rodney. 2012. Heritage: Critical Approaches. London: Routledge. Herbert, Joanna, and Richard Rodger. 2007. “Frameworks: Testimony, Representation and Interpretation.” In Testimonies of the City: Identity, Community and Change in a Contemporary Urban World, edited by Joanna Herbert and Richard Rodger, 1–19. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Hewison, Robert. 1987. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen. Holston, James. 2008. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Holston, James. 2009. “Insurgent Citizenship in an Era of Global Urban Peripheries.” City and Society 21 (2): 245–67.



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Hulme, Tom. 2013a. “Interview with Anna Mee,” Affective Digital Histories. Held by East Midlands Oral History Archive. Hulme, Tom. 2013b. “Interview with an Anonymous Man Born in 1970,” Affective Digital Histories. Held by East Midlands Oral History Archive. Hulme, Tom. 2013c. “Interview with Winston Thomas,” Affective Digital Histories. Held by East Midlands Oral History Archive. Kearns, Gerry, and Chris Philo. 1993. Selling Places: The City as Cultural Capital, Past and Present. Oxford: Pergamon. Landmark Planning. Undated c. 2004. St George’s Quarter. Leicester: [digital publication]. Lees, Loretta. 2003. “Visions of ‘Urban Renaissance’: The Urban Task Force Report and the Urban White Paper.” In Urban Renaissance? New Labour, Community and Urban Policy, edited by Rob Imrie and Mike Raco, 61–82. Bristol: The Policy Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1968. Le Droit à la Ville. Paris: Anthropos. Leicester City Council. 2008. “CQ Art.” http://cqart.leicester.gov.uk/, accessed 19 March 2018. Leicester Mercury Online. 2008. “Theatre ‘Hitting Sex Club Trade’,” 9 February. Accessed 1 December 2010 (no longer online). Leicester Regeneration Company. 2002. Masterplan. Leicester: [digital publication]. Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowenthal, David. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macdonald, Sharon. 2013. Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. London: Routledge. Madgin, Rebecca. 2010. “Reconceptualising the Historic Urban Environment: Conservation and Regeneration in Castlefield, Manchester, 1960–2009.” Planning Perspectives 25 (1): 29–48. Maxwell, Kenneth. 2004. Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1750– 1808. London: Routledge. “munro + whitten website.” http://www.munro-whitten.co.uk/front/Place/place/ 214239, accessed 19 March 2018. Shorthose, Jim. 2004. “The Engineered and the Vernacular in Cultural Quarter Development.” Capital and Class 84: 159–78. Silverman, Helaine. 2002. “Touring Ancient Times: The Present and Presented Past in Contemporary Peru.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 881–902. Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16 (3): 407–29. Slater, Tom. 2006. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30 (4): 737–57. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge. Tallon, Andrew. 2013. Urban Regeneration in the UK. London: Routledge. Thompson, Paul. 1978. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Urban Task Force. 1999. Towards an Urban Renaissance. London: Spon Press. Urban White Paper. 2000. Our Towns and Cities—the Future: Delivering an Urban Renaissance. London: Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. Urry, John. 1995. “How Societies Remember the Past.” The Sociological Review 43 (1): 45–65. Watch This Space. 2008a. “Leicester Cultural Quarter.” http://www.watch-thisspace.org.uk/leicester-cultural-quarter1.html, accessed 19 March 2018. Wright, Andrew. 1985. On Living in an Old Country. London: Verso. Yarrow, Thomas. 2017. “Where Knowledge Meets: Heritage Expertise at the Intersection of People, Perspective, and Place.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23 (1): 95–109.

Chapter 9

Marginalised Development and Ad-Hoc Tactics for Growth Lucía Martín López, Christoph Lueder and Almudena Cano

A SPATIAL APPROACH TO MARGINALITY Sociological approaches to the concept of marginality highlight the lack of power, participation and integration experienced by a group, or a territory (Billson 2005). Such groups are seen as marginal inasmuch as they are excluded from capitalist models of urban development. Latin American debates of the 1960s and 1970s refer to marginal groups in a context of ‘dramatic urbanisation which was driven mainly by the growth of informal settlements (favelas, barrios, ranchos) and a workforce employed outside the formal established economies’ (Bernt and Colini 2013, 15). In 1976, Janice Perlman had provocatively titled her seminal book The Myth of Marginality, demonstrating that in terms of their contribution to the city, informal settlements cannot be classified as marginal. Perlman (1976), Quijano (1974), Nun (1969), Eckstein (2001), among others, argue that these populations are not outside or on the margins, but rather asymmetrically integrated into the system, providing their labour power, political support and cultural richness but receiving little in return (Perlman 2004). Eckstein contends that those who control the means of physical coercion and the means of producing wealth have power over those who lack such means. This power can include the control of ideas, as well as material resources (Eckstein 2001, 17). Returning to the favelas of Rio more than four decades after her 1976 book, Perlman found a series of improvements in collective consumption of urban services achieved by the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. Statistics demonstrate that now 98 percent or more have electricity and a bathroom in their home, that about 60 percent own washing machines, that the grandchildren of those what first settled there have achieved near economic parity with 161

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the residents of the surrounding municipality and that illiteracy had declined from 72 percent to 0 percent (Perlman 2014). In those favelas, where inhabitants had been allowed to improve on site, dramatic improvements in appearance had been achieved. Yet a survey found that residence in a favela is the most widespread reason for stigmatisation (84 percent), even ahead of skin colour (80 percent) and far ahead of residence in public housing (45 percent) (Perlman 2014). Such statistics highlight the need to research the space of informal settlements, and debate not only their economic and social composition but also their spatial logic and the spatial mechanisms by which informal settlements produce urban space and ‘make’ cities. Two opposing positions and perspectives are particularly relevant to a spatial approach to this debate. On the one hand, a position shared by many architects, urban planners and some sociologists, who are fascinated by ingenious spatial solutions to crisis they discover in informal settlements, and by the capacity of their inhabitants to organise collectively, as neighbours and families, to consolidate their settlement through a tenacious series of small, incremental steps (Dovey 2012; Owen, Dovey and Raharjo 2013). Here, the perspective is one of learning from the favelas, barrios and ranchos in order to overcome the divide between the formal and the informal city, to move past ‘asymmetrical integration’. On the other hand, scholars in urban studies, such as Ananya Roy (2004, 98), caution that design and planning approaches to informality tend to be concentrated in redeveloping ‘space and buildings rather than people’s socioeconomic experience’. Roy (2005) acknowledges that urban planners have become more interested in understanding the social codes, unwritten rules and informal mechanisms of social negotiation that marginalised groups rely on to govern informal settlements. She criticises that current planning responses continue to see informality as separate from formality, either through an image of informality as ‘heroic entrepreneurship’ advocated by Hernando De Soto or through an image of informality in crisis, of ungovernable ‘informal hypergrowth’ cities, proposed by Sir Peter Hall and Ulrich Pfeiffer (Roy 2005, 148). Hall and Pfeiffer, and De Soto argue for enablement, for helping the poor to help themselves. The implication is that it becomes possible to devolve responsibility for poverty to the poor (Roy 2005, 148). An earlier generation of theorists had already pointed out that ‘marginality’ often is not a passing phase on a trajectory towards consolidation, but rather it results from the capitalist model itself and from concentration of capital at the international level (Cardoso and Reyna 1968; Quijano 1974; Nun 1969). From field research in Mexico City, Peter Ward (1982) reported a parallel phenomenon at local level. Not all squatter-invaders whom he surveyed became successful squatter consolidators. Rather, many sold their lots to better-off households who then consolidated rapidly (Ward 1982, 12). We recognise that an emphasis on enablement can act (or be used) to conceal the



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complex interplay of political, social and economic forces that keep marginalised populations trapped in asymmetrical relationships versus the formal city, versus the state and versus global capitalism. Aihwa Ong (2011, 2) identifies two approaches towards investigating contemporary urban conditions: ‘(a) the political economy of globalisation, and (b) the postcolonial focus on subaltern agency’ and criticises these as bearing a Marxist pedigree and thus being ‘overdetermined in their privileging of capitalism as the only mechanism and class struggle as the only resolution to urban problems’. In our attempt to understand informality at the scale of individuals and families, of homes and neighbourhoods, we are aware of the problematic nature of frameworks reducing to instantiations of a universal principle the situated phenomena and heterogeneous conditions that we observed during our field research. We seek to move beyond dichotomies such as ‘inside versus outside’, ‘marginal versus central’, ‘formal versus informal’ that continue to underpin much current practice. Drawing on Roy’s (2005, 148) work, we understand informality ‘not a separate sector but rather a series of transactions that connect different economies and spaces to one another’. We contribute three empirical case studies to the discourse, aiming to understand the complex and asynchronous trajectories of settlements and homes that lead from informal origins to varying degrees of consolidation, as well as from buildings designed by architects to informalisation through adaptations by inhabitants. The three authors visited and surveyed the three case studies between 2014 and 2018. In each case, we conducted semi-structured interviews with inhabitants, and produced measured drawings of homes. In Mexico City, Martín López surveyed a house in the context of doctoral research for the Polytechnic University of Madrid (2014). In Cosumar, Cano and Lueder surveyed a total of eight homes in collaboration with Lahbib Elmouni at the École d’Architecture de Casablanca, inviting his students and Kingston University students of architecture for part of the research project (2016–2018). In Cerro de la Cruz, Lueder surveyed ten homes in collaboration with Andrea Pino and Lautaro Ojeda, Universidad de Valparaíso and Alexandru Malaescu, Iulia Fratila, Kingston University London (2015). From each of the three episodes of field research, we selected a single dwelling in order to expose how continual socioeconomic and political struggles of inhabitants are woven into formal and informal modes of urbanisation. Casa Negrete in Mexico City was self-constructed in 1985 as a small cabin comprising of three spaces, for living and sleeping, for cooking and eating and a bathroom. Responding to the growth of the family, it has since been incrementally enlarged, radically transformed and, to a certain extent, formalised. The second case study exemplifies an inverse trajectory of progressive informalisation. A few examples of this phenomenon exist in Latin American

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countries, such as PREVI, a 1970s experimental settlement in Lima, Peru (García-Huidobro, Torriti and Tugas 2010). Outside Latin America, in Casablanca, Morocco, appropriation of French Modernist housing by inhabitants has produced numerous memorable hybrid buildings. From a survey of Cosumar, a 1932 factory town designed by the noted French architect Edmond Brion, we have selected Dar Lhadja Lakbira, an informalised house. Our third case study takes us back to Latin America: Casa Señora L. in Cerro de la Cruz, Valparaíso, Chile. Like Casa Negrete, it originated in a small cabin of three spaces that was incrementally enlarged and transformed, reflecting the family biography of its inhabitants. However, beyond the need for additional family space as the sole motivator of transformation, the owner, Señora L., cited economic motivations (rental income) as well as qualitative aspirations (her desire to enjoy views of the sea). Our analysis of the case studies is through reading of space and time as suggested by the historian Karl Schlögel. In his book titled In Space, We Read Time, Schlögel (2016) argues that historians document and interpret leaders, actions and social processes, but often fail to register and decipher the impact of spatial setting. Schlögel contends that the rooms and spaces matter, in which decisions are made, in which people encounter each other. He cites Walter Benjamin’s astonishing descriptions of spaces that evoke the atmosphere in which events take place, the spirit of the epoch (Benjamin 1999, 220–21; Benjamin 1986, 48). We propose an analogous argument for the ‘minor histories’ of everyday life. We begin by documenting the transformations that each of the three homes underwent, reflecting changes in their inhabitants’ lives. Our documentation takes the form of spatial biographies, illustrating a complex set of relationships between the built environment, political context and aspirations held by people, claims staked and rights achieved over time. Second, we analyse the tactics that inhabitant builders employ, referring to Michel de Certeau’s (1984) definition of tactics, as opposed to strategy. This conceptual framework enables us to revisit conceptions of time-based architecture proposed from the 1920s onwards by architects such as Martin Wagner (2015 [1932]), challenge assumptions on use and exchange value of informal housing (Smith 1976; Marx 1970), and ultimately, contest false binaries of informal versus formal, marginal versus core. TACTICS The common definitions of tactics and strategy are rooted in military theory, wherein military strategy identifies campaigns for winning a war, and tactics are the techniques for winning battles. Michel de Certeau adapted these terms



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to situations of everyday life and proposed a different definition that does not subordinate tactics to strategy, but rather places these terms in opposition to each other. He noted that strategy assumes a group of actors that are in control and carry out campaigns. Strategy is self-segregating; it is ‘a mastery of places through sight . . . proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured’ (de Certeau 1984, 37). In opposition to strategy, ‘tactic is an art of the weak’ (de Certeau 1985, 38). As de Certeau (1984, 38) writes: ‘It does not . . . have the options of planning general strategy and viewing the adversary as a whole within a district, visible, and objectifiable space. It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of “opportunities” and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings’. Through the three empirical case studies, we explore how builder-inhabitants of informal settlements use tactical action to produce space. Our text and drawings record transformations over time – and the tactics that produce these – as ‘objects that can be observed and measured’. Those tactics fill a gap left by the absence and disinterest of professionals such as architects, municipal officials and urban planners, who are in positions of strategic oversight. Instead, inhabitants use incremental, ad-hoc tactics derived from continuous feedback obtained through acts of construction, the experience of inhabitation and local negotiations at neighbourhood level that produce cumulative effects. In contrast to those ad-hoc tactics, Martin Wagner, the Berlin city councillor for planning developed ideas for homes conceived to anticipate growth over time. In 1931, Wagner set up a working group named Das wachsende Haus (The Growing House) that included Egon Eiermann, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Erich Mendelssohn, Hans Poelzig and Hans Scharoun. The group developed adaptable micro-homes stripped to the bare essentials that were capable of being modified once the economic circumstances of inhabitants improved (Böttcher 1932; Leupen 2005). Their strategic conceptions for flexibility and adaptability productively intersect with the tactical moves deployed by the protagonists of our case studies. The tactics of builder-inhabitants are subject to acts of consolidation, legalisation and commodification of property (Boano and Perucich 2016). Such acts determine the exchange value of a self-constructed house, as opposed to its use value. Use value in classical political economy is the power of a good to satisfy a need (Smith 1976). In Marx’s (1970) critique of political economy, any product has a labour value and a use value, and if it is traded as a commodity in markets, it additionally has an exchange value, most often expressed as a money price. The inhabitants of settlements who do not hold titles to their land or houses (or both) are unable to sell and trade their property as a commodity. Subsequent consolidation of settlements and the legalisation of land tenure create exchange value. Our case studies reveal

Figure 9.1.  Site plan Casa Negrete, Colonia Cumbres de Tepetongo, Mexico City.

Figure 9.2.  Perspective of Cumbres Tepetongo. Negrete House is located on the left side of the street. Due to topography, it is half-buried and almost invisible from the street. Unlike their neighbours, the Negrete family have not built a high fence around their home.



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that residents may trade their property or become landlords, as the family of Casa Señora L. in Valparaíso did. Hence, tactical actions of inhabitants may trigger transactions between use and exchange value that, on a strategic level, ‘can give rise to valuation of the property, the city itself and, ultimately, state investments’ (García-Huidobro, Torriti and Tugas 2010, 90). Within this complex set of local agencies, global forces and multifaceted economic, political and social interdependencies, tactical actions by builderinhabitants can act to further blur the boundaries between formal and informal mechanics of urban transformation. Our spatial biographies of three families, in Mexico, Morocco and Chile, aim to contribute to a better understanding on how tactical actions interact with those mechanics. CASA NEGRETE, COLONIA CUMBRES DE TEPETONGO, MEXICO Context The case study analysed in Mexico is located in Colonia Cumbres de Tepetongo belonging to Alcadía of Tlalpan in the south of Mexico City. The origins of Colonia Cumbres de Tepetongo date from the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s when building lots were sold fraudulently. These illegal promotions exploited the migration of thousands of people from the countryside to Mexico City during the 1970s who lost their livelihoods due to mechanisation of agriculture and import substitution industrialisation policies. The average population density of the entire territory of Tlalpan is 2,078 inhabitants per sq. km. In the urbanised area, however, the density is about 10,000 inhabitants per sq. km. Although Tlalpan attracted significant migration during the past decades, the most recent population and housing census (INEGI 2015) found that 95.3 percent of the residents of Tlalpan in 2010 came from the Alcaldía de Tlapan area and only 4.7 percent came from other munici palities. Almost 81.3 percent of houses in Tlalpan are single families; the average occupation is 3.7 people per home. Most constructions are informal and self-built by their inhabitants, and according to Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (2016, 12) most territories are characterised by a high or very high degree of marginalisation. Sheinbaum Pardo (2016) refers to the concept of marginalisation proposed by the Mexican National Population Council (CONAPO), which defines marginalisation as structural phenomenon appearing through multiple forms and intensities of exclusion. CONAPO point to three s­ocioeconomic dimensions: education, housing and availability of goods. The infrastructure of Cumbres de Tepetongo had evolved very positively, especially between 1980 and 1995 when the government of Tlalpan ran

Figure 9.3.  Casa Negrete, spatial biography.

Figure 9.4.  Casa Negrete, spatial biography.

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a program for consolidation and service provision working with national Institutes of Health and international institutions. As of 2018, the territory is served with electricity, water and drainage. Streets have been paved and soft infrastructure, such as schools, health care spaces, and churches, is provided. Spatial Biography The traditional Mexican family is characterised by an extended nucleus, in which up to four generations live together in the same house as an elementary social system characterised by conviviality. The small houses that young working couples self-built in the 1970s and 1980s in Cumbres de Tepetongo incrementally expanded to accommodate new members of the family. The house of the Negrete family underwent such a process (figures 9.1 and 9.2). Initially built by Carlos Javier and Dionisia to live with their children Fátima, Rodrigo and Erandi, the house comprises three spaces (bathroom, transformable living room in bedroom and kitchen – dining room). It then was extended to accommodate four family units (eleven people) and eleven spaces (one living – dining room, one living room, one dining room, two bathrooms, one kitchen, five bedrooms). As of 2018, the house was divided into two parts; Rodrigo’s family lived in the upper and Erandi’s family in the lower part. The main tactics for enlargement used by the inhabitants of Colonia de Cumbres de Tepetongo are horizontal extensions and vertical extrusions that form two independent homes with independent access to the upper unit via a staircase in front. Fátima Negrete explained that this is done in order to reduce overcrowding and to avoid territorial conflicts: With so many families at home, privacy and hygiene problems occurred daily because we shared the bathroom and kitchen. They [Rodrigo’s family] did not use the stove on the top floor. Sometimes it was complicated. They used the dishes at home and after that they kept them upstairs in their house. We could not cook because they left everything in their space. (Fieldwork interview 2014)

The Negrete family self-built their house with concrete blocks and a metal roofing in 1985. At first, the house had no drainage or running water, so they had to build a septic tank at the bottom of the plot and a water tank that was refilled weekly by a truck. At that time, Dionisia and Carlos Javier (the parents) slept on a sleeper couch in the living room, separated from their children by shelves. When Dionisia and Carlos Javier had managed to save enough money, they demolished the bathroom, installed a drainage system and connected it



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to the network, added a cistern to the front of the plot and – separated from the initial house – built a room out of brick and a concrete slab for the three children. This gave the parents more privacy, allowing them to sleep alone apart from the living room (figure 9.3, phase 2). In 1995, the boys and the girl started adolescence and it became necessary to build a separate space for them. The family decided to demolish the initial house and sought the help of a government architect in the formalisation of their home. They could hire this architect because they obtained a credit from Institute of National Fund for Workers Housing (INFONAVIT) granted for the construction of a new house in their own lot. They built a living room, a kitchen, a parents’ bedroom and Fátima’s bedroom (figure 9.3, phase 3). Four years later, Rodrigo’s girlfriend moved into the house. The family extended the living room for Erandi to sleep there, allowing the couple to stay alone in the bedroom (figure 9.3, phase 4). Rodrigo and his girlfriend had two children, one of whom, Carlos Javier, left the house. Erandi started living in the house with his girlfriend and daughter. When Dionisia became ill, Fátima moved with her husband and her baby. By that time, he had already built another storey that is accessed via an outside staircase in order to give the families independence from each other (figure 9.3, phase 6). The absence of specific legislation and precise regulations allowed the Negrete family to transform and expand their home.

DAR LHADJA LAKBIRA, COSUMAR, CASABLANCA, MOROCCO Context Since the 1920s, with the thriving modern industrial activities in Casablanca, the city experienced rapid demographic growth driven by migration from rural areas. The first larger factories concentrated on the wastelands of Hay Mohammadi, which became home to an emerging Moroccan working class. The federation of employers ‘Comité central des industriels’ provided housing as a key element of its development strategy. Four ‘cités ouvrières’, settlements for workers, were built, by the Lafarge, JJCarnaud, Savonnerie du Maroc and the Cosumar and Huileries companies (Kaïoua 1997). Cosumar has been singled out as ‘the most remarkable company housing settlement’ built in the 1930s in Casablanca (Rabbat 2010, 107). The French architect Edmond Brion designed the settlement to host the Muslim workers of COSUMAR (Compagnie Sucrière du Maroc) sugar factory in the area of Roches Noires. From 1932 onwards, it was built over several stages on a site adjacent to the factory. It is enclosed by a wall and accessed by two gates

Figure 9.5.  Site plan cite ouvrière Cosumar, Casablanca. Dar Lhadja Lakbira is the leftmost of the homes shown in floor plan.

Figure 9.6.  Perspective, Cosumar. The two Dar Lhadja Lakbira homes are to the left, in front of and immediately behind the arch spanning over the alleyway. The power cable marks the approximate height of the buildings as designed by Edmond Brion; originally there were three small single-level houses. The added upper level and overhanging roofs were incrementally self-constructed by inhabitants. The entrance delineated with dashed lines was filled in with masonry when the two adjacent houses were combined.



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(figure 9.5). Over time, Cosumar grew denser due to increasing numbers of workers needing to be housed. Initially, it provided 330 housing units to 1,500 inhabitants; five years later, it had expanded to 450 units. In 1939, construction was temporarily interrupted by workers’ refusal to pay their monthly rent. The rent strike was one of several actions coordinated by the union (l’association professionnelle) seeking to improve workplace and living conditions of employees. Following on from the Cosumar protests, strike actions spread to numerous companies and led to a broad resistance movement in Casablanca (Gallissot 1964). The history of labour contestation has informed the development of the Cosumar settlement over a series of transformations reacting to inhabitants’ needs and changing lifestyles. The original, standardised dwellings included one bedroom, a kitchen, a toilet and an enclosed patio. Inspired by traditional Arab House typologies (‘Dar’), larger units comprise two or more bedrooms organised around a central courtyard space. Originally the dwellings had electricity and mains drainage, but no tap water, which instead was provided by seven public fountains distributed throughout the settlement. Local amenities include a central public square in front of the mosque, two public baths (Hamam), a Koranic school, two communal bread ovens and convenience shops. Spatial Biography Streets in Cosumar are named after the native regions of the workers; house names refer to the householders and to family history. For example, Dar Lhadja Lakbira means ‘the house of Hadja Lakbira’ (figure 9.6). Hadja Lakbira’s father-in-law was one of the first generation of employees of the sugar factory. In the 1930s, a single-room dwelling was allocated to his family. Like most neighbours, the family early on covered the patio. When his son married his wife, Hadja Lakbira, and started working for the factory, they moved to the house next door (figures 9.7 and 9.8, phase 2). The spatial layout of that house was similar and they found the courtyard already covered with corrugated metal sheets. Hadja Lakbira remembers how some of the patios of her neighbours once had beautiful fruit trees that provided shade and fresh air. Despite the bucolic views and the thermal comfort provided by the open-air patio, the family sacrificed sunlight and ventilation in favour of a larger covered room accommodating shared daily activities. The sheet metal roofing caused problems with rain and dust; therefore, once the family had made some savings, Hadja’s husband replaced it with a concrete slab. At this point in time, Hadja Lakbira and her husband shared the main bedroom with their children. The other bedroom was mainly used for storage and had a small bed for occasional visitors. In part due to their gloomy

Figure 9.7.  Dar Lhadja Lakbira, Cosumar. Diagram of incremental transformation.

Figure 9.8.  Dar Lhadja Lakbira, Cosumar, spatial biography.

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atmosphere, those bedrooms were mostly used at night, while family activities took place in front part of the house during the day. As the small cooking area had no window of its own, the entrance door was always kept open to allow in light and ventilation. Soumia, Hadja’s daughter, recounted that household activities took place in front of the door, providing an opportunity for women to socialise: Our mother and other neighbours used the alleyway for drying clothes and bread, for washing dishes . . . streets were bustling in the mornings. (Fieldwork interview 2016)

The spatial constraints within homes encouraged activities in the street during daytime. According to a neighbour, Khadija, this instilled a sense of community that continues to the present day: The families are still very close with one another. (Fieldwork interview 2016)

By the 1960s, Hadja Lakbira and her husband already had three daughters and four sons, creating urgent need for extra space. The solution, Hadja Lakbira relates, was to combine the two houses into one and live with her parents-in-law: We managed to have all the family together under the same roof. (Fieldwork interview 2018)

This was a significant investment that doubled the available space for the family and provided an opportunity to adapt the spatial layout to the needs of the family (figures 9.7 and 9.8, phase 3). By removing part of the dividing wall, the front areas of the houses were connected. The back sections remained separate; internal partitions were removed to enlarge the bedrooms. The two toilets were combined into one bigger bathroom and the original courtyard became a generous kitchen. In order to introduce light in the new kitchen space, a window facing the alleyway was inserted. The original small round openings in the façade continued to ventilate the new bathroom. The family spent some money in decorative finishing options for walls and floors, such as mosaic tile wainscoting enhancing the appearance of the living room while protecting the bottom half of the walls from dampness and damage. Hand-woven Moroccan rugs cover the bedroom floors and colourful textiles are found in every corner. Once as the family saved some money, they built a narrow staircase to access a rooftop terrace. A small bedroom was added upstairs as a private space for sleeping for Hadja Lakbira and her husband. As their children grew up and moved out of Cosumar for work, they regained some private space downstairs. Hadja Lakbira’s husband passed away in 2007 and her children moved to

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Belgium to find work, with the exception of two daughters, Soumia and Hannane. When Hannane got married, she relocated to the adjacent property with her own family, staying close to her mother and sister (figure 9.7, top). This house already had a top floor extension that included three bedrooms, thus providing enough space for the children. Hannane would like to make future improvements to accommodate the changes in the family, but, as of 2018, the risk of eviction inhibits them from investing more time and money: I don’t want to be afraid of being expelled. (Fieldwork interview 2016)

As of 2018, only Hadja Lakbira and her daughter Soumia live in Dar Lhadja Lakbira; they find the house large enough for both to live very comfortably. Once a year, Soumia’s siblings come to visit and the bustle of the former times rekindles in the house that has been the setting of the lives of four generations. The district around Cosumar has been in decline since 1970s as factories began to relocate to sites beyond the city limits. For example, the factory of Lafarge, which had been operating since 1913 in Roches Noires, in 1981, transferred its production to the peripheral area of Bouskoura, displacing employees and dismantling of valuable architectural heritage. The continuing decline of the area is aggravated by real estate speculation. The settlement of Cosumar settlement too suffers from the restructuring of the industrial geography of Casablanca. With more than 1,700 employees, the COSUMAR company currently commands a 70 percent share of the national market for sugar and seeks to expand its production capacity. In order to gain space for expansion, the company seek to evict the inhabitants of Cosumar from their homes. In order to exert pressure on the community, six years ago the company stopped maintaining the settlement. The informal appropriations and self-built extensions of homes are cited by the company as evidence of insalubrious and dangerous living conditions, in support of their argument for demolition. Hadja Lakbira is one of the voices within the community demanding Cosumar’s heritage to be valued, drawing attention to common memories and a sense of shared belonging in the community’s struggle resisting eviction. CASA SEÑORA L., CERRO DE LA CRUZ, VALPARAÍSO, CHILE Context Valparaíso is Chile’s third-largest city. During the nineteenth century, migration from the countryside to Valparaíso began and the city grew around its

Figure 9.9.  Site plan Cerro de la Cruz, Valparaíso, Chile. Casa Señora L. bottom left.

Figure 9.10.  Casa Señora L. Perspective drawing.



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port where ships stopped after having travelled around Cape Horn. Land occupations began in the early nineteenth century, driven by migration from the countryside to the city. The port and city experienced relative decline after the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The nineteenth-century historic centre of Valparaíso was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002. Today, the port of Valparaíso remains Chile’s busiest and the city claims to be Chile’s most creative and dynamic. However, not all of its residents have benefitted from Chile’s economic growth. Almost 16.9 percent of Valparaíso’s citizens are classified to live in poverty, more than the 14.4 percent nationwide (Pino Vásquez and Ojeda Ledesma 2013). A narrow strip of land along the coast, ‘El Plano’ is taken up by the port, the commercial centre and up-market housing. Most of Valparaíso’s inhabitants live on the forty-two steep hills above the cities and the deep ravines that separate the hills. Informal settlements in the ravines provide the only means of housing available to migrants, many of which are refugees from earthquakes and the urban poor. The ravines are vulnerable to hazards such as fire. For example, fires spread across ten of Valparaíso’s hills in 2014; fifteen people died and almost 3,000 lost their homes and possessions (Pino Vásquez and Ojeda Ledesma 2013). In 2011, the Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo (MINVU) published its ‘National Cadastre of Camps’, identifying 70,633 precarious settlements and camps in which a total of 30,000 families live; 61 percent of the national total is located in the Valparaíso Region, the Biobío Region and the Santiago Metropolitan Region (Pino Vásquez and Ojeda Ledesma 2013). A variety of construction materials and structural typologies are used, ranging from timber construction on tall timber columns or on masonry plinths to steel-framed construction. Cladding is predominantly timber or corrugated steel. These construction types allow for buildings to be stacked on top of each other, and relationships between neighbouring buildings to be negotiated three-dimensionally, often resulting in complex configurations that allow most houses to be exposed to sunlight and share spectacular views to the sea amongst each other (figures 9.9 and 9.10). Spatial Biography At the time of our visit in March 2015, the house was inhabited by a single person, Señora L., who told us that she was sixty-four years of age. She described herself as a housewife, having worked as a hairdresser before she retired. Señora L. and her family have lived in the house since they build it more than forty years ago. Initially, the house had one single level (figures 9.11 and 9.12, phases 1 and 2), where Señora L. lived with her husband, son and daughter. When Señora L.’s husband lost his job, they received a final paycheck of over

Figure 9.11.  Casa Señora L. Diagram of incremental transformation.

Figure 9.12.  Casa Señora L. Spatial biography.

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600,000 pesos (about £675). This is less than the average monthly salary in Valparaíso’s formal employment sector, but for the family it was a considerable amount. They invested in building an additional level above the existing house: In New Year’s Eve we used to climb up with a ladder and sit in the terrace to enjoy the views of the sea. And I said to my husband: the day I have the money I will build another floor with big windows to enjoy the panorama. And I did it when I had the chance! It was my dream. (Fieldwork interview 2015)

In the place of the raised terrace, the family first added a bathroom and living room, filling in the space between the house and its neighbour (figures 9.11 and 9.12, phase 3). Later on, another extension provided an open-plan kitchen and dining space, a bathroom and bedroom (figures 9.11 and 9.12, phase 4). My husband made the balcony (gallery). In part it was a mistake because we don’t have enough space inside when my children and grandchildren come to visit. (Fieldwork interview 2015)

Every time they saved money (sums such as 200,000 pesos) the family invested it in the house to carry out finishing works, such as installing a floating timber floor in the upstairs level. The ground floor apartment used to be in good condition, so the family were able to rent it out. With the rental proceeds, they were able to refurbish the first floor and add on another bedroom (figures 9.11 and 9.12, phase 5). At the time of our visit in 2015, the ground floor was not lived in as it lacked cross-ventilation and therefore had become damp. Señora L. attributed the building defects to the self-construction techniques and the lack of professional advice: Everything was made without plans or the help of an architect, and that’s why you see some failures. (Fieldwork interview 2015)

The vast majority of buildings in the ravines of Valparaíso are built by their inhabitants without advice from architects. However, during our field research we spoke to building engineers who had recently established their office in the neighbourhood of Señora L., and who now work on projects in the ravines. As a result of the lack of professional advice, the ground floor of Señora L.’s house that had been a source of supplementary income deteriorated and became uninhabitable. The son and daughter of the family grew up and left home. Señora L. divorced last year and now she lives alone in the house, receiving visits by her family, children and grandchildren.



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ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION The need to increase habitable space and the desire to improve its quality are the primary motivators of transformations across all three case studies. We found that three distinct tactics were used. In a first step, all three families incrementally extended the perimeter of their home in horizontal direction (figure 9.13). Familia Negrete incrementally added small rooms within their plot. The family of Señora L. began by adding storage spaces to their home, and then negotiated with their neighbour to make use of the space between their homes for another extension. ‘Perimeter extension’ is carried out either on an allocated plot (Negrete), or through negotiation (Señora L.). A variant of perimeter extension is the covering over of patios and the amalgamation of adjacent homes to form a single, larger dwelling. The latter two variants were employed in Dar Lhadja Lakbira. Vertical extension or extrusion is the second tactic identified. Once the families had gathered sufficient resources, they choose to add an additional level, not only in order to gain space, but also to allow for reorganisation of the ground floor. For example, in Dar Lhadja Lakbira, an additional level accommodated a bedroom for the parents and allowed for separate sleeping accommodation of parents and children. The upper floor added to Casa Negrete provided space for Rodrigo’s family and freed up the ground floor for Erandi’s family to live autonomously. Independent access to the top floor of Casa Señora L. allowed the family to create two separate units and rent out one. The third tactic is subdivision of rooms and reorganisation of subdivisions. Rearrangement of partitions in Casa Negrete and Dar Lhadja Lakbira responded to changing numbers of family members and allowed reprogramming of spaces and activities seeking to balance shared with personal space. The three case studies demonstrate that the tactics for self-construction responded to changes in patterns of inhabitation, in an iterative and incremental process subject to continual reassessment and correction that generated space, but also qualified and differentiated spaces (figure 9.14). Responding to an urgent problem, they triggered continuing trajectories of change. Alterations usually were carried out ad-hoc, that is, without consulting architects and seeking planning permits. Apart from this, the changes in patterns of space and inhabitation closely resemble these in the ‘formal city’ and resonate with the scenarios for the ‘growing house’ that Martin Wagner first explored in the 1930s. The difference is one of urgency, of severe overcrowding in many informal scenarios. In our field research, at the scale of the family and house we often found distinctions between the realms of the formal and the informal to be blurred. For example, the family of Señora L. constructed a balcony overlooking the sea, as a tactic responding to a need for space, but

Figure 9.13.  Chart comparing tactics and types of transformations identified in the documentation of the three case studies.

Figure 9.14.  Comparative diagram.



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simultaneously expressing and fulfilling a desire, tactically enhancing the use value as well as strategically increasing the exchange value of their home. The boundary line between tactic and strategy becomes porous; tactical response turns into strategic plan at numerous points in time and at different stages of consolidation. Occupations of land and self-construction of settlements are tactics employed by marginalised groups that find themselves unable to access the rental or property market, or are victims of fraudulent sales, such as Familia Negrete. At this point in time, the illegally constructed houses have little or no exchange value on property markets, but offer significant use value to their inhabitants. Hence their design is driven by tactical optimisation of use value rather than strategic anticipation of exchange value. The struggle of inhabitants may trigger incremental processes of consolidation and legalisation, and basic infrastructure such as electricity, water, sewage, as well as services (schools, health care, religious spaces) is made available, exemplified by Cumbres de Tepetongo. In such settlements of informal origins, homes may gradually gain increasing exchange value that can be monetised through eventual sale, or through rental contracts, as the family of Señora L. attempted. Cosumar exemplifies a reverse trajectory. Initially, its inhabitants were tenants of their employer, the adjacent sugar factory. Over more than eight decades, inhabitants appropriated their homes through self-constructed alterations; their status has become informal in the sense that many have ceased to pay rent in retaliation to their landlord’s failure to invest in upkeep of buildings. The rapid urban growth of Casablanca has engulfed Cosumar; it is now centrally located and its exchange value to property markets has increased accordingly, putting the community at risk of eviction. The case studies expose dynamic interaction between informality and monetisation, between the use value and the exchange value of informal or informalised houses. Fernando Domínguez Rubio and Uriel Fogué (2017, 12) have celebrated the volatility of situations arising from such dynamics, describing ‘a perennially undefined and unstable space, which can be endlessly explored and re-imaged’. As open-ended spaces rife with potential, and as an alternative to capitalist models of valuation and urban growth, informal settlements, settlements of informal origins and informalised settlements increasingly attract critical attention and theoretical speculation, in contrast to the stigmatisation and marginalisation that remains a reality in the lives of most inhabitants (Perlman 2014). The community leaders of Cosumar fight against eviction by pointing out on the one hand, its patrimonial value, the legacy of its architect Edmond Brion, as well as, on the other hand the sense of community that is shared by inhabitants, and that became evident during our field research. Ananya Roy (2005, 154) has pointed out a ‘false dichotomy’ between globalisation, viewed as disempowering, and local

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communities, seen to be a force for change. Instead she argues for agency at multiple scales that operates in multiple theatres of action and with multiple forms of sovereignty (Roy 2005, 154). A struggle for local sovereignty triggered by a critical threat, such as eviction, cannot be isolated, neither from its political and economic context, nor, we argue, from its spatial context. The fact that the community in Cosumar has a space, in which it can meet, matters, the quality of the space in which decisions are made matters, as do the qualities of spaces that people have made for themselves in their homes. The experience of making space, individually and collectively, matters: it changes lives and opinions; it makes communities. None of the interviewees and communities that we studied can adequately be subsumed under a rigid definition of social and spatial marginality. Indeed, each community develops along its own, specific, non-linear path towards consolidation or towards informalisation, towards convergence or divergence with the formal city. The enduring stigmatisation of informal settlements and communities highlights the urgent need to study and better understand the global forces and local tactical actions that shape them, and to better appreciate the nuanced and deeply evocative spaces that squatter-consolidators and inhabitant-builders create for their families and communities over time, thereby making a vital contribution to the future of their cities. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors wish to thank Lahbib Elmouni for hosting a collaborative field research project in 2016, for undertaking follow-up interviews in 2018 and for maintaining ties with the community and two community associations over many years. We thank Andrea Pino Vásquez, Lautaro Ojeda Ledesma, Iulia Frăţilă and Alexandru Malaescu for the collaborative field research in 2015 and the many insights they have since shared in conversations. REFERENCES Benjamin, Walter. 1986. Moscow Diary. Translated by Richard Sieburth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bernt, Matthias, and Laura Colini. 2013. “Exclusion, Marginalization and Peripheralization. Conceptual Concerns in the Study of Urban Inequalities.” Working Paper no. 49. Erkner: Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning. http://www.irs-net.de/download/wp-exclusion-marginalization-peripher alization.pdf, accessed 1 July 2018.



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Billson, Janet M. 2005. “No Owners of Soil. Redefining the Concept of Marginality.” In Marginality, Power and Social Structure: Issues in Race, Class and Gender Analysis, edited by Dennis M. Rutledge, 29–47. Oxford: Routledge. Boano, Camilo, and Francisco Vergara Perucich. 2016. “Bajo escasez ¿Media casa basta? Reflexiones sobre el Pritzker de Alejandro Aravena.” Revista de arquitectura 21 (31): 37–46. Böttcher, Karl. 1932. Wettbewerb “Das Wachsende Haus” (1931–1932). Berlin: Berlin Architekturmuseum Inv. Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, and Jose Luis Reyna. 1968. “Industrialization. Occupational Structure, and Social Stratification in Latin America.” In Constructive Change in Latin America, edited by Stewart Cole Blasier, 19–56. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Domínguez Rubio, Fernando, and Uriel Fogué. 2015. “Unfolding the Political Capacities of Design.” In What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment, edited by Albena Yaneva and Alejandro Zaera-Polo, 143–60. London: Ashgate. Dovey, Kim. 2012. “Informal Urbanism and Complex Adaptive Assemblage.” International Development Planning Review, 34 (4): 349–67. Eckstein, Susan. 2001. Poder y protesta popular en América Latina. In Poder y protesta popular. Movimientos sociales latinoamericanos, edited by Susan, Eckstein, 15–74. México: Siglo XXI editores. Gallissot, René. 1964. Le Patronat Européen Au Maroc; Action Sociale, Action Politique, 1931–1942. Rabat: Éditions Techniques Nord-africaines. García-Huidobro, Fernando, Diego Torres Torriti, and Nicolas Tugas. 2010. “Time Builds! The Experimental Housing Project (PREVI), Lima: Genesis and Outcome.” Lotus: 87–101. INEGI. 2015. Encuesta intercensal. México: Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. Kaïoua, Abdelkader. 1997. Casablanca, L’industrie Et La Ville. Tours: Université François Rabelais. Leupen, Bernard. 2005. Time-Based Architecture. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Marx, Karl. 1970 [1859]. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. New York: International Publishers. https://archive.org/details/acontributionto01marxgoog. Nun, José. 1969. “Superpoblación relativa, ejercito industrial de reserva y masa marginal.” Revista Latinoamericana de Sociologia 5 (2): 178–236. Ong, Aihwa. 2011. “Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global.” In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 1–26. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Owen, Ceridwen, Kim Dovey and Wiryono Raharjo. 2013. “Teaching Informal Urbanism: Simulating Informal Settlement Practices in the Design Studio.” Journal of Architectural Education 67 (2): 46–55. Perlman, Janice. 1976. The Myth of Marginality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Perlman, Janice. 2004. “Marginality: From Myth to Reality in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro, 1969–2002.” In Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from

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the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia, edited by Ananya Roy, Nezar AlSayyad, 105–47. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Perlman, Janice. 2014. Urban Informality, lecture to UN-Habitat worldwide. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=utvz7j1IUfk, http://reportescomunales.bcn.cl/2015/ index.php/P%c3%a1gina_principal, accessed 1 July 2018. Pino Vásquez, Andrea, and Lautaro Ojeda Ledesma. 2013. “City and Informal Habitat: Illegal Occupation of Land and Self-Help Construction in the Ravines of Valparaíso.” Revista INVI 28 (78): 109–40. Quijano, Aníbal. 1974. “Marginal Pole and Marginal Labor Force in Latin America.” Economy and Society 1: 393–428. Rabbat, Nasser O. 2010. The Courtyard House: From Cultural Reference to Universal Relevance. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Roy, Ananya. 2004. “Transnational Trespassings: The Geopolitics of Urban Informality.” In Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia, edited by Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad, 289–317. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Roy, Ananya. 2005. “Urban Informality. Toward an Epistemology of Planning.” Journal of the American Planning Association 71 (2): 147–59. Schlögel, Karl. 2016. In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics. Translated by Gerrit Jackson. New York: Bard Graduate Center. Sheinbaum Pardo, Claudia. 2016. Programa de Desarrollo de la Delegación Tlalpan 2015–2018. México: Delegación Tlalpan. Smith, Adam. 1976 [1776]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, vol. 2, edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wagner, Martin. 2015 [1932]. Das wachsende Haus: ein Beitrag zur Lösung der städtischen Wohnungsfrage, 2nd edition. Berlin: Deutsches Verlagshaus Bong & Company. Ward, Peter. 1982. “Introduction and Purpose.” In Self-Help Housing. A Critique, edited by Peter Ward, 1–13. London and New York: Mansell Publishing.

Chapter 10

San Miguel de Allende Tackling Marginality in the False-Utopian City Mario López González Garza This chapter seeks to explain the causes of the urban marginality to which vulnerable communities who live in the Municipality of San Miguel de Allende are exposed. It argues that this vulnerability is a consequence of the false utopia projected by actors with economic interests that exploit the city due to the World Heritage status granted by UNESCO (2008) and that are backed by neoliberal government policies. In the same way, it analyses the strategies that different social leaders have implemented in the past and present to mitigate the impact of marginality in San Miguel de Allende. In the ‘Global South’, Latin America and Mexico, residents on lower incomes are systematically priced out and pulled away from central areas (Janoschka and Salinas 2017). The high cost of living in the centre of the city – where infra­ structure, services and security are of higher quality – and the provision of lowincome housing stimulates the movement of lower income people to the urban periphery. In this regard, ‘the move of hundreds of thousands of households to the periphery epitomises the multiple contradictions of low-income housing policies, urban planning and policies in the cities’ (Janoschka and Salinas 2017, 48). This phenomenon is frequent in Mexican cities with a population greater than 3 million, such as the cities of Mexico, Querétaro, Guadalajara and Monterrey, although the pre-existing regional infrastructure mitigates the densification of the city’s boundaries that usually occurs without formal planning. The problem is exacerbated when the city is smaller than 200,000 inhabitants but where the population is rapidly increasing without an adequate planning policy. An example of this problem is the city of San Miguel de Allende. San Miguel de Allende is a city and municipality, located in the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico. It is part of the macro region of Bajío, with a total 189

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population of approximately 160,000 people. It is 274 kilometre (170 miles) from Mexico City, 86 kilometre (53 miles) from Querétaro and 97 kilometre (60 miles) from the state capital of Guanajuato (INEGI 2010). Historically, the town is important as the first municipality declared independent of Spanish rule by the nascent insurgent army during the Mexican War of Independence, in addition to being the birthplace of Mexican general Ignacio Allende. San Miguel de Allende has undergone profound urban transformations since its colonial foundation in 1542. Despite its often glossy image as ‘the best city to visit in 2017 and 2018’ (Travel and Leisure 2018), San Miguel de Allende is facing a socioeconomic and socio-ecological crisis produced by neoliberal urbanism. This crisis constitutes a threat to vulnerable communities in the city (Gleeson and Beeza 2014, 226) and to its World Heritage status (UNESCO 2008). A local and national state oriented to the interests of the real estate market that underpin the urbanisation process have tried to hide the crisis through a false utopia, generating an image of the ideal city of San Miguel de Allende. Utopian philosophical thought, as Florescano (1997, 74, my translation) notes, has a very long history and is rooted in ‘man’s [sic] sense of dissatisfaction that is generated by his present situation’. The author continues: In the face of certain conditions that oppress the life of man [sic] and that one tries to overcome through an ideal human organisation that is generally located in the future . . . utopian thought appears, in the majority of cases, in the moments when frictions and social differences are more acute, when a society or particular social group is disproportionately exposed to economic equalities and political struggles, and when the current situation has because so evidently intolerable, overwhelmed by the dissatisfactions of his [sic] everyday life, the man tries to find happiness and the full realisation of his potential in a future ideal moment. (Florescano 1997, 53–54, my translation)

In the case of San Miguel de Allende, such a vision for the future has not materialised for the majority of the inhabitants of the municipality. Contrary to the aforementioned definition, a false utopia reflects the de facto interests that have been created in the city. The historic centre of San Miguel de Allende has become a space where the economic interests of entrepreneurs, tourism and real estate, have transformed the character of the World Heritage city. The current environment of San Miguel is captured by these words: ‘It is disappointing that the splendor borrowed from baroque decoration serves to disguise social misery’ (Krieger 2017, 51). The existence of a false utopian city requires us to review the projects that update the historical application of the utopia of Thomas More in San Miguel de Allende, as Don Vasco de Quiroga (who was appointed the first bishop of diocese of Michoacán, New Spain, in 1536) and Fray Juan de San Miguel



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(who was at the orders of Quiroga and founder of San Miguel de Allende) did in the city’s marginalised communities (Zavala 1949; Florescano 1997). Spanish settlements in the sixteenth century were not only established in fertile agricultural areas or sites of rich mineral resources, they also sought to provide refuge to the Spanish in case of uprisings and to merchants during the traffic of goods on the royal roads. The Spanish founder, Fray Juan de San Miguel, created some urban centres in the actual state of Guanajuato, among them San Miguel de los Chichimecas later called ‘el Grande’. Towards 1542, the Franciscan convent was founded, the patron saint – the archangel San Miguel – was assigned to the town and the first concessions for cattle ranches were awarded (Wright 1999, 265). Referring to Fray Juan de San Miguel, Justino Fernández and Edmundo O’Gorman noted that he was ‘an important historical figure in the civilisation of Michoacán, and his good works in both quality and quantity can be compared with those carried out by the first bishop Vasco de Quiroga; only the brilliance of the latter makes us sometimes forget the meritorious labour of the former’ (cited in de la Maza 1972 [1939], 14, my translation). Both priests were looking for an ideal place, a utopia. Compared with America, ‘Europe, for its old age, was considered difficult to correct; but discovered humanity, naked, simple, naive, could live in accordance with the desired perfection’ (Zavala 1949, 49, my translation). It is necessary to establish at this point a fundamental connection – a first montage – between what was achieved by the contemporary of Fray Juan de San Miguel, the Bishop Don Vasco de Quiroga, whose practical zeal elaborated the Ordinances for the hospital-towns that were to be established in New Spain – in the new urban centres, such as San Miguel – and the writings of the humanist, Thomas More in Utopia. It was Silvio Zavala (1949) who, in a text that discusses Thomas More’s Utopia in New Spain, referred to the spiritual brotherhood of Utopia and its interaction with the Ordinances of the Michoacán bishop. The situation of England in the sixteenth century, which was experiencing a profound social, political, economic and ideological crisis, led More – who was chancellor in 1525 – to write an assessment of the conditions that prevailed in his country. Life in Utopia was conceived as exactly the reverse of that in England (Florescano 1997, 79), and lived in conditions of equality, respect, honesty and justice for all inhabitants. In America, especially in new urbanisations, one can explore the utopian ideas of More and Quiroga, where Quiroga’s ‘humanistic thinking considers the possibility of adapting theory to reality: of creating a more human and just world’ (ibid., 79). If the frontier of New Spain was immersed in an intense social and economic crisis and the social and cultural contrast was evident between the Spanish settlers and indigenous peoples, the idea of projecting an ideal reality in the future was present in San Miguel el Grande in the sixteenth century. Almost 500 years later, the city border remains in crisis

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and San Miguel de Allende with it. The present-day city centre – designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site – is where the urban dream of Fray Juan de San Miguel and Vasco de Quiroga has failed to materialise for the city’s marginal and vulnerable communities. THE SOCIAL CRISIS FACING SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE According to government statistics (CONEVAL/INEGI 2010), of the total population of the Municipality of San Miguel de Allende of 160,383 persons, 63.7 percent live in poverty, 21.3 percent live in extreme poverty, 42.4 percent live in moderate poverty, 26.2 percent is vulnerable to social deprivation and 2.1 percent are vulnerable by income (i.e. this population does not present social deficiencies but its income is less than or equal to the welfare line). Only 8 percent of the total population is deemed to be not poor and not vulnerable. The methodology used by CONEVAL for the measurement of poverty, income and social deprivation considers the following indicators: current income per capita, education, access to food, access to health services, access to social security, access to basic housing services, quality in housing spaces and degree of social cohesion.1 The same study notes that 34 percent of the population lacks access to adequate nutrition, meaning that 47,421 people suffer hunger or experience a decrease in the amount of food they could obtain, 28.9 percent do not have access to health services and 84.5 percent has deficient access to social security (24 percent higher than the national average). Furthermore, 49.2 percent of residents, a total of 68,660 people, report living in homes without basic services, such as water, drainage, electricity and fuel for cooking. About 18.9 percent (26,429 people) report living in homes with poor quality materials and insufficient space. Just as in the colonial era, the indigenous people of the Municipality of San Miguel de Allende are the most marginal and vulnerable. Almost 64.5 percent of the indigenous population has no access to health services (CDI 2005). In the past six years, extreme poverty has been reduced by only 3.7 percent and poverty by only 2.6 percent. These reductions are minimal and insufficient and are clearly affected by the low national inflation during those years – 4.4 percent in 2010, 3.36 percent in 2016 and 6.77 percent in 2017 (CONEVAL 2016; INEGI 2018). While inflation was low, poverty also decreased by almost the same percentage, but increased in the last year as inflation rose. These statistics reveal the failure of public policies to reduce poverty and attend to the needs of vulnerable populations. Overall, we can say that almost 500 years after its foundation, the city and municipality of San Miguel de Allende are immersed in a state of social crisis, with half of its population living in a state of poverty and inequality.



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In San Miguel de Allende, we have witnessed a growth of the marginal population both in the city centre and in the outlying communities. This growth in marginality has multiple causes, the most important being a low degree of economic diversification, which results in low-paid jobs and generates pressure on social welfare (IMPLANSMA 2016). As a result, it is common for the residents of the zone, the so-called sanmiguelenses and guanajuatenses, to migrate to the United States to seek better paid jobs. The most profound consequence of this migration is family disintegration and the breakdown of the community safety net. In 2015, San Miguel migrants reduced poverty in their communities by sending their families a total of $112,940,000 from the United States (State Institute of Migrant Assistance to Guanajuato and their Families 2016). Migration vulnerability has, however, resulted in a large number of deportees from the United States. In 2017, 11,077 guanajuatenses were repatriated (SEGOB 2017) as a result of Trump’s new anti-immigrant policies.2 The lack of income forces the children of vulnerable families into the informal labour market to enhance meagre resources. Child labour results in decreasing educational attainment and therefore ultimately undermines the opportunity for these children to acquire better jobs in the future. The city also suffers the phenomenon of gentrification, which is resulting in the displacement of the original population of the neighbourhood by one of greater purchasing power. Since the declaration of San Miguel de Allende and Atotonilco as World Heritage sites (UNESCO 2008), real estate pressure has been generated that displaces the native inhabitants – who do not have the resources to maintain the listed buildings – to the periphery of the city and to predominantly rural environments (Aguilar in Martínez and Fernández 2004). After requesting documentary information from the Municipal Housing Institute of San Miguel de Allende (IMUVI 2017) on housing and the impact of the projects on marginal areas, the Institute denied any access to information on the subject. As García Herrera et al. (2007, 280) write, ‘as the state at various scales adopts gentrification as a housing policy . . . it has little self-interest in collecting the kind of data that documents the level of displacement’, especially because this information may delegitimise dominant political discourses. This implies that attention should be given to the methodological limitations of the debates on displacement (see also Slater 2009; García, Smith and Mejías 2007). Population displacement and dispersion causes a greater need for investment in social infrastructure, such as education and health as well as in urban infrastructure, such as bridges, sidewalks, roads and interstate highways, in the new communities. The minimal supply of social housing has detonated irregular growth, generating pressure on the rural territory, leading to deforestation and negatively impacting the recovery of the aquifers that the city occupies (IMPLANSMA 2016). The houses in the centre of San Miguel de Allende have an average commercial

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value of more than $4,000 (76,000 pesos) per square metre. Thus, a person who earns the minimum wage (88.36 pesos per day, as of December 2017), would require 860 days to buy a square metre and 86,000 days to buy a house of 100 square metres. Acquiring the property would therefore take 236 years and would require all earnings in that period to be devoted to the purchase. The decoupling of housing markets from labour markets has led to rising social inequality, reflected in the growth of informal settlements where the participation of the population is considerable and government intervention minimal (Kellet and Hernández García 2013). The crisis of insecurity – which results from public policies and low incomes – has encouraged the construction of gated neighbourhoods. While these neighbourhoods create an illusion of social protection, they result in the dismembering of the social fabric and the geographical division of the population. Since 2015, twelve gated communities have been built, in which 6,000 people live. It should be noted that the floating population – which travels from Mexico City, the state of Mexico, Querétaro, Celaya, Guanajuato and León among others – can double on weekends. The result is the separation between the communities already built and the new gated developments. A clear example is Colonia San Luis Rey where 2,707 people live (INEGI 2010) which will be cut off from the rest of the city of San Miguel de Allende by two new subdivisions that will surround it (Club de Golf Ventanas and Artesanto) and a new centre and mixed-use commercial park, called ‘Corazón District’, planned between Colonia Aurora and San Luis Rey. Both communities will be strictly segregated and the master plan does not have an integrating vision. To transform the reality of the marginalised population in the Municipality of San Miguel de Allende and mitigate the social crisis that exists, more than 100 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are currently working in the territory. The actions of social movements and NGOs link individuals and groups in spaces and places within civil society, the State, the academy, producing a networked set of formal-informal articulations (Álvarez 2009, 28–29). In San Miguel de Allende, as in other territories, these spaces produce a complex assemblage of people, practices, ideas and discourses. As Slater (1998, 385) argues: ‘social struggles can be understood as wars of interpretation’. What we call social movements could perhaps be better conceptualised as ‘fields’ or ‘political-cultural domains’. Álvarez (2009, 27, my translation), for example, conceptualises them as ‘discursive fields of action’, which are articulated formally and informally through networks. In the next section, I present three NGOs that work from a civil society perspective, who face different challenges in the discursive fields of action.



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CONTESTING MARGINALITY IN SAN MIGUEL Casita Linda is an NGO, which has built dozens of houses in marginal areas, increasing the well-being of families. Casita Linda allows families to move from flimsy huts to houses that have concrete floors, separate bedrooms for girls and boys, a family bathroom, solar-powered lights, an ecological kitchen, windows, a cistern to collect and store rainwater and basic furniture. Moving to a home that is safe, clean and large enough changes the lives of families and fills them with dignity. The structure of the house is adapted to the needs of families of four members, which corresponds to average family size in the communities (Casitalinda.org). Casita Linda also provides workshops that aim to improve standards of living in communities, especially given low levels of formal education (most women, e.g. do not complete secondary education). In the workshops, the women and men of the community work on issues ‘such as setting goals, nutrition, child care, home care, water conservation, organic gardening and other income generating projects, and working on such challenging issues as sexuality and family planning, addiction, and domestic violence, educating, diversifying the economy and taking care of the environment’ (Nieto 2016 in Casita Linda 2018). In the analysed sample of families that received a house in the past five years, in seven out of ten cases the new house encouraged the parents to seek a better job with higher remuneration and to keep children in school. These outcomes underscore the social benefits that result from social housing and suggest that it should be a central axis of public policies (and not left to the NGOs). In the false utopian city, social housing is almost non-existent and the marginalised go to NGOs in an effort to find a route out of the poverty in which they live. The NGO ABBA AC from Celaya, associated with Caminamos Juntos AC, which is located near the train tracks of San Miguel de Allende, provides security, food and temporary shelter to hundreds of migrants who are on their way to the United States or who have been deported, from the same country. ABBA and Caminamos Juntos also provide legal and psychological support and free lodging for two days, although it can be extended for up to fifteen days if the migrant is unwell or injured. These associations receive all migrants, mostly Hondurans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans and Mexicans, who are fleeing from political repression and violence, armed groups or extreme poverty. San Miguel de Allende has a long history of providing shelter to oppressed peoples. San Miguel de los Chichimecas (today part of San Miguel de Allende) was one of the towns established by Spaniards during the Conquest. The first inhabitants of the San Miguel de los Chichimecas territory – where the Spaniards founded San Miguel de los Chichimecas – were nomadic

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groups that were settled on the banks of the Laja River. A merchant pochtécatl or merchant of Nopala, of Jilotepec, called Conni who had maintained relations with the Chichimeca Pames since before the Conquest – with whom he traded and exchanged food for bows and arrows – decided to leave his province, recruiting his brothers and others Otomi relatives to live with the Chichimecas, fleeing from the Spaniards, ‘to avoid the impact of the Spanish invasion and to continue with their ancestral traditions’ (Wright 1999, 36, my translation). As Wright (1999) notes, it was Conni who founded a settlement with a group of Otomíes, on the banks of the Laja River, near the definitive site of San Miguel. It is worth highlighting the term ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ (UN 1951) could apply to Conni himself, his brothers and relatives, for having taken refuge with the Chichimecas on the banks of the Laja River. Thus, the first settlers of the city were themselves marginal inhabitants, migrants and refugees. Caminamos Juntos and the ABBA shelter continue to receive migrants just as the first inhabitants did almost 500 years ago. To this socioeconomic crisis, we must add the socio-ecological crisis around the issue of water. Rapid population growth has resulted in the urbanisation of ecological reserve areas and a negative impact on the replenishment of the San Miguel aquifers (Mendoza, Villanueva and Maderey in Martínez and Fernández 2004). It should be noted that the aforementioned study carried out by CONEVAL on poverty does not monitor the quality of basic housing services. It only takes into account whether the water is piped and does not establish whether it is potable or contaminated. Caminos de Agua, an NGO based in San Miguel de Allende, has published studies on the toxicity of water in marginal and central areas of the city. For example, in 2016, it found arsenic and fluoride at toxic levels – above the limits of the World Health Organisation – in a number of neighbourhoods, including of San Rafael, Providencia, Olimpo, San Antonio, San Luis Rey, Los López and Cieneguita (Caminos de Agua 2018). The impact of the over-exploitation of the aquifer mantle results in the deterioration in the health of the people who live in these communities. With eighty-six different projects involving rain harvest systems and ceramic filters for water, Caminos de Agua has managed to improve water access for 14,788 people in urban and ejidal3 communities. The work carried out by the organisation is essential in order to prevent arsenic poisoning in communities that do not have drinking water. By February 2018, Caminos de Agua had managed to install 1,880 ceramic filters in the community that provide 1,678,500 litres of drinking water. As a civil society organisation, it has placed the regional water problem on the public and government agenda, promoting a change of consciousness and in the process redefining the vision of water use in the city. An example where community leaders, NGOs and the academy intervene is the project developed during the past two years, in the community of Palo



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Colorado, in the Municipality of San Miguel de Allende, which is one kilometre from the municipal garbage dump. Here garbage collection and its separation into possible recyclable materials is the largest source of employment. Other members of the community – especially men – are masons who build on the outskirts of the city while some women stay at home with the children or work as cleaning staff in the residences of the periphery. In Palo Colorado, there is no quality drinking water and 80 percent of its members live in poverty. To transform this marginal reality, Casita Linda and Caminos de Agua joined forces to implement the design and construction of seven houses with cisterns, which collect rainwater from their roofs to make it potable. The families worked together – especially the women of each family with their younger children – for the construction of the cisterns. Currently, they collect 22,000 litres of drinking water per family – which can be used, if well managed, for up to six months. The water collected is filtered in purification systems using ceramic filters designed by Caminos de Agua, in order to prevent disease. Once the first seven houses were finished, students and professors from the Anahuac University investigated the process of each NGO to improve the design of the houses. This research resulted in five new house designs which will solve specific needs of families. Houses based on these designs are currently under construction and ten more houses will be built with the community throughout 2019. The community members of Palo Colorado in collaboration with NGOs and the academy have become articulated in a discursive field of action. As a result of their collaboration, 130 people have come out of extreme poverty. Another 200 people have benefitted from participation in education workshops. Furthermore, these people are recognised today as subjects with rights and as full members of civil society (see Álvarez 2009). POSSIBLE HORIZONS The crisis of San Miguel de Allende is reflected in its urban configuration described earlier. We can also observe this crisis in the new suburbs built in San Miguel de Allende which, drawing on Krieger (2017), I define as neobarrocos or neobaroque. For Krieger (2017, 51), the neobarroco refers to ‘a significant architecture that is virtually exciting, illusory, imperfect and indeterminate, which generates emotions in the collective mind. It is essentially a monumental architectural art of fun, of spectacle, of deviation to distort the senses’. Not only are these new suburbs gated communities, but they are neighbourhoods with controlled environments. Gated communities with controlled environments are places that are only accessible to members of the subdivision and include sports and leisure amenities, ornamental

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architecture and landscape designed to control the flora and fauna. Residents enjoy amenities that are not available to the rest of society. The security of the gated neighbourhoods is absolute and unauthorised access can result in incarceration. The presence of such communities drastically affects social behavior, increasing insecurity on the border between the closed subdivision and the surrounding areas. This insecurity can be corroborated in the tragic homicides of three people that occurred on 16 April 2018 in the Spa Escondido Place, in San Miguel de Allende, which is on the border of a set of gated neighbourhoods. The gated subdivisions increase their density without respecting the urban landscape, simulating neobaroque and kitsch architecture (Krieger 2017, 51). The neobaroque sensibilities of gated communities do, however, connect with the touristification of the city centre. We can witness the neobaroque phenomenon at work in the spatial transformation of the centre of the city of San Miguel into a spectacle of bars, restaurants, galleries and social entertainment centres. The spectacle generates desire which ‘constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1985, 32). If the desire unites different fragments and if, as in our case, the city is the integrated fragment, then the neobaroque is the flow that Society of the Spectacle (Debord in Krieger 2017, 63) consumes. In the Society of the Spectacle ‘the schizophrenic is the universal producer of desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1985, 32). The Society of the Spectacle and the desire to buy the ‘best’ house in the real estate market unleash social inequality. The neobaroque spectacle has as its response a greater desire, and it is one that exacerbates marginality (Deleuze and Guattari 1985; Lope de Vega in Krieger 2017, 31). Desire defines the capacity for well-being, because the real estate market becomes the medium and executor of the neobaroque City, immediately excluding and concealing everything that is not part of the spectacle, including the misery of the margins. In particular, the eclectic characteristic of the different baroque aesthetic expressions of the city that are engaged in a dialogue with each other in a homogeneous and spectacular way, a significant contrast with the assembly and construction carried out by Zeferino Gutiérrez, master builder, on the main facade of the Parish of San Miguel Arcángel, symbol of the city on a global level. Its façade, taken from illustrations of the Cathedral of Cologne, Germany (de la Maza 1972 [1939], 72), shows the neo-Gothic construction as an example of the spectacle in the nineteenth century (Krieger 2017). As Krieger (2017, 27) writes: ‘The baroque principle focuses on the violent conquest of the emotions of the public through theatricality, in the present case, the urban audience, exposed to the efficiency of the neo-baroque theatrical imagery’. From this analysis, we can deduce that San Miguel de Allende is a false utopian city. It narrates the montage of a neobaroque imaginary on



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the urban structure, a false idea of equality and justice completely divorced from the realities lived by most of its inhabitants, especially the marginalised. The false-utopian city of the present proposes an examination of the foundations on which San Miguel de Allende was built to find new horizons, reviewing and identifying the progressive steps that have taken place at other historical moments. A great example is the second foundation, where San Miguel de los Chichimecas (besides being stopped to avoid attacks by nomadic peoples) was a centre of culture and pacification (Toro 1925). In 1542, the Spanish founder, Fray Juan de San Miguel, had a clear mission; pacification and missionary evangelisation that included the creation of urban centres on the ‘permeable and fluctuating’ border north of Mesoamerica (Wright 1999, 11). As Fray Juan de San Miguel, we are invited to re-evaluate and build the cultural infrastructure in the periphery of the city. Just as former mayor of Medellín, Sergio Fajardo,4 has worked to transform the environment of this city, in part by creating educational centres to promote peace in the most violent neighbourhoods of Medellin in the decade of the 1990s, so the new centres of cultural education in San Miguel de Allende can transform the periphery (Fajardo 2017, 195). Another exemplary foundation was the so-called Ilustración in San Miguel el Grande, between 1767 and 1821. Here an avant-garde education was imparted in the Colegio de San Francisco de Sales in downtown San Miguel el Grande by the Congregación del Oratorio funded by San Felipe Neri and directed by Juan Benito Díaz de Gamarra. The latter was an illustrious ecclesiastic born in 1745, who continued his studies initiated in San Ildefonso de México and in the Oratory of San Miguel in Italy, obtaining his doctorate in Pisa and affiliating with the Academy of Sciences of Bologna. Díaz de Gamarra was an enlightened orthodox, with strong humanist essences, which he considered necessary in the formation of youth. Díaz de Gamarra, Fulgencio Zerrillo, Unzaga and Helguera were the ecclesiastics who taught Cicero, Virgil and Horacio to the youth of New Spain – not only for the learning of Latin, but also for the learning of the classical spirit. In addition, they taught logic, experimental physics, maths and physics. As De la Torre Villar (1981, 165, my translation) writes: ‘It was therefore the College of San Francisco, authentic seedbed of ideological renewal and a beacon of intellectual light that illuminated the minds of the studious youth of the province’. As a consequence, the diffusion of Diaz de Gamarra’s humanism ideologically prepared the main participants, such as Allende and the Aldama brothers, for Mexican independence. Just as the enlightened revolted against the baroque city, we can today transform the neobaroque city in which we currently live, through possible illustrated laboratories of experimentation (Vidargas 2008). In this new Ilustración, the indigenous communities and their knowledge of the territory must be integrated principally. The inclusion of the indigenous communities is urgent,

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both to preserve their ancestral traditions and to avoid the errors and arrogance perpetuated by much Eurocentric and scientific thought. Furthermore, the declaration of San Miguel de Allende as a Historical Monument in 1939 was the foundation for its resurgence in the twentieth century. Declaring part of the territory of San Miguel de Allende as a National Park or Ecological Reserve would be an extraordinary invitation to reorient the city and the municipality in the twenty-first century in line with this spirit of interepistemic experimentation. Through the lens of the false-utopian city, I argue for a review of the urban projects that embrace the application of the Utopia of Thomas More, as Vasco de Quiroga did in marginalised communities (Zavala 1949; Florescano 1997). Regardless of the type of crisis, any transformation or urban renewal in the immediate past of San Miguel de Allende – as in other cities – has tended to rely on a champion, or a group of champions, to lead the change. The champions call, lead and help to implement changes that begin to transform the urban environment (Beza, Muñoz and López 2013). Such a process of cultural transformation can have a profound impact on institutions that are present in the public space of the city and are focused primarily on the question of social marginality. To conclude, as noted earlier, San Miguel de Allende can be conceptualised as a neobaroque false-utopian city as a consequence of a set of meanings, values and subjectivities that reflect vested economic and political interests, exacerbated by the desire to conceal marginality. The UNESCO status of San Miguel de Allende has negatively transformed the value of public space and has led to social conflict. The construction of gated communities, the lack of quality public transport between peripheral areas and central areas, insecurity and lack of public space on the city’s border (not to mention the lack of maintenance of existing services) produces an abrupt marginalisation that current government policies try to mitigate based on new projects, but which are not planned from a sustainable perspective and lack a consideration of public space and culture. One example is the housing project presented on 19 June 2018 by municipal agencies and the federal government to build ‘Lomas de San Miguel’ where 5,000 citizens of San Miguel, who are under sixty and with a monthly income of 6,000 pesos, can buy and access financing for the acquisition of their home. Janoschka and Salinas (2017) are highly critical of this kind of government policy. They write: The lack of synchronization between housing policies and urban planning policies produces fragmented urban landscapes, which are disarticulated from each other and the surrounding environment. Public administrations incentivize the production of housing, nonetheless ignoring the construction of liveable urban habitat in which housing is not only a place surrounded by walls but a space that provides both shelter and the means for social reproduction. (47–48)



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The construction of liveable urban habitat should be the principal axis of transformation from the neobaroque false-utopian city into the illustrative city, and it can be carried out through the work of social movements in dialogue with NGOs that have already done so much to address the problem of marginality in San Miguel de Allende. NOTES 1. According to CONEVAL, at the national level in 2010: 46.1 percent of the population (52,813,000 people) lived in poverty and 11.3 percent (12,964,000 people) in extreme poverty. In 2016, these figures had fallen to 43.6 percent (53,418,000 people) and 7.6 percent (9,375,000 people), respectively. 2. Trump’s immigration reform that will make America great again; “Make Mexico Pay for the Wall.” According to Trump, for many years, Mexico’s leaders have been taking advantage of the United States by using illegal immigration to export the crime and poverty in their own country (as well as in other Latin American countries). 3. The ejido is a legal person with legal personality and its own assets, which is made up of a set of assets and rights called ejidal property. It recognises property over land, for human settlement as for productive activities. The Law protects the integrity of the lands of indigenous groups. It is recognised in Section VII of Article 27 of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States (Orozco 2010). 4. Sergio Fajardo Valderrama was the governor of Antioquia (2012–2016) and together with Alejandro Echeverriwas awarded the Curry Stone Design Prize, for their bold and ambitious public works plan for the city of Medellín (2009). In 2018, Fajardo ran for president of Colombia and finished third.

REFERENCES Álvarez, Sonia. 2009. ‘Repensando la dimensión política y cultural desde los movimientos sociales: algunas aproximaciones teóricas.’ In Repensar la política desde América Latina: Cultura, estado y movimientos sociales, edited by Raphael Hoemer, 27–36. Lima: Programa Democracia y Transformación Global. Beza, Beau, José Muñoz and Mario López. 2015. Finding Common Ground: Creating Successful Places in the Redevelopment of Mexico City and Melbourne. México: Triángulo. Universidad La Salle. Caminos de Agua. 2018. ‘2017 Year Report’. https://caminosdeagua.org/en/year-endreports/, accessed June 11. Casita Linda. 2018. “Casita Linda about Us.” https://casitalinda.org/about-us/, accessed July 10 2018. Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los pueblos Indígenas CDI. 2005. Indicadores sociodemográficos de la población total y la población indígena por municipio. 2005. México: San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato.

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Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social, Secretaría de Desarrollo Social, Subsecretaría de Prospectiva, Planeación y Evaluación (CONEVAL). 2010. Informe Anual Sobre la Situación de Pobreza y Rezago Social, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato. Ciudad de México. Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social (CONEVAL). 2017. Informe de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social 2016, Ciudad de México. de la Maza, Francisco. 1972 [1939]. San Miguel de Allende. Su Historia. Sus monumentos. México: Frente de Afirmación Hispanista A.C. De la Torre Villar, Ernesto. 1981. El Colegio de estudios de San Francisco de Sales en la Congregación de San Miguel el Grande y la Mitra Michoacana. México: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Estudios de Historia Novohispana. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1985. Antioedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Buenos Aires: Paidos. Fajardo, Sergio. 2017. El poder de la decencia. Colombia: Ariel. Florescano, Enrique. 1997. Tomás Moro, la “Utopía” y el experimento de Vasco de Quiroga, México. Xalapa: La Palabra y el Hombre. Garcia Herrera, Luz, Neil Smith, and Miguel Ángel Mejías. 2007. “Gentrification, Displacement, and Tourism in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.” Urban Geography 28 (3): 276–98. Gleeson, Brendan, and Beau Beeza. 2014. The Public City. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía). 2010. ‘Censo de Población y Vivienda 2010’. https://www.gob.mx/cms/uploads/attachment/file/44717/Guana juato_003.pdf2010/, accessed 20 April 2018. INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía). 2017. ‘Índices de Precios al Consumidor, Inflación’. http://www.inegi.org.mx, accessed 20 April 2018. Janoschka, Michael, and Luis Salinas. 2017. “Peripheral Urbanisation in Mexico City: A Comparative Analysis of Uneven Social and Material Geographies in LowIncome Housing Estates.” Habitat Internacional 70: 43–49. Kellet, Peter and Hernández-García, Jaime. 2013. Researching the Contemporary City. Identity, environment and social inclusion in developing urban areas. Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Krieger, Peter. 2017. Visual Epidemics: Las Vegas Neo-Baroque in Mexico City. México: Daniel Escotto editores. Martínez, Julia, and Adrián Fernández and Osnaya Patricia. 2004. Climate Change: A View from Mexico. Mexico: INE/ SEMARNAT. Orozco, Pascual. 2010. Naturaleza del Ejido de la Propiedad Ejidal Características y Limitaciones. México: Revista Mexicana de Derecho. Slater, David. 1998. “Rethinking the Spatialities of Social Movements: Questions of (B)orders, Culture, and Politics in Global Times.” In Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures, edited by Arturo Escobar, Sonia E. Álvarez and Evelyn Dagnino, 380–401. New York: Routledge. Slater, Tom. 2009. “Missing Marcuse: On Gentrification and Displacement.” City 13 (2–3): 292–311. Toro, A. 1925. Compendio de la Historia de México, vol. 2. México: Imprenta de Vicente García Torres.



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Travel and Leisure. 2018. “The World’s Top 15 Cities.” https://www.travelandlei sure.com/worlds-best/cities, accessed 15 August 2018. UNESCO. 2008. “Protective Town of San Miguel and the Sanctuary of Jesús Nazareno de Atotonilco.” https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1274, accessed 15 August 2018. Vidargas, Francisco. 2008. San Miguel de Allende and the Sanctuary of Jesús Nazareno de Atotonilco México. México: San Miguel de Allende Municipal Presidency/ INAH/Conaculta. Wright, David. 1999. La Conquista del Bajío y los orígenes de San Miguel de Allende. México: Memorias de la Academia Mexicana de la Historia. Zavala, Silvio. 1949. La Utopía de Tomás Moro en la Nueva España. México: Memoria del Colegio Nacional. El Volumen IV de la Biblioteca Histórica Mexicana de Obras Inéditas, reeditado en Memoria de El Colegio Nacional.

Chapter 11

Conclusion Urban Research and the Pluriverse: Analytical and Political Lessons from Scholarship in Varied Margins Julie Cupples THEORETICAL TENSIONS AND THE DECOLONIAL CHALLENGE In the proposals that we wrote for our workshop in Mexico City and for this book, we sought to bring together perspectives on urban marginality from both political economy and cultural studies. We did so based on a conviction shared by the investigators that politically productive and theoretically informed insights into the question of urban marginality are substantially enhanced when these two interdisciplinary approaches are brought into dialogue. Doing so means paying close attention to at least two key aspects: (1) the processes and effects of urban transformation driven by local and national government policies, the role of capital and the actions of real estate developers and land speculators and (2) the micro-practices of everyday life with a focus on the tactics and cultural politics of the urban poor who must negotiate and resist these processes in their struggles for a dignified life. In other words, we sought to focus on the top down and the bottom up, on the economicpolitical dimensions and the cultural ones. The cultural dimensions must not be divorced from the political economy ones as the top-down processes are often legitimised by powerful actors through the mobilisation of discourses that stigmatise those harmed by urban planning and seek to posit processes of urban transformation such as gentrification as natural and inevitable. These discourses are, however, contested on the level of everyday life by the urban poor and their allies who seek to circulate a different kind of common sense and envision a different kind of city. The hegemonic discourses are then intensely challenged by counterhegemonic ones such as the ‘right to the city’. We have, however, written and edited this book in a context in which the intellectual debates within urban studies have become particularly fraught 205

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and have resulted in a quite bitter divide between those who consider themselves to be on the inside and the outside of the so-called planetary urbanisation (PU) framework. According to this thesis, which draws its inspiration from the work of Henri Lefevbre (1971), the global geographical transformations of the twenty-first century require a shift in how we study the city. It suggests that we should no longer consider the ‘city’ to be a distinct analytical category as ‘the urban’ is now a planetary condition shared by all the spaces and places on the globe, including oceans, deserts, mountains and jungles (Brenner and Schmid 2012). The PU thesis is not, however, readily embraced by all critical scholars working in this field. For example, Ruddick et al. (2018, 388) acknowledge the ambition that lies behind the attempt to develop a new epistemological framework for work on the urban but assert that ‘contemporary writing on planetary urbanisation also seems largely to reproduce the terrain it is attempting to rework’ in part because of a lack of ‘reflexive engagement with questions of social ontology of the urban’. These tensions within urban geography and urban studies were recently aired in a special issue of a leading geography journal.1 While these exchanges are in many ways theoretically productive, they also feel unnecessarily vicious and overly defensive. For example, Neil Brenner (2018), one of leading proponents of the PU thesis, describes feeling misrepresented and caricatured, while a number of feminist and queer scholars describe feeling exhausted from trying and failing to prise open in an epistemological sense what is quite a gendered field. As Natalie Oswin (2018) notes, the PU theorists have tried to produce a unifying critical and anti-capitalist theoretical approach to the urban that challenges the triumphalising yet harmful visions of urban policy-makers, planners and conservative academics. In the process, they have argued for pluralism and situatedness of knowledge. Oswin (2018) believes, however, that by continuing to emphasise capitalist accumulation over other forces of oppression, PU theorists have failed to adequately think through the role of race, gender and sexuality in the making of the urban. While Oswin (2018, 543) does not doubt that ‘capitalist exploitation is alive and well, and tethered to urbanisation processes around the globe’, she stresses that ‘other unjust and violent forces like patriarchy, colonialism, racism, nationalism, and heteronormativity are kicking too’. These feminist and queer authors are then contesting the idea then that scholars in urban studies in general and in urban geography in particular are already working with a plural set of epistemological positions. Responding to Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s (2014, 751) polemical claim that there is ‘no longer any outside to the urban world’ (emphasis in the original), some of the contributors to the special issue (Oswin 2018; Jazeel 2018) locate themselves as being on the outside (of urban geography), a positionality that I also share. While I have some work in and on cities



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and on questions of the urban (see, e.g. Cupples, Guyatt and Pearce 2007; Cupples and Ridley 2008; Cupples 2009; Cupples and Glynn 2009), I’ve done this research without ever identifying myself as an urban scholar and have done so usually by engaging with other interdisciplinary bodies of literature, namely, science and technology studies, feminist studies, development studies and media and cultural studies and more recently with the Modernity/ Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) paradigm. I believe it is sustained and indepth engagement with this latter body of literature accompanied by a partial decentring of the urban that might help us to get beyond the impasse. This final concluding chapter seeks to provide some insights on how engagement with this literature and a decolonial focus on the urban might provide a way forward for urban scholars seeking to disrupt North/South binaries, without losing sight of the importance of geographical specificity. I am calling for sustained and in-depth engagement with the MCD literature because I noticed that Brenner (2018) liberally cites a number of decolonial scholars (De Sousa Santos, Mignolo, Quijano) in his article but does so without engaging with most of the premises of the decolonial option. While these premises are difficult to summarise briefly, they involve the following aspects.2 Capitalism, colonialism, modernity and patriarchy rather than being understood as parallel processes are seen as entangled and co-constitutive and they emerged simultaneously as a result of the conquest of America by Spain and Portugal. This means that we locate the origins of modernity in the fifteenth century (rather than in the seventeenth century). Coloniality is what remains when formal colonialism comes to an end and independent nation-states are formed. We are then still living with the consequences of conquest today in the form of coloniality (Mignolo 2000; Quijano 2007). The creation of this world system that we refer to as global capitalism could not have occurred without a belief held by Europeans that first Native Americans and then Africans were less than human, so capitalist accumulation is embedded in and inseparable from the dynamics of racial privilege and racial oppression. In other words, it is race not class that is the most fundamental oppression. Oppressions of class or gender are therefore always exacerbated by racial disadvantage or mitigated by racial privilege. Locating modernity in the fifteenth century and acknowledging the conquest of America as a foundational moment in the establishment of modern capitalism means noting that America precedes Europe as a geocultural and geopolitical entity (Quijano and Ennis 2000; Lao-Montes 2008). Furthermore, the genocide that occurred as a result of colonialism was accompanied by epistemicide (Grosfoguel 2012). The conquest of America (and subsequent colonisations around the globe) were as much epistemic projects as well as ones focused on the theft of land and resources. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007; 2014) has outlined, indigenous and

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African knowledges, cosmovisions and spiritualities were deemed inferior to Eurocentric ones and would die out or should be actively destroyed and so Eurocentrism works through both colonialism and coloniality to render other non-Eurocentric knowledges as non-existent and non-admissible. They remain on the other side of the abyssal line, in the Zone of Non-Being (see also Grosfoguel 2018; Cupples and Glynn this volume). Abyssal thinking and the dismissal of non-Eurocentric knowledges persist today and continue to be the foundation of the Westernised university (see Cupples 2018). A decolonial approach, as Grosfoguel (2002; 2011) writes, does away with the division between culture and political economy or between postcolonial or Marxist approaches. Asking ‘what comes first, “culture or the economy,” is a false dilemma, a chicken-egg dilemma that obscures the complexity of the capitalist world-system’ (Grosfoguel 2011, 12). As noted earlier, for most PU urban studies scholars, the forces and agents of capital are the central object of critique. As a result, these scholars do important and useful work on urban marginality and the modes of corporate greed that result in displacement, eviction, the privatisation of public space, informality, violence and insecurity. They also usefully analyse the discourses and their circulation in sites of policy and elsewhere that work to support and legitimise this state of affairs. So this critical position, while valid in the terms in which it is expressed, does not exceed the boundaries of Eurocentric thought. It is what Dussel (2016) would call a critique from the inside. While they see capitalism, it is possible that some of them don’t see coloniality, in spite of the fact that contemporary capitalism is reasserting itself through recolonising gestures, and as a result effective anti-capitalist resistance is and has to be decolonial. As Nick Mirzoeff (2018) writes with reference to New York City, the primary way of seeing in the global city means not to see. Consequently, those who live on the privileged side of the abyssal line often fail to see coloniality embedded in the urban environment and how for example, as Mirzoeff (2018) remarks, gentrification is giving way to militarised invasion, occupation and eviction and these processes are enabled by the impunity accorded to the state forces that arrest and kill people of colour. In many cities in Latin America, the rich increasingly secure themselves in luxury airconditioned towers and vehicles, while the indigenous people that also live and work in the city are invisibilised. Mirzoeff (2018) understands the new activism around colonial monuments as part of this struggle for visibility. The murders of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin in the United States show how urban spaces such as street corners or parks become Zones of Non-Being when occupied by people of colour. Capitalism as a geographical process cannot then be separated from Eurocentric genocidal logics based on the elimination, disappearance or assimilation of the native or colonised subject. It is a system that results in the premature death of people, especially



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indigenous people and people of colour who refuse to assimilate, and also in the death of other forms of life on the planet (see Grosfoguel 2018). While these aspects are, as Mirzoeff suggests, insufficiently underscored in recent urban scholarship, there are some important exceptions. More than two decades ago, Neil Smith (1996) referred to the processes of gentrification as the advance of a ‘new urban frontier’, while a collection compiled by Atkinson and Bridge (2005) posited gentrification a new form of urban colonialism. More recently, Libby Porter’s work is drawing attention to the close yet often overlooked connections between settler colonialism, urban planning and indigenous activism, pointing to the need to better understand ‘the specifically urban aspects of producing and maintaining coloniser-colonised relations’ (Porter and Yiftachel 2017, 2; see also Porter 2010; Porter and Barry 2015; Porter 2017). Similarly, a recent edited collection (Peters and Andersen 2013) is focused on the presence of indigenous peoples in the city and the role played by indigeneity in the making of the urban. Focusing on four post colonial settler societies, namely the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it explores how indigenous peoples have been marginalised from the city both materially and discursively, in spite of the fact that cities in these locations sit on stolen indigenous land and that, in many cases, colonial dispossession accelerated the migration of indigenous peoples to cities. Indigenous peoples and indigenous ways of knowing and being are very much present in cities and are central to both understanding and overcoming urban marginality, particularly as indigenous peoples in settler3 societies are much more likely to be inadequately housed in poor neighbourhoods, unemployed or incarcerated than non-indigenous people. One of the issues highlighted by this scholarship that seeks to indigenise the urban is the difficulty that some (non-indigenous) urban scholars have in admitting non-Eurocentric and relational ontologies. As a result, certain ways of being and knowing, which are highly relevant to questions of urban marginality, are reduced to the non-admissible or at best are seen as things to consider alongside questions of capital accumulation rather than as processes that are constitutive of it. While there is some acceptance of the idea that (agentic) non-human entities are now caught up in processes of urbanisation, it generally does not extend to an understanding of them as sentient beings. It fails to admit the mountains that are alive (Li 2015); the rocks and glaciers that listen (Povinelli 1995; Cruikshank 2005), the mountains that talk (Mignolo 2002), the forests that think (Kohn 2013) and the lobsters that sense an imminent hurricane (Cupples 2012). This omission matters because such earth beings, as Marisol de la Cadena (2015) calls them, engage in important modes of anti-capitalist work. In Peru, the god Apu defends the Cerro Quilish mountain in Peru from harmful extractivist practices (de la Cadena 2015; see also Li 2015). In Aotearoa, New Zealand, a taniwha (water monster) acts as

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a kaitiaki (guardian) of the Waipā River and has made its way into environmental legislation (Fisher 2017). In the Miskito nation of Nicaragua, lasa or supernatural beings such as the swinta or the liwa mairin protect forests and seas from unsustainable hunting or fishing practices (Cupples 2012). In Australia, an urban redevelopment project in Perth was disrupted by the Waugul spirit who rested in that place (Porter 2010). While most of these examples might seem incidental to questions of urban marginality and are seen to belong to rural studies, environmental studies or indigenous studies, they become central to the urban when we (try to)4 speak from a different locus of enunciation and begins to further dismantle the reified binary (see Jazeel 2018) between the urban and the rural. As Libby Porter (2010, 41), who has taken this ontological challenge seriously, writes: The presumption of scientific knowledge and human relations with place in planning is unsettled when Indigenous people present different ontological and epistemological understandings of place.

In recent publications, Arturo Escobar (2015; 2018a; 2018b) has also been developing a decolonial approach to the urban based on relational ontological principles, noting that the political activism enacted by indigenous and Afrodescendant movements that are defending land, territory and water against predatory capitalist practices (especially mining) have extreme relevance for cities. For Escobar (2015, 93), a relational ontological approach means accepting that neither human nor non-human elements ‘pre-exist the relations that constitute us’. In other words, ‘we exist because everything exists’ (my translation). As Anthony Bebbington (2019, 322) writes, in reference to the frequent murder and criminalisation of Latin America’s environmental defenders, their movements to defend territory and oppose extractivism appear to be concerned with ‘transformations happening in the countryside, they are addressing processes that exceed lo rural and that will almost certainly have to have urban components if they are to stand any chance of being successful in their own terms’. Indeed, many of these struggles reference urban violence and marginality. As one Colombian environmental defender told Arturo Escobar (2015 91, my translation), ‘It is preferable to be shot dead than go to live in the corridors of the city’. Similarly, the Rama Kriol people residents of Bangkukuk Taik on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast who have mounted a highly mediated decolonial resistance to a proposed interoceanic canal that would damage their lives and livelihoods talk about not wishing to have to go live in Bluefields (the closest city) where you need money for everything and if you don’t have money you don’t eat (unlike in Bangkukuk Taik where they don’t need money because they grow and fish their own food) (see Bangkukuk Taik 2015; Cupples and Glynn 2017).



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Like the PU theorists, Arturo Escobar (2018a) is deeply opposed to urban neoliberal discourses such as those of ‘smart cities’ ‘competitive cities’ and ‘resilience’, but he suggests instead that the crisis faced by cities should not be reduced to a crisis of capitalism or even to an ecological crisis. The crisis we face, according to Escobar, is also epistemological and civilisational and results from the banishing of the Earth from the city. What we need, therefore, is to accelerate a process that he calls rurbanisation, where indigenous and peasant knowledges and cosmovisions are brought back into the city. In fact, indigenous cosmovisions and ancestral collective memories have been central to some of the most high-profile forms of anti-capitalist activism that the world has seen, including the Bolivian Water War and Gas War, the Zapatista rebellion, the formation of the APPO in Oaxaca and the opposition to the interoceanic canal in Nicaragua. In other words, one of the obstacles to the decolonisation of urban studies is that sentient non-humans, indigenous cosmovisions, popular religiosities and supernatural beings are all seen as external to the contestation of capitalism, at best as beliefs to be respected rather than as resources for thinking otherwise. Indeed, drawing on Dussel (2016, 491), we might say that PU theorists fail to ‘acknowledge that the planetary dimension is far larger than the European and American concept of “world” ’. Urban scholars need, therefore, to engage with relational and non-Eurocentric ontological practices, as these are the most likely source of alternatives to the current crisis (Dussel 1985). As Libby Porter (2010, 78) asserts with respect to urban planning, urban research is ‘in danger of missing the key moments of critical transformation unless it is accompanied by a sufficiently deconstructive stance towards its own ontological and epistemological philosophies’. On one level, making a decolonial/ontological turn means recognising that theories generated in the Global North by Eurocentric thinkers might not be so useful in the Global South, a point that has repeatedly been made by postcolonial urban scholars too. While we must remain attentive to this crucial argument in our work, we can hopefully get beyond the problematic divides (postcolonial/Marxist, North/South, global/non-global) that urban studies scholars have played a key role in constructing and maintaining, and begin to see the theoretical resources that emerge from non-Western places and from non-Eurocentric ways of knowing that might be applicable (with modification) for cities in the Global North. In a thorough appraisal and critique of contemporary critical approaches in urban studies, Simone Vegliò (2018) calls for a closer engagement between decolonial theorising and urbanisation, which would build on important earlier work carried out in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s that started from the Latin American experience (see Slater in this volume). This body of literature includes the early scholarship of late Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1970; 1972; 1973; 1977), who

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went to become one of the leading proponents of the MCD paradigm. Quijano developed this body of literature when, in his view, the marginalised urban population in Latin America ceased being a category applicable to isolated individuals to become a dominant feature of Latin American cities (see especially Quijano 1972). Vegliò (2018) notes that working with the concept of coloniality might enable us to use the insights that both PU and postcolonial theorists bring to our understanding of the urban without reproducing Eurocentrism and without being too general or too local in our focus. It can also perhaps help us to address the scalar and conceptual imprecision that often accompanies the term ‘marginality’ (i.e. whether we are discussing neighbourhoods, individuals or social relations and whether we are referring to ecological, economic, sociocultural, sociopsychological or political modes of marginality) (see Cortés 2006). A decolonial approach means that race and gender emerge not as something to be considered alongside questions of capitalist accumulation but as intrinsic to it. We are not therefore talking about alternative perspectives within a single worldview but about multiple worldviews, a pluriverse. Dussell (2016) has identified the limitations ensue when the work of critical scholars ‘remains enclosed within a particular paradigm’, while Mignolo (2018) urges us to change the terms of the conversation rather than the contents of the conversation. It is important to note at this point that while decolonial thought is most present among indigenous and Afro-descendant and other colonised actors, being from the Global South does not automatically make you a decolonial scholar as in many cases your mind remains colonised, just as being European does not automatically make you a Eurocentric thinker (see Dussel 2016, 491). One of the epistemic consequences of colonialism is that political and intellectual elites in the Global South usually reject the African and indigenous origins of their nation-states and tend not to see indigenous and Afro-descendant knowledges as epistemic models for policy and research (de Sousa Santos 2014). The universities in the Global South also reproduce Eurocentrism in their teaching and research programmes (Grosfoguel 2012). Eurocentrism is not confined to northern or European institutions, although it does of course play out differently in different parts of the world. A cross-cultural undertaking such as this one does not then necessarily result in an inter-epistemic text, if all scholars continue their dialogues and writing projects within Eurocentric frames. Fortunately, this text does succeed to some extent in being both cross-cultural and inter-epistemic, while remaining inevitably permeated by Eurocentric thought. But what this text does successfully is juxtapose different experiences of urban marginality, in order to read them through different lens. Juliet Hooker (2017, 3) is an advocate of what she calls hemispheric juxtaposition, which she defines as ‘concurrent readings of two [or more] subaltern traditions that generally



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viewed as disparate’ (parentheses added). Some of the chapters in this collection adopt this approach and by so doing get beyond, as Becerril Miranda and Ramakrishnan (this volume) demonstrate ‘some of the pitfalls of comparative urbanism’ (see also Calderon et al., Rebolledo and White, de Souza Santos and Hulme, all in this volume). In what remains of this final chapter, I seek to deploy a decolonial lens in order to think about how we can do cross-cultural work in varied urban margins that engages and develops the concerns expressed by a number of feminist and queer urban scholars, without ditching the necessary PU emphasis on capital as a harmful and destructive force that is undermining lives and livelihoods in cities across the globe, both those located in colonising and imperial nations and those located in colonised ones. I am in effect embracing Brenner’s (2018) attempt to get beyond the impasse with a call for ‘engaged pluralism’ but would like to push it further in epistemological terms. Engaged pluralism does not merely involve incorporating poststructuralist, feminist and queer approaches into (Marxist) urban theorising. In my view, we need more urban scholarship that is attentive to the relational, communitarian, indigenous and rural elements that compose political struggles in cities today. We also need a deeper recognition of the way that gender and racial inequalities, more so than class ones, underpin and are inseparable from contemporary capitalist practices. As I argue in the next two sections, a decolonial lens enables us to make sense of urban atrocities such as the feminicide in Ciudad Juárez and enables us to draw inspiration from the urban poor in both the Global North and Global South by talking with and from their struggles. Along with the broader MCD (Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality) paradigm, two key theorists are particularly helpful in this regard: Uruguayan political theorist Raúl Zibechi and Argentinian feminist thinker Rita Segato. PATRIARCHY AND THE APOCALYPTIC PHASE OF CAPITAL Ciudad Juárez is a Mexican city located on the US-Mexican border in the state of Chihuahua. It is directly across the border from El Paso in Texas. It has a large young female migrant population who moved from other parts of Mexico to seek work in the large number of assembly factories, or maquiladoras, that are located here. Working conditions are poor, wages are low and most residents must also struggle with inadequate housing, medical care, drinking water and sanitation. Women factory workers do, however, experience a degree of social mobility and gain new forms of independence after migration (Tiano and Ladino 1999). Ciudad Juárez has gained notoriety as

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one of the most violent cities on the planet beset by a high level of drug and gang-related violence and homicide. It also has a high level of femicide/feminicide.5 Since 1993, hundreds of young women, most of them maquiladora workers, have been abducted, assaulted, raped and murdered, their mutilated bodies dumped in the desert that lies on the edge of the city. Their murders have been followed by some of the worst kinds of state indifference and impunity in which perpetrators are rarely brought to justice and the crimes mostly go unpunished. In response, friends, family members and feminist and human rights activists have been demanding an end to the killings and punishment of the perpetrators. In an attempt to rehumanise the dehumanised victims, they filled the city with pink crosses and posters of missing women. In addition, the murders have generated international solidarity and significant amounts of media and artistic production – there have been numerous documentaries, exhibitions, blogs and murals dedicated to raising awareness of the feminicide and to the rehumanisation of the victims. The impunity that accompanies the murders is legitimised by dominant forces that discursively connect the women – who have already defied traditional gender roles and relations by leaving their homes and their unpaid domestic work and migrating to Ciudad Juárez to seek paid work – to prostitution, drug addiction and immoral behaviour. Indeed, as Leslie Salzinger (2000) notes, gaining employment in the factories requires women to perform a sexualised kind of femininity (e.g. flirting with managers, wearing skimpy clothing) and once hired they are subject to quite gendered forms of surveillance. Their presumed lack of respectability is then seen to justify police inaction over the crimes. Salzinger (2000) emphasises the close connections between cultural constructions of gender and the neoliberal economic model. These workers are cheap labour and, by virtue of having made themselves available to transnational capital, loose women, a status that gets them hired and also devalued. Even condemnation of the murders in popular culture can end up reworking the problematic notion that the proper gender order has been disrupted by the incorporation of Mexican women in the transnational labour market (see discussion in Volk and Schlotterbeck 2007). Rita Segato (2006; 2016), who has viewed the femicide in Ciudad Juárez through a feminist decolonial lens, puts both gender and the question of women at the centre of economic and political questions and is highly critical of the idea that these are optional analytical categories for scholars. Her work reveals how patriarchy is inseparable from contemporary neoliberal economic and political formations, given the ways in which the (masculine) public sphere was central to the creation of colonial modernity and the ways in which patriarchal ideologies are being reasserted along with colonial forms of extractivism in the contemporary period. Colonialism and coloniality have



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worked to articulate the domestic space to the private and the intimate, an articulation that did not pre-exist colonial occupation. It is, however, an articulation that remains incomplete and precarious and that must be consistently maintained by colonial and patriarchal forces. In Ciudad Juárez, according to Segato (2006), there is a pedagogy of cruelty at work that has been unleashed by the growing impunity of economic power as capital moves into what she calls its apocalyptic phase (as the illegal accumulation of capital has become structural) and neoliberal multiculturalism comes to an end (as cultural rights are achieved but are not matched by the redistribution of wealth). According to Segato, we should not understand the crimes in Ciudad Juárez as random and inexplicable events or as evidence of the lifestyle failure of the victim. Rather she understands them as systematic ones that result from what she calls ‘high intensity colonial modern patriarchy’ and that are closely connected to and embedded in neoliberal globalisation. In this new phase, Segato believes that the character of urban violence has shifted. The unimaginable cruelty inflicted by large numbers of men on the women of Ciudad Juárez is not an instrumental form of violence. It is an expressive and communicative act that feeds off the forms of inequality generated by economic globalisation and appropriates the body of women as a colony. The mode of communication is both vertical (punishing the victim for her transgressive moral behaviour and asserting territorial control over the public space in which she moves) and horizontal. It seeks primarily to speak to other men in pursuit of membership of a masculine/masculinist society. The murders are not then random sexually motivated acts carried out by antisocial or messed-up individuals but are part of a systematic criminal mafia embedded in powerful networks who benefit from impunity (a point that a number of courageous investigative journalists have made). Common criminals from marginalised neighbourhoods would not be able to kidnap, torture, rape and kill and bribe government officials without facing the force of the law. Ciudad Juárez is, therefore, a site where the entanglements between capitalism, coloniality, patriarchy and premature death are hypervisible. These entanglements replicate themselves across the globe, although they often do so in less spectacular and grotesque ways. The exploitative maquiladora industry that both thrives on and reproduces marginality is not then a coincidental backdrop to feminicide, it is integral to the system of neoliberal globalisation and Rita Segato’s work is central in lifting the veneer of unintelligibility that obscures the relationships between gender, capital and modern-colonial power. By centring coloniality, gender and patriarchy as much as the urban, Segato provides us with new insights into urban marginality in Ciudad Juárez and in other sites where transnational capital arrives and dispossesses.

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THE DISPERSED CITY While Rita Segato focuses on the suffering produced by the toxic combination of coloniality, misogyny and economic globalisation (as well as on the feminist humanitarian activism that feminicide has created), Raúl Zibechi (2005; 2010; 2012) explores the new forms of urban activism that have emerged in Latin America and that cannot be analysed through an orthodox left wing or new social movements approach. Zibechi amply acknowledges the persistence of repression throughout the continent, but reveals the modes of political action in place that are a source of optimism. They are extremely relevant for the question of urban marginality, as they demonstrate the multifaceted ways that cities are being made to work for dispossessed and subordinated populations. Zibechi’s work on social movements in El Alto, Buenos Aires and Caracas reveal the creative construction of ‘new territories’ in which the urban poor are engaged in innovative forms of everyday practice. In the Bolivian Aymara city of El Alto, now inhabited by large numbers of indigenous migrants after the closure of the tin mines in the mid-1980s, urban spaces have been occupied in ways that permit the survival, social reproduction and political action of the urban poor. Drawing on popular, indigenous, familial, horizontal and autonomous modes of organisation and economic production, urban dwellers are taking over functions inadequately or no longer provided by the state. Furthermore, they are producing their own goods and services based on ancestral kinship structures and non-exploitative forms of economic exchange. They are also redesigning urban architectural forms and eschewing trade unions and political parties in favour of dispersed and constantly mutating people’s assemblies. In Bolivia, as in insurrections elsewhere in Latin America, they make frequent use of the roadblock, which for Zibechi (2012) embodies the ‘territorialisation of conflict’. These formations coexist with repression, inadequate infrastructure, poverty and lack of access to basic services. El Alto mobilises a decolonial cartography in the sense that it has become impenetrable and difficult for outsiders to navigate. Outsiders often see El Alto as a chaotic city, but as Zibechi (2005) writes, if we see El Alto as chaotic, it is probably because we are viewing it ‘from a Western, foreign, or colonial perspective’. Zibechi (2012) calls these urban spaces ‘non-capitalist islands’ that operate beyond both capital and the state and challenge both the inevitability of gentrification and the welfarist premises of the traditional left. By working according to a dispersed model of power, they put ‘the neoliberal model on the defensive’ (1). Zibechi (69) writes: While the city constructed in the image of capital – following the logic of concentration – negates the autonomy of its subjects, the dispersed city opens



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itself up to difference, but it is a difference rooted in social ties of a communitarian character (going beyond the traditional understanding of community).

This then is an ‘exclusionary territoriality’ that is politically potent and ready for largely leaderless rebellion. The people of El Alto have organised effective uprisings that bring down presidents and result in changes to policy. Indeed, the people of El Alto were central to the insurrections such as the 2003 Gas War that led to the election of trade union leader and coca farmer Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, in 2006. Zibechi (2012, 72) asserts that there is a likely ‘connection between this autonomous familybased work and the fact that these same sectors were capable of mounting an insurrection without leadership or leaders’. While most Latin American revolutions (Mexican, Cuban, Nicaraguan) have not been able to produce new worlds, embedded as they were in Eurocentric notions of nationalist liberation, there is something distinct about the more recent territorial struggles being fought in Bolivia and in Zapatista territories in Mexico and elsewhere (Zibechi 2012). These movements are developing non-state powers and are able to dismantle and fragment neoliberal and patriarchal institutionality in ways that are relevant for struggles against capital and state domination in the Global North too. They are in other words worthy of our attention wherever in the world we work. While these forms of urban activism in Latin America are posited as new or at least as emerging in response to ‘the current conjuncture of destruction of communal worlds by neoliberal globalisation’ (Escobar 2018a, 174), it is important to recognise that they build on centuries of decolonial black and indigenous resistance to colonial dispossession and they draw on ancestral ways of knowing. As the Zapatistas asserted in the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, their ‘method of autonomous government was not simply invented by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN); it comes from several centuries of indigenous resistance and from the Zapatistas’ own experience’ (cited in Escobar 2018a, 173). So subordinated peoples are building new future urban worlds using ancestral knowledges as a central resource. Ancestrality should not be understood as ‘an intransigent attachment to the past’ but rather as something that ‘stems from a living memory directly connected to the ability to envision a different future’ (Escobar 2018a, 71). It is important to recognise however that ancestrality is often not readily available to European, Euro-descendant and Eurocentric intellectuals, even those committed to a critical emancipatory politics and who seek to speak with and from the position of the subaltern. It is, therefore, necessary that urban researchers when accounting for the geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge acknowledge, as de la Cadena (2015) does, that there might be things that we are simply not capable of grasping.

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But what we can more easily grasp is that these urban ancestral forms of world-making are reversing urban trajectories that are often seen as global in their scope and are useful in other sites for revealing the non-inevitability of processes such as gentrification. Indeed, in many ways, it is Bolivian cities where we find a clear disruption of the global urban gentrifying model. Kate Maclean’s (2018) recent work on La Paz discusses changing indigenous mobilities in the wake of economic growth and declining inequalities. In La Paz, the main beneficiaries of this economic transformation are the formerly marginal and (until recently) stigmatised Aymara population, especially women, who are increasingly buying up real estate in wealthy white neighbourhoods such as the Zona Sur and occupying urban spaces (such as luxury shopping malls like the Mega Center) with indigenous ways of being. Maclean (2018) refers to the movie Zona Sur on this process in which Comadre Remedios, an Aymara woman in traditional dress (pollera and Derby hat), purchases in cash the large home of a white middle-class family who can no longer maintain their elite status and standard of living in a decolonising Bolivia. So while we might be able to identify gentrification in many parts of Latin America, it is important to note that in some places native inhabitants are displacing white settlers and the dynamics of urban marginality are being reversed. I recognise that urban transformations in Bolivia involve indigenous property ownership, so there is a risk here as elsewhere that the newly empowered might well become elite indigenous capitalists (see Coulthard 2007, 452) who are perhaps embracing rather than de-linking (see Mignolo 2007) from capitalist-colonial modernity. But nonetheless there are decolonising urban processes under way that have implications for our understandings of urban marginality. WAYS FORWARD It is not possible to be too prescriptive in sketching out what a decolonial urban studies might look like, because the approach, the theories and the content will all depend on the specific geographies at play and on the geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge (see Grosfoguel 2016). These geographies and politics include the forms of oppression in place and the relational worlds that are being constructed in resistance to these forms of oppression. They also include the relational worlds that exist more or less independently of capital and coloniality. Not every form of subaltern urban activity, action or experiment is in response to capitalism and coloniality. There are, however, a few general recommendations that we can bear in mind as we seek to decolonise urban research and, in the process, draw on the strengths of the intellectual contributions provided by PU, postcolonial, decolonial and feminist theorists.



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A starting point is to recognise our own locus of enunciation and therefore our limitations. If we have been trained in the Westernised university, our thinking will inevitably have been shaped by Eurocentrism. We also need to recognise, as Fabian Frenzel (2016) writes, that it is extremely difficult to talk of urban marginality without Othering, noting that slums and townships are often framed in hyperbolic ways as sites of extraordinary suffering or sites of creative entrepreneurship. Even when we as researchers are on the side of the dispossessed, we Other. We must therefore keep the hybridity of the urban condition in our writing (i.e. not everyone in a marginal neighbourhood feels oppressed), while we simultaneously reflect on our own complicity with Eurocentric and colonial systems. Doing so can potentially be achieved by thinking more closely about our modes of interpretation. Decolonial feminist scholar María Lugones (2003) highlights how difficult it can be for us as researchers to read marginality. Drawing on and extending the work of Arthur Danto, Lugones argues that it can be very hard to establish what is an expression and what is a manifestation, especially when it comes to things that middle class or more affluent populations might characterise as poverty, exclusion or dysfunction.6 While the urban poor are of course constrained by structures of power, they do not cease to express themselves in whatever means they have available, to make political statements. We must, therefore, pay attention to these forms of expression, as we must also try to identify the structural conditions that should be seen as manifestations. Doing decolonial work does of course mean paying close attention to our practices of citation. Doing so does not mean that we can no longer cite and engage with Eurocentric thinkers such as Marx and Foucault, but it involves recognising that these thinkers might require some modification and will need to be brought into dialogue with decolonial thinkers. (Marx has of course been long subject to this modification, e.g. Black Marxism.) Just as (modified) Marx might have some purchase for reflecting on conditions and struggles in the Global South, decolonial thought might be extremely useful for reflecting on conditions and struggles in the Global North. Theories can travel from North to South and from South to North and from South to South and much decolonial theory is useful in the Global North too. While far more people in the Global South find themselves below the abyssal line in the Zone of Non-Being, there is also a Zone of Non-Being – a zone of dehumanisation where racialised people are subject to premature death – in the Global North. Such a space might include Grenfell Tower – a high-rise social-housing block in London that was home to a number of low-income, working-class and refugee residents and managed by a tenant management organisation (KCTMO) on behalf of the local council. In June 2017, twenty-two tenants died in a ferocious fire caused by highly combustible cladding that had been applied to

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the outside of building. Residents had repeatedly raised concerns about safety including fire safety, but these concerns were repeatedly ignored by KCTMO that was very much part of a system that fuels ongoing disinvestment in social housing. Like the activists in Ciudad Juárez, Grenfell activists (both before and after the tragedy) have sought to rehumanise the residents. As Segato (2006, 29) writes, the apocalyptic phase of capital stands in brutal opposition to ‘relational worlds’ and constitutes ‘an attempt to dismantle lo colectivo’ and this is something we can also see in London’s housing landscape, a city that as a direct result of housing policy and austerity politics is increasingly unaffordable for ordinary Londoners. The appropriation of social housing by private investors and predatory landlords and the displacement, eviction, racialisation, stigmatisation (and burning to death) of existing inhabitants is without doubt a mode of colonisation. Just as Latin America’s urban dwellers engage a communitarian, collectivist and relational ontology that seeks to overturn and challenge marginality through a mixture of experimental innovation, occupation and insurrection, so do marginal populations in the UK capital. One such example is the case of the Focus E15 Campaign in London. Focus E15 is a multicultural and multi-ethnic movement initiated by young single mothers living in a hostel who were served eviction notices by the East Thames Housing Association with support from the local Labourled Newham council. As a result of the regeneration of East London just prior to and following the 2012 Olympic Games, which was financed by global real estate corporations, their homes sat on a site in which large profits could be made by private developers (Watt 2016). If evicted, the mothers and their children would have been displaced to cities outside of London and removed from their crucial support networks. The threat of eviction came as a direct result of Tory austerity politics that have been accompanied by benefit sanctions, cuts to housing benefit and the so-called bedroom tax. In this context, maintaining social housing in London, with escalating real estate prices and profits to be made, is seen as uneconomical. Evictions enable social housing to be sold to private developers and converted into luxury homes. In this part of London, a vibrant social movement was unleashed that has also involved the territorialisation of protest, as mothers have occupied council offices and the nearby empty Carpenters estate and carried out awareness-raising activities in the street. Using the slogan ‘social housing not social cleansing’, occupations and protests have been organised like children’s birthday parties and have frequently involved balloons, cake and face painting. So in response to the cold masculinist world of financialisation and property speculation, the E15 mothers have enacted a different set of values based on maternal care and on community, collectivist and ludic action in which the activists are simultaneously fighting classism, racism and sexism. The struggle was never confined to E15 and instead became rapidly articulated to the housing crisis



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and to a critique of Tory Britain (see Sagoe 2013; Belgrave 2014). Despite a conjuncture involving predatory landlords, the absence of rent controls, exorbitant MP expense claims and the stigmatisation of people on benefits, lo colectivo can be found in London as well as La Paz and El Alto. As Sarah Kwei (2014) put it: With a lot of nerve, the support of thousands of people and media attention across the globe, a group of mainly young, working class women has put the political elite in its place.

Given that urban marginality is always a result of dehumanisation, it is the places in the world where we find dehumanisation that should have ‘epistemological privilege’ (Maldonado-Torres 2008, 183, drawing on Dussel). We don’t need to compare places that are different, and thereby inadvertently erase their differences, we can instead follow Hooker’s lead and that of a number of scholars in this volume, and engage instead in acts of juxtaposition. So let us connect decolonial struggles across the globe, allow ancestral knowledges, indigenous cosmovisions and non-human agents to disrupt the hold that Eurocentrism has on our thinking, ensure that gender and race, along with class, are always kept in the picture, think about what the rural and rural struggles mean for the city and allow our theories (PU, feminist, postcolonial and decolonial) to travel in multiple directions.

NOTES 1. See the special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (3), 2018. 2. A good introduction to this body of literature can be found in the journal Cultural Studies 21 (2–3), 2007. 3. I recognise following Moana Jackson that the term ‘settler’ is of course a euphemism that conceals the violence of colonialism (Sykes and Jackson 2016). 4. I seek here to acknowledge how difficult it is for those of us trained in the Westernised university to do so. 5. Mexican scholars such as Marcela Largarde have used the term ‘feminicide’ (femincidio) rather than ‘femicide’ (femicidio) to signal not only the sexist and misogynistic character of the murders, but also to signal that they are murders that are tolerated by state forces (see OACNUDH 2014). 6. The example Lugones takes from Danto is that of a disordered room. Is a disordered room the manifestation of the structural conditions in which someone is forced to live, or does it instead tell us something about the occupant? If it is the latter, is the room disordered because the (female) occupant is rejecting dominant gendered norms?

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Index

abstract space, 21, 22, 23, 24, 36 abyssal thinking, 123, 208, 219 activism, 35, 51, 70, 122, 130, 208 – 11, 214, 216, 217 anthropology, 144 APPO, 129, 211 assemblages thinking, 7 asymmetrical integration, 161, 174 austerity, 130, 220 Australia, 210

conceptual logic, 7 – 8 conjunctural analysis, 121, 131 consolidation, 162, 163, 165 Cuba, 217 decoloniality/decolonial theory, 11, 13, 120, 123 – 24, 131 – 32, 134, 207 – 8, 210 – 14, 216 – 19, 221 deindustrialisation, 5 Delhi, India, 21, 43 – 44, 46 – 47, 50 – 55 dependency theory, 3 determinate abstraction, 21, 23, 24 displacement, 1, 20, 25, 27, 30, 32, 34, 35, 50, 135, 145, 193, 208

Bangkukuk Taik, Nicaragua, 210 bedroom tax, 220 Bluefields, Nicaragua, 210 Bolivia, 211, 216 – 18 Buenos Aires, Argentina, 216 Calais, France, 61 – 71 capitalist urbanisation, 3 – 4, 21, 22 – 24, 32, 65, 161 – 63, 175 Caracas, Venezuela, 216 Casablanca, Morocco, 171 – 77 Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, 124, 213 – 15, 220 class inequality, 1, 6, 21, 28, 29, 30 – 31, 33 – 35, 51, 79, 91 – 93, 95, 96, 102 – 4, 109, 119, 151, 154, 156 commodification, 27, 165 comparative urbanism, 2 – 3, 4 – 5, 43 – 45, 56, 83, 144

ecological crisis, 190, 195 – 96, 211, 212 ecstasy, 100, 108 – 9 Edinburgh, Scotland, 31 – 34, 103 El Alto, Bolivia, 216 – 17, 221 El Chocó, Colombia, 24 – 28 ethnography, 4, 7, 102, 106, 110, 145, 152, 155 Eurocentrism, 124, 208, 212, 219, 221 eviction, 27, 43 – 44, 54 – 55, 68 – 71, 177, 186 experimental urban spaces, 62 – 68 extractive economies, 27 extractivism, 210, 214

227

228

Index

Facebook, 86 – 90, 117, 129, 149 favelas, 4, 6, 45, 161 – 62 femicide/feminicide, 213 feminist theory, 102, 206 – 7, 231, 214, 218 Focus E15 movement, London, 220 gated communities, 30, 194, 197 – 98, 200 gender inequality, 1, 6, 30 – 32, 34, 36, 79, 83, 90, 102, 123, 206 – 7, 212 – 15, 221 gentrification, 1, 19 – 36, 85, 92, 120, 144, 145, 147, 151, 156, 193, 205, 208, 209, 218; commercial, 26, 145 – 50; planetary, 20, 21, 23 gentrifier activity, 27 geographies of conflict, 25 – 27 ghetto, 5, 77 – 78, 81 – 83, 88 – 89, 92, 95 – 96 Glasgow, Scotland, 100 Global North, 2, 5, 31, 43 – 44, 62, 207, 211, 213, 219 Global South, 2, 31, 43 – 44, 46 – 47, 62, 69, 189, 207, 211, 213, 219 Gold Horn, The, 30 Grenfell Tower, London, 219 Growing House, The (architectural movement), 165 heritage, 25, 143 – 47, 150 – 54, 156, 177, 179, 189, 190 – 93 housing, 1, 28 – 36, 43 – 56, 62 – 63, 65, 71, 100 – 101, 126, 151, 162, 164 – 69, 171, 173, 189, 192 – 96, 200, 213, 219 – 20 housing policy, 43 – 44, 46 – 47, 189, 193, 200, 220 incremental process, 183 informal appropriation, 177 informal economy, 3 – 4, 92, 163 informality, 1, 65 – 66, 161 – 63, 175, 208 informal settlements, 43 – 44, 121, 153, 161 – 64, 172, 175 – 76, 185, 194 Istanbul, Turkey, 9, 19, 28 – 31, 34 – 35

La Paz, Bolivia, 218, 221 legalisation, 165 Leicester, England, 143 – 50, 156 London, England, 61, 77, 83 – 86, 90 – 94, 100, 219, 220 maquiladoras, 213 marginalised development, 161 marginality, 33, 61, 69, 71, 78, 79, 96, 161, 176, 212, 215, 216, 219, 220; advanced, 5 – 6, 91, 96; cultural, 131 – 56; history of concept, 2 – 8; urban, 1 – 8, 35, 44 – 46, 54, 56, 78, 81, 83, 94, 99, 101, 110, 119 – 21, 124, 129, 133, 152, 189, 193, 198, 200, 205, 208 – 10, 218, 219, 221 Marxism, 20 – 24, 36, 101 – 2, 163 – 65, 208, 211, 213, 219 Marxist urban theory, 3 – 4, 5, 13, 32 Mexico, 1, 44 – 45, 86 – 90, 99 – 101, 106 – 7, 117 – 34, 213 – 15, 217 Mexico City, 1 – 2, 20, 35, 86 – 90, 95 – 96, 101, 106 – 7, 126 – 28, 131, 163, 166 – 68, 194 modernisation theory, 3 moral panic, 5, 19 – 20, 124 – 25, 127, 134 narcocultura, 127 neoliberalism, 4, 6, 25, 29, 67, 69, 90, 109, 121, 126 – 28, 133 – 34, 144, 145, 189 – 90, 215 – 17 neotribalism, 99 – 100, 104 – 5, 109 – 10 Newcastle, England, 103 New Zealand, 209 NGOs, 48, 62 – 66, 71, 194 – 96, 201 Nicaragua, 195, 210 – 11, 217 Oaxaca, Mexico, 129, 211 Olympic Games, 46, 85, 91, 92, 220 oral history, 145, 147, 150, 156 Ouro Preto, Brazil, 144, 150, 151 – 57



Index 229

planetary urbanisation, 13, 20 – 21, 23, 62, 206 policing, 6, 44, 49, 61 – 71, 106, 128, 129, 214 postcolonial theory, 2, 4 – 5, 7 – 8, 13, 20, 46, 123, 163, 208, 211 – 12, 218, 221 praxis, 22, 24, 44, 53 queer theory, 206, 213 Quibdó, Colombia, 9, 19, 24 – 28, 34 – 35 racial inequality, 6, 31, 35, 61, 68, 70, 79, 81 – 82, 90 – 91, 95 – 96, 102 – 3, 123 – 24, 154 – 56, 206 – 7, 212, 221 – 23 racialisation, 6, 61, 70, 121, 219 – 20 racism, 68, 79, 122, 220 rave culture, 99 – 102, 105 – 10, 147 – 48 real abstraction, 22 refugees, 62 – 69 rent gap, 32 – 34 rentiers, 26 – 27 rent strike, 173 resettlement, 50 – 51 resistance, 33, 44, 52, 56, 81, 87, 101, 108, 126, 169, 208, 210, 217, 218 right to the city, 205 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 4, 6, 43, 47 – 50, 53 – 55, 161 roadblock, 216 rurbanisation, 211 San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, 189 – 201 self-construction, 12, 182 – 83, 185 sexuality, 123, 150, 195, 206

slums, 50 – 51, 54, 56, 65, 69, 100, 219 slum upgrading, 43 – 47 social media, 71, 86 – 90, 105, 121 – 25 space and time, 164 spatial biographies, 164 spatial fix, 26 stigmatisation, 68, 78 – 83, 96, 129, 131, 162, 185, 220 subaltern urbanism, 62 – 63, 69 subcultural capital, 99 – 103, 109 – 10 supernatural beings, 119, 210, 211 tactics/tactical actions, 50, 55, 161, 164, 167, 186, 195, 197, 216 taste, 77, 89, 102, 119 temporary sites, 62 – 64 Tepito, Mexico, 126 – 28, 130, 133 – 34 territorial stigmatisation, 1, 5, 6, 34, 83, 86 – 90, 91 – 97, 120, 126 – 27 three-dimensional negotiation, 179 time-based architecture, 164 universities, 212, 219, 221n4 urban planning, 209 utopian thought, 190 – 91, 195, 198 – 201 Valparaiso, Chile, 177 – 82 Virgin of Guadalupe, 119, 125, 127, 134n1 volunteers, 62 – 71 YouTube, 127, 129 – 30 Zapatistas, 211, 217 Zone of Being, Zone of Non-Being, 123 – 24, 208

About the Contributors

Héctor Becerril Miranda is CONACYT Research Fellow at the Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero where he is conducting research on disaster risk reduction in the Metropolitan Area of Acapulco. Héctor holds a PhD in Development Planning from University College London and a MSc in Town Planning from University of Paris. His main areas of expertise are public policy, urban governance and informal settlements. Edwar Calderón is Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad EAFIT in Medellín where he is working on the multidisciplinary GCRF PEAK Urban Project. He recently completed a postdoctoral research project in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh on the British Council grant: ‘Land Use Planning Challenges: The Gentrification of the Historical Centre of Quibdó, and Its Impact on the Sustainable Socioeconomic Production’. Almudena Cano Piñeiro is an architect in search of intellectual and practical alliances between urban design, research and teaching. She works at the service of local communities in Spain, India and the United Kingdom. She has exhibited her work at the thirteenth and sixteenth Biennale di Venezia, XII BIEAU, ARCH Moscow NEXT2013 and ICA-London among others. She is currently a PhD student at the Royal College of Art. Julie Cupples is Professor of human geography and cultural studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her current research is focused primarily on contemporary media practices and struggles for indigenous and Afro-descendant rights in Latin America. She is the author or editor of six books, including Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University and The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development. 231

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About the Contributors

Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos is Director of the Brazilian Studies Programme and Departmental Lecturer at the Latin American Centre, University of Oxford. Her work focuses on urban ethnography, incorporating themes of cultural heritage, participatory city planning and mining economies. Andreza is the author of The Politics of Memory: Urban Cultural Heritage in Brazil. Kevin Glynn is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at Northumbria University. He has published widely in media studies, cultural studies and critical and cultural geography. He is co-author of Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power and the Transformation of American Television, Communications/Media/Geographies and Shifting Nicaraguan Mediascapes: Authoritarianism and the Struggle for Social Justice. Neil Gray is Research Associate at the University of Glasgow. His studies primarily focus on urban devalorisation, territorial stigmatisation, gentrification theory, housing movements and the spatialities of Italian autonomous Marxism. His recent book Rent and Its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle (2018) was published by Rowman & Littlefield International in the Transforming Capitalism series. Tom Hulme is Lecturer in modern British history at Queen’s University Belfast and author of After the Shock City: Urban Culture and the Making of Modern Citizenship. His research interests are mainly in the connections between the city and understandings of belonging from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Hamish Kallin is Lecturer in human geography at the University of Edinburgh. He has published on the links between territorial stigmatisation and gentrification, the role of state power in the gentrification process and the myths and realities of rent control (with Tom Slater). His research focuses on the multiple ways in which capital circulation remakes the city of Edinburgh. Mario López González Garza is Mexican and has an MA in architecture from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His research focuses on urban marginality and the design of the city. He is a board member of the NGOs Casita Linda and Caminamos Juntos, focusing on migration and vulnerable populations in San Miguel de Allende, where he currently resides. Christoph Lueder is Associate Professor of Urbanism and Architecture at Kingston University, London. His research is focused on the twentieth- and



About the Contributors 233

early twenty-first-century history of architecture and urbanism, with a particular concentration on the pervasive roles of diagrams as analytical, generative, narrative and critical devices. His architectural practice outputs include the University Library Magdeburg (2003), social housing in Ingolstadt, Germany (1998) and housing in Shanghai, China (2005). Lucía Martín López is an architect and researcher at the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey and a member of the National System of Researchers at CONACYT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología) in Mexico. Her PhD in architecture received the Extraordinary Doctorate Award 2015–2016 from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Her research on progressive housing has been exhibited at EXPO Milano 2015 and the Spanish Pavilion of the sixteenth Venice Architecture Biennial. Oli Mould is Lecturer in human geography at Royal Hollow, University of London. His research focuses on searching for communities flourishing in the face of political and economic pressures, social unrest and cultural division. His specific research agendas cut across a number of traditional academic themes such as urban politics, creativity, cultural studies and social theory. Kavita Ramakrishnan is Lecturer in geography and international development at the University of East Anglia. Her research focuses on informal housing, experiences of marginalisation and everyday coping strategies in South Asian and European cities. César Rebolledo is Professor of Communication at Universidad La Salle in Mexico City and a member of the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) in Mexico. His research interests include religious identities and social discrimination, Western imaginaries of death in youth cultures, digital moral and hate interactions on social media and cultural meanings of silence in the hypermedia era. Tom Slater is Reader in urban geography at the University of Edinburgh. He has written extensively on gentrification, displacement from urban space, territorial stigmatisation, welfare reform and social movements. Over the past decade, he has delivered lectures in nineteen different countries on these issues, and his work has been translated into ten different languages, circulating widely to inform struggles for urban social justice. He is currently writing a book titled Shaking Up the City: Reframing Urban Inequality (2020). Ebru Soytemel is Lecturer in sociology at Aston University. Her research interests include social and economic inequality, gentrification and

234

About the Contributors

socialspatial exclusion and the relationship between social class and socialsymbolic borders. She has experience of working with quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods and has a particular interest in ethnographic research methods and multiple correspondence analysis. Joseline Vega Osornio is Lecturer in theories of communication at the Universidad Iberoamericana in the Santa Fe district of Mexico City. She is also a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Her research interests revolve around methodologies of the imaginary and the neurohumanities. Joy White is an independent researcher and the author of Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise, one of the first books to foreground the socioeconomic significance of Grime music. She writes on a range of themes, including social mobility, urban marginality, mental health/well-being and urban music. Catherine Wilkinson is Senior Lecturer in Education at Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom. She has an interdisciplinary background, with a BA (Hons.) in fashion brand management, a MSc in marketing management and a PhD in environmental sciences. Her diverse research interests include youth voice, difference and disfigurement and community radio. She is a qualitative researcher, using ethnographic and participatory approaches.