Features, Urban Struggles

Sven da Silva: Special Zones, Slums, and High-rise buildings: Community leaders between “occupancy urbanism” of the poor and the powerful in Recife, Brazil

This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).

This blog documents the politics of community leaders in an area selected for “urban renewal” in the center of the city of Recife in the northeast of Brazil. More specifically, it looks at how they position themselves regarding legally defined low-income residence areas (officially named as Special Zones of Social Interest, or ZEIS), informal land occupations (favelas or slums), and vertical gated communities (residential high-rise buildings). Community leaders operate as brokers between the interests of the urban poor, politicians, and real estate developers. They provide essential services in slums, while being dependent on the lower level bureaucracy for the provision and maintenance of these services (Koster & de Vries 2012). The role of community leaders as crucial brokers in Recife is heightened by the fact that they are democratically elected as local representatives of their Special Zone within a city-wide participatory program for slum governance.

I deploy the analytical lens of “occupancy urbanism” that narrates struggles for urban space and shelter “beyond policy and projects” (Benjamin 2007: 558). The perspective insists on seeing “the urban” as an open-ended site of encounter and “political possibility” (Benjamin 2014: 319). “Occupancy urbanism” is the term that Solomon Benjamin uses to describe the physical-political spaces that are opened-up when the urban poor occupy land, claim public services, or negotiate with the municipal bureaucracy (2007, 2008, 2014). As I explain further below, despite occupancy urbanism being a political practice of the poor, it has become useful for the powerful, especially for real estate developers and their allies.

As the poor’s “subversive politics on the ground” (Benjamin 2008: 723), “occupancy” urbanism challenges the mainstream developmentalist model of “global” urbanism. The latter abides by capitalist market mechanisms and private property, while assuming that cities in the “Global South” will follow the footsteps—or become satellites—of those in the “Global North”. Occupancy urbanism is not about policymaking and masterplanning to make cities “inclusive”, “smart”, and “World Class”. Occupancy urbanism is neither the arena of elite civil society that preaches “good governance” and forms of direct citizen participation without collective representation by community leaders. Central to occupancy urbanism is the analysis of “land and its historicity in its multiple logics” (2014: 318). The focus on various forms of “occupancy” and tenure arrangements forces us to move beyond homogenized versions of “the favela” (slum). Occupancy urbanism thus highlights internal diversity within “the slum” while “grounding the slum in the circuits of finance and real estate capitalism” (Roy 2011: 228).

Affluent private investors and developers have not only made their own agreements with community leaders and the municipal administration, but they have also benefited from the land occupations initiated by the poor. I follow Anaya Roy in calling this an “occupancy urbanism of the powerful” (2011: 230). Roy points at the existence of “development mafias, local criminal syndicates, often with global connections” (Weinstein in Roy 2011: 230). Their practices are interpenetrated with the occupancy urbanism of the poor in terms of claims to land, basic services, and embeddedness within the lower level municipal bureaucracy. While community leaders in Recife can definitely not be described as “mafias organized in criminal syndicates”, it is possible to observe the proliferation of community leaders with strong ties to real estate developers who negotiate with the municipal administration under the guise of “public consultation”. For these reasons, I consider these practices of community leaders as part of occupancy urbanism of the powerful.

In the following sections I present ethnographic examinations of two areas, Coque and Vila Imperial. My approaches to community leaders and the context in both settings has allowed me to further theorize the squatter approach to urban development that is taking place. I show how, in Recife, occupancy urbanism is “wielded differentially by different social classes in the context of urban inequality” (Roy 2011: 231). I argue that occupancy urbanism helps us to think about land development and urban politics as an interplay between various practices of “occupancy”. In this way we can gain an understanding of the creation of a highly exclusionary city. Before expanding on Coque and Vila Imperial, however, I first expand on Recife’s urban governance and offer a short description of a contestatory movement called Occupy Estelita.

Image 1: Map of the center of Recife that locates land occupations, ZEIS, Rio Mar shopping mall, New Recife project area, and (halted) social housing estates (OpenStreetMap, 2020, adapted by Sven da Silva)

Participatory urban governance

Often referred to as Brazil’s capital of inequality, Recife’s urban governance legacy includes a slum governance program, as well as a participatory planning program in which the municipal administration visits neighborhoods for consultation and deliberation. Both programs were initiated in reaction to massive land occupations by the poor in the 1970s; although these programs have lost much steam over time. Due to this strong popular movement, the military regime (1964-1985) had to shift their strategy from forced evictions for a “slum-free” city towards, what we would now call, “upgrading” for an “inclusive” city.

In 1983 a new local zoning law defined Special Zones of Social Interest (ZEIS), as “spontaneously existing and consolidated housing settlements, where special urban norms are established, in the social interest of promoting their legal regularization and their integration into the urban structure”. ZEIS, in a way, mediate the “formalization” of the “informal” city. Today there are 74 ZEIS in the city and more than half of Recife’s 1.6 million inhabitants lives in such a zone.

Approved in 1987, the PREZEIS (Plan for REgularization of ZEIS) regulates these “special urban norms”. As a complex bureaucratic system of laws and actors, the PREZEIS attempts to regulate land markets. PREZEIS prioritizes shelter over ownership rights, regulates maximum plot sizes, and limits relocation to the minimum required (de Souza, 2001). From their neoliberal perspective that favors unregulated land markets, urban investors and pro-business media see the PREZEIS as an impediment for land development and have always attempted to open up ZEIS areas for land valorization and beautification, especially those near the riverbanks or the oceanfront.

The real estate pressures on ZEIS areas intensifiedwhen Brazil began preparing to host the FIFA World Cup 2014. Presented to the public using the bombastic language of “turning Recife into a new Dubai” the highly controversial New Recife was approved by the municipal government. The project aims to construct more than ten high-rise buildings at the Estelita quay. Through an auction questioned by national prosecutors, in 2008, the New Recife construction consortium—made up of private investors—acquired a huge abandoned terrain owned by the federal government. There was no public consultation, the terrain was auctioned “for a banana price”—as neighboring community leaders commented—and there are allegations that one of the consortium members sponsored the campaigns of politicians in order to get the deal approved.

Such top-down “urban renewal” projects for the middle and upper classes were combined with participatory planning for the poor. This means that the construction of highways and shopping malls went together with contracts for the construction of housing estates for displaced families in ZEIS areas. However many of these estates have not been constructed, because the municipal administration has since 2013 discontinued the participatory planning program, leading to a major increase in the social housing deficit.

Occupy Estelita

In the aftermath of the nation-wide June 2013 protests (Mollona 2014), the social movement Occupy Estelita erupted on the political scene in 2014. Largely composed out of a middle-class group of university students and professors, architects and lawyers, the activists camped on the New Recife terrain to prevent the demolition of historic warehouses located on the construction site. Occupy Estelita has been described as the most important recent Brazilian social movement against the decay of participatory structures and the privatization of public space. Various lawsuits have so far prevented the construction of the New Recife skyscrapers.

Occupy Estelita mobilizations pressured the municipality to re-negotiate the project. Community leaders, both those in favor and against the New Recife project, jumped into the space opened up for re-negotiation. They were able to make claims for public services in land occupations with various shacks bordering the New Recife construction site along the historic train rails. Community leaders in Coque always remained divided however regarding the New Recife project. Nevertheless they are overall satisfied that the project’s redesign includes more space for leisure activities and social housing units as compensation. It still remains unclear, however, who can claim a right to the social housing units and where these will be constructed.

Coque’s leaders and projects

Coque is a ZEIS in the center of Recife where 40 thousand people live. It is located at a walking distance from the New Recife terrain. At the end of 2013, the current mayor spectacularly announced the construction of a canal crossing Coque as a basic sanitation project budgeted at R$18 million. This would go together with the construction of a social housing estate for affected families who lived in shacks on the edge of the canal. However, the social housing estate was never constructed and, instead of a house, the 150 affected families were offered very low compensations ranging from R$ 4,000 to R$ 38,000, amounts that are not sufficient to find housing near Coque.

At the same time the municipality had transferred several pieces of land to “third party” actors for urban development within Coque’s ZEIS borders. A large strip of land along the riverbanks was transferred for the construction of a Juridical hub. Ironically enough, this did not follow PREZEIS regulations.

Louro and Moises, both active in the local board of Coque within the PREZEIS, were very active in the successful resistance against the construction of the juridical hub. They are micro-entrepreneurs, born in the 1970s, and active in community groups involved in the “never-ending struggle” (luta eterna)for better living conditions in Coque. Louro works as an Uber driver and is better known as “Louro of the Pitbulls” for he breeds and takes care of pitbulls. Moises runs a stall (banca) in the city center with his wife where they sell clothes and accessories. He is better known as “Brother Moises” since he is a faithful member of the Pentecostal Assembleia de Deus. With other community leaders and groups in Coque, Louro and Moises stressed the risk of future resettlements that the New Recife project brings for Coque.

The main representative of Coque however stressed the employment opportunities that the New Recife project will generate for Coque’s residents. He formed part of a group of community entities in the vicinity of the New Recife construction site, including Cabanga and Coelhos, to demand participation within the New Recife consortium meetings. They made commercials to promote the project under the slogan “Good for You, Good for the City” and mobilized residents to support the New Recife project during public hearings in 2014. More recently they mobilized unemployed residents when the consortium started to collect résumés.

Image 2: A community leader from Coque records a pro-New Recife commercial. He argues that New Recife will bring employment opportunities for the poor and helps build a safer city, because the abandoned terrain at the Estelita quay attracts drug-traffickers. On the background the medical hub and the construction of a business tower. (Photo by Sven da Silva, 2014)

Land and housing rent prices near the new shopping malls or areas destined for vertical growth increased massively. Several new occupations emerged out of Coque. Moises and Louro initiated a new occupation just on the edge of Coque’s ZEIS parameters at the Imperial Street. Their occupation exposed the unfair compensations received by affected families of the canal in Coque. Using his own measures, yet without much exaggeration, Moises recounts:

“The compensation (indenização) is always ridiculously low. Imagine somebody living on the main street of Coque receiving R$ 40.000 as compensation, while the house is worth R$ 200.000. That is because the municipality does not pay for the land. We don’t have the land titles.”

Since the cheapest house in Coque at the time sold for R$ 50000, several families moved to distant locations outside the city center. The compensations were thus used to buy materials to construct a shack at a new land occupation. Such “occupancy urbanism” of the poor exposed high housing rent prices in Coque, despite the efforts of the PREZEIS to avoid housing rent or keep it low.

Image 3: Street in Vila Imperial in 2014 (Photo by Sven da Silva, 2014)

Vila Imperial

On paper the vacant terrain that affected residents of Coque occupied was on the name of the federal government (the União) as stated in the union heritage register (SPU). In practice, two enterprises built a wall around it to claim the terrain as theirs. On Labor Day 2014, the land occupation started, and it was baptized as Vila Imperial.

I visited Vila Imperial days after its initiation and saw how lots were being allocated with the support of a housing rights movement. Several wooden shacks had already been built and the number of people arriving to occupy lots was growing rapidly. Louro explained the occupation as follows:

“We occupy due to the pressures on housing in Coque, and the lack of assistance from City Hall (Prefeitura). But at any moment some project can arrive for the terrain. You will see how people who have invested in constructing their house lose everything again. It is a vicious circle.”

Stories of land occupations such as Vila Imperial are often contradictory and sensitive. Political rivals of Louro and Moises would speak about invasões “illegal invasions” (of private property). They see it as a form of opportunism or urban speculation of the “better off” poor who already have secured housing in Coque. They argue that the shacks are rented out again, only there to wait for resettlement money, or a speculative strategy to receive an apartment in a social housing estate. Such discourses were used by many of those in favor of the New Recife project, as justification for evictions. Louro explained the conflicting views as follows;

“People from Coque and Vila Imperial gave more body to the Occupy Estelita movement. We occupied the streets and pressured the municipality, and they supported our struggles. They for example helped us stop the eviction of 58 families through legal and design support. That is when other leaders in Coque started to call us terrorists and mentally deficient people who want to obstruct the development of the city. There now exists a big lie about opportunism at Vila Imperial intended to discredit the occupation and its organization. They say that so-and-so (fulano o tal) bought 50 lots at the occupation to rent out shacks. However, the pioneers at Vila Imperial know that nobody received more lots than anyone else.”

Four years later, Vila Imperial had electricity, water supply, and instead of wooden shacks, there were now brick houses, some of them with two floors. The land occupation is now very much considered part of Coque, yet it is not included in the ZEIS parameters. I walked through Vila Imperial with Moises again and discussed the election of Bolsonaro who had called movements that occupy land “terrorists” (Albert 2018, Eiró 2018), as well as the beginning of the sale of the first New Recife apartments, a sign that the construction will soon begin. He suddenly climbed a shaky wall and revealed:

“See those warehouses? Four upscale apartment blocks will be erected there. Nobody called us to say that this will happen, and still, it is all approved by Recife’s Urban Development Council. [NB: The majority of seats are occupied by delegates who represent the real estate sector.] The only thing that we don’t know is when they officially start and end the construction. This will have a major impact on Coque and Vila Imperial. Imagine how many cars that would be! For sure the main street of Coque will need to be widened at some point.”

Yet again an upscale project that pressures Vila Imperial and Coque. Now one that is on a stone-throwing distance. Without ZEIS protection, residents of Vila Imperial remain in constant fear of “the vicious circle”—of losing a house without sufficient compensation and starting all over again. With the decay of participatory structures and the deepening of an urban development model where investments for the poor are only “compensatory” or alleviative (paliativo), the political spaces in which community leaders like Moises and Louro can operate have become increasingly slim.

Image 4: Street in Vila Imperial in 2018 (photo by Sven da Silva, 2018)

Rethinking occupancy urbanism

Occupancy urbanism explains land occupations such as Vila Imperial and how Moises and Louro “run after things” for this “informal settlement” by claiming land and housing. At the same time, occupancy urbanism makes visible how “formal” planning such as the New Recife project similarly operates in a legal area of opaque negotiations between community leaders, political parties, developers and the municipal bureaucracy. Following Roy, I have the called the latter “occupancy urbanism of the powerful” (2011: 230).

Can we then continue to perceive occupancy urbanism as a politics of the poor that challenges neoliberal urban development projects? I have shown how Moises and Louro experience what can be called “occupancy of the powerful” as encroaching on Coque and Vila Imperial. They continuously struggle against evictions and very low resettlement compensation. This lies in stark contrast to the fact that luxury buildings get constructed through covered-up illegal means. Can we then continue to assume that Moises. Louro, and “informal” land occupations have a specific form of political agency—in and of themselves—that is able to counter occupancy urbanism of the powerful and “global” urbanism?

Therefore, I wish to caution against over-reading occupancy urbanism as the political agency of the poor. In Recife, the “occupancy urbanism by the powerful” has gained much political space as witnessed in the increased role of community leaders with close ties to the real estate developers and municipal administration. Rather than a threat or disruption to “global urbanism, land occupations and ZEIS are used as justification for the construction of skyscrapers by promising employment and social housing. And yet, the occupancy urbanism of the poor draws on collective memories of the popular movement in the 1970s in their struggles against dispossession. It must be stressed that this resulted in the PREZEIS, and that these were struggles for belonging to the city, as against resettlement to the periphery or relocation to a social housing estate.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679614).

Sven da Silva is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University (The Netherlands), and member of the ERC-funded research project “Participatory urban governance between democracy and clientelism: Brokers and (in)formal politics”. 

References

Albert, Victor. 2018. “Brazil’s Homeless Workers’ Movement is an assertive social work organization” FocaalBlog, 30 November. www.focaalblog.com/2018/11/30/victor-albert-brazils-homeless-workers-movement-is-an-assertive-social-work-organization

Benjamin, Solomon. 2007. Occupancy Urbanism: Ten Theses. Sarai Reader 07(Frontiers): 538-563. https://sarai.net/sarai-reader-07-frontiers/

Benjamin, Solomon. 2008. Occupancy urbanism: Radicalizing politics and economy beyond policy and programs. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3): 719-729. DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2008.00809.x

Benjamin, Solomon. 2014. Occupancy urbanism as political practice. In: The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, 331-343.

de Souza, Flávio A.M. 2001. Perceived security of land tenure in Recife, Brazil. Habitat International 25(2): 175-190.

Eiró, Flávio. 2018. “On Bolsonaro: Brazilian democracy at risk” FocaalBlog, 8 November. www.focaalblog.com/2018/11/08/flavio-eiro-on-bolsonaro-brazilian-democracy-at-risk

Koster, Martijn, and Pieter A de Vries. 2012. Slum politics: Community leaders, everyday needs, and utopian aspirations in Recife, Brazil. Focaal (62): 83-98. doi:10.3167/fcl.2012.620107

Mollona, Massimiliano. 2014. “The Brazilian ‘June’ revolution: Urban struggles, composite articulations, and new class analysis,” FocaalBlog, October 28, www.focaalblog.com/2014/10/28/massimiliano-mollona-the-brazilian-june-revolution-urban-struggles-composite-articulations-and-new-class-analysis

Roy, Ananya. 2011. Slumdog cities: Rethinking subaltern urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(2):223-238. DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01051.x

Cite as: da Silva, Sven. 2020. “Special Zones, Slums, and High-rise buildings: Community leaders between “occupancy urbanism” of the poor and the powerful in Recife, Brazil.” FocaalBlog, 31 July. www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/31/sven-da-silva-special-zones,-slums,-and-high-rise-buildings-community-leaders-between-occupancy-urbanism-of-the-poor-and-the-powerful-in-recife-brazil/

Blog

Vita Peacock: The slave trader, the artist, and an empty plinth

On 7th June 2020, the bronze statue of Edward Colston in the English city of Bristol was pulled down by Black Lives Matter protesters with a rope, rolled a short distance down the road, and dropped into the harbor with a gurgle. Colston was a merchant who became rich in the late seventeenth-century selling sugar, wine, oil, fruits, and most significantly, slaves from the West African coast (Morgan 1999). Although, rather dubiously, Colston left no written records, he became a member of the Royal African Company in 1680, rising to deputy governor in 1689, at a time when the chartered corporation held a monopoly over the West African slave trade, shipping captives to plantations in North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil (Pettigrew 2013). Colston’s memory has however endured in Bristol because of his local philanthropic works. Colston funded schools, hospitals, almshouses, workhouses, and other charitable causes, and even today his name is attached to a number of other toponyms across the city. The statue itself was erected in 1895 at the height of the British Empire as a tribute to these works—completely neglecting their own inhumane underpinnings.

Since the 1990s, Colston’s pivotal role in the slave trade has become more widely known, and calls had been growing to remove the statue, but without tangible effect. So when a wave of protests swept the world, in anger at the killing of African-American George Floyd by a white police officer, Black Lives Matter activists in the U.S. began upending confederate statues, and Colston fell as part of this iconoclastic surge, subsequently catalyzing it when the event was beamed across social media and made international headlines. At the time of writing, over 360 public objects across the world symbolizing racial hierarchies have now been removed, defaced, painted over, beheaded, and drowned.

Michael Taussig has reflected extensively on what happens when symbols are destroyed (1999). Public statues like the eighteen-foot figure of Colston contain a secret, a public secret—in his case the secret of African slavery that lay behind his reformist programme—that is revealed at the moment of their desecration. The power of this revelation is by its own nature temporary, but nevertheless extremely potent, releasing a ‘strange surplus of negative energy’ into the world (1999, 1), a magical shockwave whose strength is commensurate with the depth of the secret it exposes. When activist Jen Reid stood on top of the empty plinth later that day, spontaneously raising her arm in the Black Power salute, ‘It was like an electrical charge of power running through me’, she remembers. As news of the toppling continued to spread, the plinth stood there, pulsing, while a feverish debate developed over what should replace it.


The empty plinth where Colston stood is embroidered with Black Lives Matter placards (Caitlin Hobbs / 7th June 2020, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Colston_-_empty_pedestal.jpg)

I have been an admirer of the artist Marc Quinn since I was twelve years old. That year, 1997, I was tugged along to the epoch-defining Sensation exhibition at London’s Royal Academy. Quinn’s contribution was present alongside other so-called Young British Artists, or YBAs, a new generation of creators working under the influence of postmodernism who sought to redefine what we thought of as art. The sight of his head made entirely out of his own blood is still imprinted on my mind, an object which somehow managed to capture both the intense throb of life, at the same time as being a death-mask, a memento mori. Some years later, when I was twenty, I made sure to catch Alison Lapper Pregnant on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, the sumptuous marble form of a woman in the bloom of biological reproduction alongside a severe disability.

At 4.30am on the 15th July 2020, in the space of barely fifteen minutes, Quinn, together with Jen Reid, a Guardian journalist, and a team of crane operatives, again placed himself at the forefront of my consciousness when he installed a life-sized resin statue of Reid giving her salute on top of Colston’s empty plinth, alongside a statement on his website. But this artwork raised questions in a way that the others did not.

The statement announces that it was a ‘joint’ undertaking by Quinn and his model Reid, an act of co-creation. Their aims are stated using the collective ‘we’ and Quinn stresses that he and Reid wanted to do the installation ‘together’. In a fuller interview with the Guardian, Quinn even attempts to efface his own role entirely, when he claims that ‘Jen created the sculpture when she stood on the plinth and raised her arm in the air’. But this vision of equality is a smokescreen, and a dangerous one at that. Reid did not create the sculpture when she raised her arm on the plinth, she was experiencing life as a subject, not an object, sensing the energic power of defacement. Quinn created the sculpture with a team of craftsmen. He is a white, 56-year old man, educated at a private boarding school and later at Cambridge University, with a distinguished legacy as an artist behind him. This kind of positionality does not prevent him from being the effective ‘white ally’ that the statement claims to strive for, but true allyship cannot arise when vast differences of institutional privilege are altogether erased. He announces modestly that the sculpture is ‘an embodiment and amplification of Jen’s ideas and experiences’, and yet, after trawling newspaper articles about the installation, I remain unable to answer the most basic question of Reid’s daily occupation.

Still, the most egregious part of the statement comes when Quinn asserts that the motive for the sculpture was ‘keeping the issue of Black people’s lives and experiences in the public eye’. This is at best a delusion and at worst a deception. This issue was at the very center of the public’s dilated pupils as it watched the satisfying swivel of Colston’s tumble on repeat, something which had little to do with Quinn, and everything to do with the physical, social, and legal risks taken by activists on the ground. The terrible genius of Quinn’s move was that he won either way. Either Bristol City Council opted to retain the sculpture, in which case his work would be permanently occupying what is at present the most famous plinth in Britain, or they opted to remove it, by which point the exposure achieved through the guerilla act will have inflated its capital value beyond anything that could have been achieved through more conventional means.

Of course, this was what the YBAs were known for. Tracy Emin’s soiled bed at the same Sensation exhibition in 1997 was as much a confidence trick about whether such an object could command a re-sale value as anything else. And its apotheosis came when Damien Hirst attempted to vend a diamond-encrusted skull for £50 million, a brazen (and by some accounts unsuccessful) experiment in wealth creation. Even if, as Quinn says, the money made when A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) is eventually sold will be given directly to the causes of people in Britain of African descent, the value is not his to give. Just that philanthropic gesture echoes the uncomfortable paradoxes of Colston himself, who made his wealth in an economy of exploitation only to munificently re-gift it.

‘No formal consent has been sought for the installation’, the statement says calmly. Herein lies the most problematic aspect of the work. At the risk of simplifying a complex and multivalent phenomenon (cf. Patterson 1980), we might think of non-consent as the very epicenter of the slave relation. To be compelled into a condition when the only alternative is violence or death is the antithesis of consent as we would understand it. Enlightenment thinkers invented various moral contortions to get around this brute truth, John Locke famously arguing that as captives in a just war, the slave gave his or her consent in exchange for their life, but these can now be comprehensively dismissed. To engage in such an openly nonconsensual way with a value created by Black people, both now and historically, at a time when a genuine public discussion around slavery in Britain had just opened up, was deplorable. It need not be said that if a Black artist, or someone with less gilded credentials, had engaged in this kind of illegal action, they may not have received the same general fanfare, and may even have been criminally prosecuted.

Within just twenty-four hours the artwork was removed. Bristol has been governed, since 2016, by the first ever person of African descent to be elected to the mayoralty of a major European city, Marvin Rees, whose father is Afro-Jamaican and mother is white British. Rees set the tone within hours of the installation with a public statement, ‘There is an African proverb that says if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together. Our challenge is to take this city far’. Quinn’s unsolicited gift, which may now be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, was quietly, but firmly, rejected by Bristol City Council. This was no minor financial decision for an entity working under the pressure of a decade of austerity and the devastations of Covid-19. The profound dignity of this gesture was what Audra Simpson might call a ‘refusal’ (2014), a negation of one world for the purpose of affirming another. It was a refusal in this case to play the game of appropriation, the seizure of value. It gave hope for the future.

Vita Peacock is an anthropologist and Humboldt Fellow affiliated with LMU Munich and the Humboldt University. She is currently finalizing a manuscript based on her ethnography of the Anonymous movement, Digital Initiation Rites: The Arc of Anonymous in Britain.

References

Morgan, Kenneth. 1999. Edward Colston and Bristol. Bristol: Bristol Branch of the Historical Association.

Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, [Mass.] ; London: Harvard University Press.

Pettigrew, William. A. 2013. Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press.

Taussig, Michael T. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Cite as: Peacock, Vita. 2020. “The slave trader, the artist, and an empty plinth.” FocaalBlog, 29 July. www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/29/vita-peacock-the-slave-trader-the-artist-and-an-empty-plinth/

Features, Urban Struggles

Ezgi Güler: Trans Sex Workers’ Collective Struggle in Urban Turkey

This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).

Facing family rejection and domestic violence, many transgender (trans) people leave their hometowns especially for large cities in search for greater acceptance and opportunities (Engin 2018). Due to a lack of viable financial means to support themselves and a lack of social acceptance by society, these individuals typically take shelter with urban trans communities (Zengin 2014). In the recent decades, trans communities working in the sex economy have become particularly visible in urban spaces (Çokar and Kayar 2011). However, stigma and hostility towards their gender identity, criminalization and the precarious nature of street-based sex work, punitive institutional practices, and neoliberal urban restructuring have exacerbated their marginalization. In response, trans sex workers have developed various coping and resistance strategies. However, their care networks and practices of resistance are often precarious. Although solidarity persists, violent structural forces produce tensions in their relationships, and hinder the emergence of their collective resistance. This post communicates an ethnographic research that investigates the processes through which the wider forces undermine sex workers’ collective struggles in urban Turkey.

The case study presented here is based on participant-observation and 30 in-depth interviews in an urban neighborhood of a major Turkish city. I collected data from August 2017 to August 2019, during which time I spent an average of six hours a day for six months with sex workers in the streets as they solicited clients and engaged in other everyday activities. In this context, a wide range of identities coexist under the category of “trans.” As used here, the term broadly signifies a person whose assigned sex at birth is male, and who cross-dresses or self-identifies as a woman or with a local or transnational gender-variant term. Most of my research participants self-identify either as a woman or as travesti, lubunya, trans, transseksüel, gacı, or cross-dresser.

Structural violence: Transgender lives in urban Turkey

Sevda, who self-identifies as a travesti, experienced estrangement and ostracism when she first revealed her gender identity to her family. She left her parental home and cut ties with her family members for many years. Struggling with poverty and homelessness, she moved to a larger city that offered her anonymity and enabled her to earn a living in the underground sex economy. Unable to find other employment, she had engaged in street-based sex work for 15 years when I first spoke with her. However, her labor has always been criminalized. The fines she has received for seeking clients in the street have accumulated. And since she has not had funds to pay these fines, her debt has gradually multiplied, reaching the equivalent of two-years rent. On occasion, when Sevda has been unable to earn a sufficient income in inner-city neighborhoods, where she is policed and punished, she has worked in peripheral areas, either along the highway, at bus terminals, or in industrial zones. Without peer support networks in these unsafe and isolated locations, she has faced violence, street harassment, and extortion. On several times, she has been targeted with bottles, stones, lit cigarettes, or water thrown out of car windows. When I first met Sevda, though strong and persistent, she seemed emotionally exhausted from the everyday hassles of her life.

The rights group Transgender Europe notes that “there is no safe country for transgender people.” The statistics from Turkey are particularly worrisome. According to their 2019 report, between October 2018 and October 2019, 331 trans and gender-diverse people were murdered around the world. In Europe, 33 per cent of all murders of trans people occurred in Turkey, with nearly all victims being sex workers. Trans sex workers are especially vulnerable due to the criminalization of sex work and societal transphobia. The violence they experience in Turkey is therefore a manifestation of structural violence (see Galtung 1990).

As in the case of Sevda, the overwhelming majority of trans women in Turkey pursue a livelihood in the sex economy. This is most often due to gender discrimination in the labor market—a fact that distinguishes this group from most other sex workers. In addition, although sex work is legal in Turkey, most trans individuals are excluded from selling sex legally. This is primarily due to their gender identity, but also their citizenship status and age in some cases. While Turkish law does not define prostitution as a crime, all actions required to conduct sex work outside of registered brothels are criminalized, and subject to administrative punishments (Çokar and Kayar 2011). In recent years, there have been rigorous efforts to restrict prostitution by closing down legal brothels, and pushing unregistered prostitutes out into urban peripheries, thereby reducing their visibility. These prohibitive and restrictive measures not only deprive them of safe working environments and economic and social security, but also compromise their access to formal protection channels. For example, the majority of unregistered sex workers do not hold any social security. The most vulnerable trans sex workers are those who work on the streets, or who struggle with poverty, homelessness, or health problems. These are the individuals most likely to get harmed by institutional practices, such as the criminal and administrative sanctions and policing, since many of them engage in “survival sex” (selling sex to meet subsistence needs).

Over the decades, trans communities in large cities have been targeted in collective assaults—often in the form of forced evictions—which have been supported by multiple actors, including extremist nationalist groups, the police, non-trans residents, neighborhood associations, the media, and various state institutions (Bayramoğlu 2013). On the one hand, such evictions have aimed to “cleanse” an area of nonconforming gender and sexual identities (Zengin 2014). On the other hand, they have served to remove marginalized populations, such as trans individuals, sex workers, and migrants, in order to transform low-income areas into profitable neighborhoods through the renewal and gentrification projects (Bayramoğlu 2013). For trans individuals who sell sex and live in these neighborhoods, such evictions have been a process of dispossession (Bayramoğlu 2013) and have devastated their livelihoods, social relationships, and spatial belongingness (Unsal 2015).

From structural violence to interpersonal violence

According to Masse (2014), what brings individuals together in present-day urban social movements is the struggle against precariousness, at work and in the life.  Participants in such struggles not only mobilize against economic exploitation, unemployment, and poverty, but also stigmatization, marginalization, criminalization, and exclusion. At the same time, however, the very conditions of precarity, around which people at times collectively mobilize, also generate interpersonal conflicts that undermine their collective struggles. Such is the case with trans sex workers.


Picture 1. Protests were organized over the murder of a trans woman and activist, Hande Kader in 2016 (Illustrated by ttillustrations, 11.06.2020)

Anthropologists have long documented how structural violence translates into interpersonal violence in the lives of socially and economically vulnerable populations (see Auyero 2000; Bourgois 2001). According to their accounts, wider forces, such as political oppression, economic marginalization, and social inequality, produce interpersonal conflicts within marginalized populations (see Bourdieu 1998). During my fieldwork, I often witnessed sex workers quarrelling, criticizing their peers’ appearances, spreading rumors, and on rare occasions, physically assaulting each other. The reproduction of violence in one’s intimate life against oneself or one’s kin, friends, neighbors, and community may follow several paths. For instance, interpersonal violence may be a practical necessity in volatile and illegal street economies that cannot rely on law enforcement for regulation (Karandinos, Hart, Castrillo, and Bourgois 2014). Such is the case in this underground sex economy, where physical and verbal violence in part serves as a mean for social control.

A great deal of the quarrels, ingrained in the language and the culture of the larger queer population in Turkey, are taken as interactional codes among trans people. The contentious nature of these social interactions help them to bond, release tensions, and form alliances. In some cases, however, hostile comments and practices turn self-destructive, harm relationships, and undermine solidarity. A considerable number of ethnographic studies have documented the integration of violence into the moral logics of people’s everyday lives (see Anderson 1999; Bourgois 1995). Accordingly, daily practices and expressions of violence on a micro-interactional level can become normalized in public and private spheres and accepted as a commonsense way to address everyday anxieties (see Bourgois 2001). Interpersonal violence may also arise from a sense of inferiority and powerlessness, intensely experienced during daily struggles for sustenance and self-respect in a hostile world, which may in turn exert a demobilizing effect on vulnerable populations (Bourgois 2001).

Weakening of solidarities and collective resistance

Informal support networks of trans sex workers are not always available to help cope with and counter risks. Even though some sex workers are in deep financial difficulties, money and other material assistance is usually shared only within small and intimate social circles. Social fragmentation, by contrast, is visible even to an outsider. For example, having suffered from severe economic hardship and financial distress for several months, Gamze once voiced her disappointment about her considerably wealthier peers, who worked next-door, “They see my situation. Why don’t they offer any support?” On the contrary, workers commonly express distrust toward their peers. Don Kulick (1998) documented similar patterns of conflicts and distrust among travestis in Brazil. Furthermore, individuals struggling financially are sometimes blamed for their circumstances by their peers—a practice that works to legitimize the social order. In other words, members of marginalized groups may hold themselves and each other responsible for the material effects of structural violence (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), thereby hindering solidarity and collective resistance in their communities.

Among the structural elements engendering conflicts and undermining solidarity are the material pressures and tensions arising from precarious labor. In the absence of social security net and other employment, a decline in the number of clients immediately creates financial distress in the lives of many sex workers. In addition, along with a shared residential space, and the friendship and community relations that this entails, trans sex workers also share a work space in the informal sex market that they depend on for their livelihoods. However, the organization of sex labor induces competition in concentrated urban spaces, where everyone must find their own clients. At times, competition may lead to fights over “stealing” others’ clients or working spots. Especially when business is slow, the workers often take note of others’ earnings, which can give rise to heated arguments. There are also vast economic disparities among trans sex workers (Zengin 2014). For this reason, financial struggles are not typically identified as a common challenge that needs to be dealt with collectively.

The divisive and hindering effects of material pressures and competition on workers’ collective struggles have been observed in many labor settings. Significantly, in the lives of trans sex workers, financial pressures are coupled with social and political marginalization.  A sense of insecurity resulting from precarious living conditions constrains community mobilization. For instance, trans communities in several neighborhoods in Turkey experienced evictions and attempts at lynching. Furthermore, due to criminalization, the threat and reality of police harassment may disrupt their lives. Given these threats, most sex workers in this neighborhood have restricted their participation especially in visible, confrontational or organized forms of resistance, including political demonstrations and physical resistance to repel the police in the neighborhood. In some cases, sex workers may even disapprove of their colleagues who are involved in contentious collective action, such as protesting a hate crime targeting their peers. Such individuals fear that organizing community mobilization could result in a decline in the number of clients or an increase in policing, thereby negatively impacting their livelihood and placing their lives at risk.

Support networks and community mobilization

In spite of being strained and ridden with contradictions, the informal networks of trans sex workers still provide support, care, and assistance, given that legal protection is limited for many of these workers (Güler 2020). As with working-class women and mothers in marginalized neighborhoods (see Edin and Lein 1997; Koch 2015; Stack 1974), relying on fictive kin for mutual aid and reciprocal exchange remains a central coping mechanism for trans people ostracized from their families of origin for reasons of gender and sexuality (see Weston 1997). In particular, those who have shared housing for many years develop intimate relationships through which they assist each other in difficult times (see Bourdieu 1996; Mauss 1954; Stack 1974).

Likewise, community-based mobilization has been an effective form of resistance against physical violence. In other words, trans sex workers heavily rely on their community for safety. For example, they stay in close contact and stand in the street in groups, warn each other about dangerous clients, coach inexperienced peers, fight back in violent attacks, and at times protest at police stations to save friends (Güler 2020). Safety is thus a pressing concern for many workers and treated as a collective responsibility.

Concluding thoughts

Transgender sex workers in Turkey live and work under difficult circumstances, including pervasive violence, punitive institutional practices, coercive policing, societal stigma and exclusion, and material pressures. On the other hand, powerful organizations promoting trans rights have emerged in recent years at a local and an international level. And trans individuals and sex workers are now more visible and vocal than ever in the streets, at universities, in formal political arenas, and in social and traditional media. In fact, this research was inspired by my admiration for their tenacious resistance to their conditions of marginality, their sense of community, and their willingness to support one another.

However, during my fieldwork, I was repeatedly made aware of rivalries and distrust, failing solidarities, and harm received from fellow peers. Although informal support systems remain crucial resources for coping with and providing a bulwark against risks, the marginalization of trans sex workers continues to constrain their collective efforts while weakening the integrity and solidarity of their communities. Moreover, despite a strong sense of shared identity, dense interpersonal networks, and close attachments among these workers, violent structural forces continue to engender interpersonal conflicts.

Similar challenges have been observed among other stigmatized populations, such as migrants, underground traders, and homeless people, whose lives often depend on the informal economy at the margins of society (see Koch 2018; Menjívar 2000). Ethnographic methods offer opportunities to explore the ways in which precarious, violent, and exclusionary structural forces condition the circumstances of socially and economically marginalized subjects while also rendering their informal networks and collective efforts precarious. To intervene and contest these economic, political, and social forces, we first need to understand the lived experiences of affected individuals.

Ezgi Güler is a PhD researcher in Social Sciences at the European University Institute. She is an urban sociologist who works on social support networks, mobilization, and resistance of sex workers.

Refererences

Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral Life of the inner city. New York: Norton

Auyero, Javier. 2000. The hyper-shantytown: Neo-liberal violence(s) in the Argentine Slum. Ethnography 1(1): 93–116.

Bayramoğlu, Yener. 2013. Media discourse on transgender people as subjects of gentrification in Istanbul. In Vikki Fraser,eds., Queer sexualities: Diversifying queer, queering diversity, pp. 41-48. Leiden: Brill.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. Unwrapping the gift: On interest and generosity in social life. Colloquium delivered to the Anthropology Department, University of California, Berkeley, April 8.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Acts of Resistance: Against the tyranny of the market. New York: The New Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Bourgois, Philippe. 1995. In search of respect: Selling crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bourgois, Philippe. 2001. The power of violence in war and peace: Post-Cold War lessons from El Salvador. Ethnography 2(1): 5-34.

Çokar, Muhtar, and Habibe Yılmaz Kayar. 2011. Seks işçileri ve yasalar: Türkiye’de yasaların seks işçilerine etkileri ve öneriler. İstanbul: İnsan Kaynağını Geliştirme Vakfı.

Edin, Kathryn, and Laura Lein. 1997. Making ends meet: How single mothers survive welfare and low-wage work. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Engin, Ceylan. 2018. Sex work in Turkey: Experiences of transwomen. In Larry Nuttbrock, eds., Transgender sex work and society, pp. 196-213. New York: Harrington Park Press.

Galtung, Johan. 1990. Cultural violence. Journal of Peace Research 27:291–305.

Güler, Ezgi. 2020. A divided sisterhood: Support networks of trans sex workers in urban Turkey. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 689(1): 149-167.

Karandinos, George, Laurie K. Hart, Fernando M. Castrillo, and Philippe Bourgois. 2014. The moral economy of violence in the US inner city. Current Anthropology, 55(1): 1-22.

Koch, Insa L. 2015. “The state has replaced the man”: Women, family homes, and the benefit system on a council estate in England. Focaal 73: 84-96.

Koch, Insa L. 2018. Personalizing the State: An Anthropology of Law, Politics, and Welfare in Austerity Britain. Oxford University Press.

Kulick, Don. 1998. Travesti: Sex, gender, and culture among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Masse, Cédric. 2014. Identities of Portuguese urban social movements: Universality and class heterogeneity, FocaalBlog, October 23.

Mauss, Marcel. 1954. The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Cohen and West.

Menjívar, Cecilia. 2000. Fragmented ties: Salvadoran immigrant networks in America. University of California Press.

Stack, Carol. 1975. All our kin: Strategies for survival in a black community. Basic Books.

UNFPA. 2014. Türkiye’de seks işçilerinin cinsel sağlık ve üreme sağlığı durumu: İhtiyaçlar ve öneriler. Available from http://www.kirmizisemsiye.org/SourceFiles/pdf-201852514943.pdf.

Ünsal, Öktem. 2015. Impacts of the Tarlabaşı urban renewal project: (Forced) eviction, dispossession and deepening poverty. In Ö. Öçevik; C.A. Brebbia; S.M. Şener, eds., Sustainable Development and Planning, pp. 45-56. Southampton: WIT Press.

Weston, Kath. 1997. Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

Zengin, Asli. 2014. Sex under intimate siege: Transgender lives, law and state violence in contemporary Turkey. PhD diss. University of Toronto.

Cite as: Güler, Ezgi. 2020. “Trans Sex Workers’Collective Struggle in Urban Turkey.” FocaalBlog, 27 July. www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/27/ezgi-guler-trans-sex-workers-collective-struggle-in-urban-turkey/

Urban Struggles

Anne-Christine Trémon: Variegated Valuation: Governance and Circuits of Value in Shenzhen

This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).

Over the past two decades, the central authorities in the People’s Republic of China have shown an increasing concern about the inequalities between urban dwellers and predominantly rural hukou (residence registration) holders that have migrated to the cities. In 2016 a new policy on urban planning coined the concept of ‘livable cities’ and stated that migrants from the countryside have the same rights as urban residents to basic public goods and services such as healthcare and education (Xinhua News Agency 2016). Migrant workers often account for 30 per cent of the population in China’s major cities, but they comprise 80 per cent or more of the total population in urban villages or ‘villages-in-the-city’, rural villages converted into urban communities (shequ) (Chung 2010). The former village of Pine Mansion (the pseudonym of my main field site) is in a transitory state, awaiting the completion of the three phases of urban redevelopment (2010–2018, 2018–2026 and 2026-2034). During this transition, natives and migrants are subject to variegated governance, ‘diverse modes of government – disciplinary, regulatory, pastoral – that administer populations in terms of their relevance to global capital’ (Ong 2006: 78). While Ong shows how variegated governance rests on zoning technologies and results in ‘graduated sovereignty’, here this variegation occurs within the same microspatial unit.  

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Urban Struggles

Sarah Winkler-Reid: Higher Education-Led Urban Development in Newcastle and the North East of England, and its abrupt Covid-19 interruption

This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).

Between 2017 and 2020 Universities in the UK were on a building spree, in this period two billion pounds of construction contracts were agreed or enacted between universities and contractors. These buildings projects have been significantly funded by entry into capital markets – the Financial Times reported that between 2016 and 2018, around three billion pounds was borrowed by UK Universities.

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Blog

Richard H. Robbins: The Economy After Covid-19

Richard H. Robbins, SUNY Plattsburgh

One feature of both the economic recession of 2007/2008 and the present Covid-19-induced economic collapse is increased central bank bouts of quantitative easing. The U.S. Federal Reserve, after pumping about $500 billion in the economy in 2008 is adding $2.3 trillion as of April 2020, while the European Central Bank (ECB) launched a €750 billion asset purchase program in March. And the IMF estimates that global fiscal support to counter the economic effects of the pandemic is $9 trillion. The question is who gets it and what does it tell us about today’s political economy and what happens next (see also on this blog: Don Kalb 2020a)?

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Features, Urban Struggles

Raúl Acosta: Navigating promises and good intentions: technomorality and scepticism among peripheral cycloactivists in Mexico City

This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).

On April 4, 2019, Pedro cycled for over an hour to get to our meeting with Mexico City’s Security Minister. He made it just on time for Alicia, a leading activist, to write his name on the list of the 14 people who would take part in the meeting. Once we were all in the meeting room, and after waiting around half an hour for the minister to show up, the meeting finally started. An activist offered the services of networked cyclists as ‘eyes’ on the streets: “We are hundreds, and can send reports about things we see”, said Octavio, who had become known in the cycling community through his personal cycling news channel on social media. Oscar, an activist who arrived in a suit, had offered to donate up to 100 new bicycles to a group of policewomen who had been recently appointed to keep cycleways clear of motorcyclists and other obstructions. “We would donate them under the condition that there is clarity about their use, and security about them not being stolen,” he said. Several activists in the room had years of experience behind them, and were well known to Mexico City authorities.  

For Pedro, it was a different story. It was his first time attending a high-level meeting with government officials. When he spoke, one could sense how nervous he was in his voice tone. He sat in a corner of the large table, and only spoke as the meeting was coming to an end. “For us in the outskirts of the city, it is particularly risky when cars go by at high speeds, so we really need for police officers to do their job. I’ve seen them do nothing as drivers break the law in front of them,” he said. Before him, the tone of complaints had been in part reproach but in part indicating his willingness to collaborate with the authorities. 

One of the main complaints among activists attending the meeting was that security personnel in patrol cars were the first to flout regulations, like running through red lights or parking where they’re not supposed to. “How are you going to enforce the laws that your own agents break?,” Oldemar asked the minister. The meeting had been convened among cyclo-activists who had perceived an increase in hostile behaviour from motorists. In their view, motorists felt free to flout regulations because of the promise of the then newly arrived government (which took office in December 2018) to stop charging speeding fines because of a lack of transparency from the private firm who managed the city’s speed cameras. Instead, the government announced ‘civic fines,’ which would entail a points-based system that would grant 10 points to all drivers and deduct one point per traffic offence, or 5 points if the speed was 40 per cent higher than the established limit. The first two points lost would come with a warning. For recurrent offenders, so-called incremental ‘civic penalties’ that would include online courses, face-to-face classes, and community service. In order to comply with the ‘verification’ (technical assessment of emissions) that is mandatory for all motorized vehicles in Mexico City, drivers need to have at least 8 points or to honour all ‘civic penalties’ incurred. It was the opinion of most activists attending the meeting that the new administration had not succeeded in getting their message across about the nuances of the change, and had rather misleadingly created the impression among motorists that there would simply no longer be sanctions for speeding. When activists explained this, it took the Security Minster by surprise. It seemed he and his team had not thought of that possibility.  

Over the past two decades, cycloactivists have achieved much more than they originally thought would be possible. From initial demands for safer cycling, various groups have developed expert knowledge regarding infrastructure, urbanism, and transport policymaking. The city government has also taken many of their demands on board and has situated ‘mobility’ as an important issue on the public policy agenda. Such success, has gone hand-in-hand with an increased presence of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working on the issue (especially regarding public transport and urban design), and of foreign financial institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank, which provides credits to carry out some of the changes activists demanded. This combination has brought about the professionalization of cycloactivism in a manner that privileges a technocratic data-driven form of urbanism with its own jargon. This transformation has involved cycloactivists themselves, among whom I have often heard a mantra: ‘what is not counted, does not count.’ Whereas cycling is a popular cause because it addresses urban dwellers’ need for cheap and easy access to the city across social classes and other boundaries, the resulting professionalization of the activist field has brought with it a new set of inequalities that Pedro’s situation illustrates.  

In their campaigns and public discourses, cycloactivists frequently used arguments of social justice and inclusion to promote cycling among urban dwellers, and demand improved infrastructures and policies for its practice from government officials. In Mexico City, social disparities are clearly noticeable during commuting times. Some workers spend up to five hours per day commuting. Again, those who live farthest from the city centre tend to be worse off. Recent studies have shown that suburban households earn 30% less than urban households, have 40% longer commutes, and spend twice as much per transit trip (Guerra 2017). For the poorest fifth of households, this expenditure can be a fourth of their total daily income. A recent government survey (INEGI 2018) also showed that while 52 per cent of urban dwellers use public transport on a daily basis, most government expenditure on mobility is dedicated to car infrastructure. In order to address these disparities and promote a more just distribution of resources from the local public administration, some cycloactivists have gone through a steep learning curve that has included professional training. Some of them have studied graduate courses on related issues (urbanism, transport engineering), others joined NGO technical teams to learn about policymaking, a few joined the government, and a couple started their own consultancy firms to promote mobility projects among small local governments around the country. 

Cycloactivists have thus taken advantage of the growing relevance of mobility in policy circles. Our global times are built on the possibility of people, things, and ideas rapidly reaching faraway destinations. Mobility “has come to define the contemporary human condition as never before, involving long-range and frequent movement that impinges on or even defines the everyday life of people from all backgrounds and social strata” (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012, 460). Scholars refer to a ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006) or ‘turn’ (Faist 2013) that highlights the role of movement as key to our social connections. Mobilities links the materiality of infrastructures with the movement and flows of interactions. Due to environmental concerns and continuous urban growth, mobility has also earned a place in global policymaking equivalent to that of social housing in the 1970s. For some scholars and activists, there is a need to include ‘mobility’ as one more human right (Logan, et al. 2018). This follows from the drastic inequalities that differentiated access and practices entail. In joining the mobility turn from a vantage point of grassroots activism, those involved have earned enough political capital to be able to use it in order to build a career in an issue they feel strongly about. But in doing so, they have also privileged a technocratic data-driven form of politics regarding mobility, which excludes from debates all those who lack the cultural capital to access the language and knowledge needed to take part in debates.  

On top of such situation, the issue of mobility has also been dominated by a type of technomorality. In their analyses of relations between NGOs, social movements and the state in India, Bornstein and Sharma defined the way these different groupings negotiate the political relations through ‘technomoral means.’ By this they meant “the complex, strategic integration of technical and moral vocabularies as political tactics” (Bornstein and Sharma 2016, 77). It is basically a translation of moral projects into technical ‘implementable terms’, such as through laws or policies. In the case of mobility, this means that decisions about what is deemed ‘good’ for the city are first taken and then the statistics are provided to show that the government is doing what it can to achieve it. This can similarly be said to be the case for cycleways and pedestrian areas. In both cases, however, some critical activists point out that despite the increase in construction of cycleways and pedestrian areas, more need to be built to address structural inequalities in Mexico City. Furthermore, much of the investment that has taken place on such infrastructures has been concentrated in what is called the ‘bubble’:  an area renowned for its restaurants, and cafes, where the city’s young professionals with a high disposable income hang out, and where foreign students or highly skilled workers seem to be more comfortable. The prominence of bicycles in such areas adds to their gentrification, and even helps market new housing developments as more environmentally aware and convenient.  

Image 1: Monument going through maintenance after being vandalised by feminist activists in Mexico City  (Photo: Raul Acosta, 10  November 2019) 

For Pedro and thousands of other cyclists from the outskirts of Mexico City, the challenges of reaching their work places or any other locality in the city centre are, by contrast, enormous. There is no cycling infrastructure in Pedro’s neighbourhood, despite the fact that thousands of people use a bicycle not because they necessarily want to, but because it is the cheapest means of transportation they can afford. Pedro became an activist after organizing a few night rides among his neighbours, and noticing that other groups in the city that had done something similar had achieved changes in their barrios. Once he started gathering groups to cycle around his area, local politicians began to take notice. He started being invited to ceremonies and interviews. And he started getting involved with other better off and well-educated activists from the centre of the city.  

I first met him at an event organized by Mexico City’s Assembly (Cámara de Diputados), where experts and activists were invited to talk about their views on any necessary changes to improve mobility laws and regulations. Pedro chose to frame his becoming an activist through a narrative of his personal struggles with depression. “Cycling helped me, and I noticed it could also help others,” he said, as he showed photos of the collective bike rides he’d organized with his neighbours. When he finished talking, he got a big round of applause and the event went on. I kept on meeting him in different events, like the meeting at the Security Ministry I mentioned above. While he enjoyed the attention and appreciated being heard, he generally appeared shy and remained silent when main points of contention were being debated. When I visited him in his neighbourhood, he told me about his caution in dealing with other more established activists: “I get the sense they are so well connected with authorities, you know, that I have little possibility to contribute [to their debates]. That is why I prefer to focus on demands in our local area, without interfering on larger debates about the whole city.” 

I refer to Pedro as a ‘peripheral’ activist because of his location at the physical margins of both the city and the political activist arena. Most of the groups that have been carrying out successful campaigns over the last two decades are made up of educated middle-class individuals who tend to have markers that distinguish them from most other urban dwellers. “Some criticize me for being white and talking about justice,” Alicia told me, who represents the oldest and most influential activist group called Bicitekas. In her case, as in others, the clear markers of privilege helped her get her message across to decision-makers in very concrete terms: in the form of invitations to dialogues with government officials, interview requests from major newspapers and magazines, invitations by international NGOs and foundations for specific campaigns and projects, and even awards of prizes for her activism. She is outspoken, well-informed about the latest debates in environmental and urban matters, and creative in thinking about new projects and seeking out the people who she needs to liaise with in order to carry them out. In comparison, Pedro is somewhat shy, although he clearly wants to be more active. Ironically, even though compared to Alicia he is worse off both in terms of economic and cultural capital, in his community he is also above the average. For a start, he has free time to dedicate to activism; and he is able to attend meetings in the city centre when many others need to work. Yet, he is peripheral compared to activists like Alicia.  

After talking a few times with Pedro, I sense both his optimism about being able to improve the lives of his neighbours through his activism, as well as his scepticism about the language that he is expected to master in order to successfully address policymakers or NGOs in meetings. When I ask him about the difficulties he may face, he smiles and tells me that “it’s all a part of the journey, like riding a bicycle in this city: it is a risk and a joy.” The journey Pedro refers to, he tells me frequently, is one of endurance. I wonder, however, how much he realises that the movement he forms part of reproduces the dominant structure he and others denounce. With their activism, they demand new infrastructures and policies to correct injustices especially affecting those worse off in the city. But there does not seem to be an effort within that activist milieu to steer their own internal workings into a more equitable arrangement where he and others would not be perpetually cast in the peripheral role. 

Raúl Acosta is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He currently carries out research on urban activism in Mexico City in a sub-project of the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded Urban Ethics Research Group. His monograph “Civil Becomings: Performative Politics in the Brazilian Amazon and the Mediterranean” examines activist and advocacy networks. 

References 

Bornstein, Erica, and Aradhana Sharma. 2016. “The righteous and the rightful: the technomoral politics of NGOs, social movements, and the state in India.” American Ethnologist 43 (1): 76-90. 

Dalakoglou, Dimitris, and Penny Harvey. 2012. “Roads and anthropology: ethnographic perspectives on space, time and (im)mobility.” Mobilities 7 (4): 459-465. 

Faist, Thomas. 2013. “The mobility turn: a new paradigm for the social sciences?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (11): 1637-1646. 

Guerra, Erick. 2017. “Does where you live affect how much you spend on transit? The link between urban form and household transit expenditures in Mexico City.” The Journal of Transport and Land Use 10 (1): 855-878. 

INEGI. 2018. Encuesta origen-destino en hogares de la zona metropolitana del Valle de México 2017. Mexico City: CDMX, INEGI. 

Logan, Samuel W., Kathleen R. Bogart, Samantha M. Ross, and Erica Woekel. 2018. “Mobility is a fundamental human right: factors predicting attitudes toward self-directed mobility.” Disability and Health Journal 11 (4): 562-567. 

Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The new mobilities paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 207-226. 

Cite as: Acosta, Raúl. 2020. “Navigating promises and good intentions: technomorality and scepticism among peripheral cycloactivists in Mexico City.” FocaalBlog, 7 July. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/07/raul-acosta-navigating-promises-and-good-intentions-technomorality-and-scepticism-among-peripheral-cycloactivists-in-mexico-city/

Blog

Don Nonini: Black Enslavement and Agro-industrial Capital

Don Nonini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Insa Koch’s recent (2020) FOCAAL blog, “The Making of Modern Slavery in Austerity Britain,” reminds us that enslavement and the bodies of black people are profoundly interconnected, and the link to challenges to “the punitive turn” and police abuse in the UK by the Black Lives Matter movement protests are all but explicit in her piece. At the same time, other recent FOCAAL blogs have dealt with the connections between the Covid-19 pandemic and contemporary global capitalism.

Black enslavement and Covid-19 are intimately intertwined. The insurgency of Black Lives Matter during the months of May-June 2020 has its own dynamics. That said, the wide turning out of protests supporting Black Lives Matter in the streets of European cities and towns (London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Milan, Kraków, Dublin, Manchester, Munich…) demonstrates that the European left has strongly shown its ongoing antiracist solidarity with African-American struggles, seeking to come to terms with Europe’s own troubled imperial history of enslavements, and challenging its current neo-nationalist or fascist resurgence under declining neoliberal capitalism (Kalb 2020).

The links between black enslavement and Covid-19 start – and continue with – the formation of agro-industrial capitalism and its relations to transnational finance capital.

The Lash, Degraded Ecologies, Finance

There is a clear relationship between the emergence of modern enslavement and the history of a full-blown agro-industrial capitalism. The close connections between fully rationalized capitalist agrarian production, finance, and slavery are only recently becoming clear.

New research on the North American southern plantation economies shows just how advanced rationalized capitalist production was under the conditions of slavery (Baptist 2014). Beyond its monocropping ecology, “many of agribusinesses’ key innovations, in both technology and organization, originated in slavery” (Wallace 2016: 261). Slaveholders measured land only against the capacity of slave labor to transform it, setting the cotton production line in terms of “bales per hand,” with enslaved African men being “hands,” nursing mothers “half hands” and children “quarter hands.” The labor process of picking cotton was measured and held to a standard by another unit of measurement – the “lash.”

“Enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to increase their own productivity and thus push through the picking bottleneck” (Baptist 2014: 130). As Baptist further points out, “on the nineteenth century cotton frontier… enslavers extracted more production from each enslaved person every year. . . the business end of the new cotton technology was a whip” (2014: 112). Planters managed a refined rationality based on the application of the whip measured out in lashes to the backs of a slave calculated relative to their infraction – how many pounds of cotton his basket fell short of making a bale, whether or not there were impurities in it, whether one slave helped another pick her quota – in which case the former received extra lashes. Under the circumstances, the rationality of increased “labor productivity” so vaunted by economists depended straightforwardly on graduated torture – with little contribution (the cotton gin aside) from “technological innovation.”

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 culminated the violent displacement of Indian nations from the Mississippi Gulf region and transformation of their territories into “new lands” of thousands of acres ready for slave-based production (Baptist 2014: 228-229). Cotton monoculture quickly exhausted the rich soils of the South, exposed the crops to rust, rot, and worms, while plowing rows of cotton aligned to the day’s sunlight to maximize yield eroded the land and exhausted aquifers within 10 to 15 years after clearing (Wallace 2016: 266).

Due to the lack of food self-sufficiency and the seasonality of cotton harvests, indebtedness by plantation owners to Northern financiers and cotton brokers became increasingly common. By the 1830s, the cotton plantations of Mississippi, Alabama and Eastern Louisiana had adopted new forms of finance and indebtedness, when the Consolidated Association of Planters of Louisiana was established to allow their member planters to mortgage their slaves as collateral for loans from international financiers, led by the Baring Brothers and the Bank of England, that pooled investments from Europe’s finest old and new upper classes to buy the lucrative bonds issued by the Association (Baptist 2014: 245-8).

Monocropping of plants and animals, the simplification and degradation of local and regional ecologies, rapid expansion of logistics over space, reliance on finance capital for loans to expand production, and the use of enslaved degraded labor – these design features of agro-industrial capitalism have remained in effect to the present.

Meat Markets, Neo-Slave Markets

The coerced use of black labor continued after the Civil War in the cotton sharecropping economy until its decline in the 1930s. At the same time, the new agro-industrial complex of livestock production in the U.S. South – again based on the hyper-exploitation of black labor – got underway. By the 1970s, the livestock industries of intensive hog, poultry, and beef production had become thoroughly institutionalized – through vertical integration (Heffernan and Constance 1994; Stiffler 2005), increases in slaughterhouse assembly-line tempos, and incorporation of meat eating as a universal practice within the diets of the U.S. population (Schlosser 2001, 2012; Stiffler 2005). Since the 1990s the meat industries have globalized to penetrate the BRICS economies, a process facilitated by the lubrication of capital provided by hedge funds and investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs’ deal-making in the sale of Smithfield Foods to Shuanghui in China (Wallace 2016: 269-271).

Subjugated and coerced black labor has anchored and offered up surplus value through U.S. agro-industrial cotton and meat production since the end of legal slavery. Since the 1960s, rural poor African-Americans, especially women, have worked in the meat processing plants of the Midwest, Mississippi delta and Carolinas regions experiencing intensified exploitation, sexual harassment and brutalized and unsafe working conditions. By the 1990s, they were joined by immigrant Mexican and Central American workers (Nonini 2003; Stiffler 2005; Stuesse 2016), with whom white plant managers sought to set them in competition.

The Great Migration of 6 million African-Americans from 1915-1970 from the South to cities in the northern and midwestern U.S. was a form of flight from re-legalized enslavement at the hands of Jim Crow whites. Migration to the Midwest and Northeast placed large numbers of blacks at the factory doors of the Fordist industries of the North. Relegated to secondary labor markets by discrimination from white industrial labor unions during the 1950s-1970s (Cowie 2010: 236-244), black industrial workers by the 1990s, like their white counterparts, were thrown out of work by the globalization of industrial production. The only exceptions were the neo-slavery of hyper-sweated meat processing and related industrial food labor.

“Broken Windows Policing” and the Expropriation of Black Lives

The grown children and grandchildren of these laid-off black industrial workers, with more recent Latinx immigrant workers, now form both the hyper-exploited workers in the food industries (meat processing, fast foods, farm work) and situated in the cities and small towns of the South, Midwest and the Northeast, and those who are chronically unemployed and underemployed, doubly discriminated against due to their poverty (forcing them to leave school before high school graduation), and their race. Those African-Americans who have more or less steady employment also show disproportionate levels of consumer debt – from credit cards, student loans, and medically -related debt. Whether steadily employed or not, a key insight is that by and large both groups draw on the same population of urban African-Americans.

The population of urban African-Americans has the profound misfortune of living in cities recurrently subject to gentrification at the new “urban scale” of globalized real estate and finance-rentier capital (Smith 2008: 239-266). Their residence in spaces made newly desirable by gentrification by the 2000s is the obverse of the fact that up to the 1990s whites fled inner cities in large numbers for segregated suburbs, while African-Americans found themselves only able to afford to live, and only allowed to live within, housing in these redlined inner-city districts.

By the 2000s, however, real estate in these districts had become “hot properties” for global finance capital seeking new sites for safe but extraordinarily profitable rent collection and property speculation in realizing value. This trend by the 1990s was both shaped by and reinforced through the “broken window policing” that targeted unemployed and underemployed African-Americans and Latinx populations (Camp et al. 2016).

What precisely is the role of broken windows policing in the gentrification process? Put non-too-subtly, even one broken window indicates the existence of a “criminal” – an undesirable element in a neighborhood. The role of such policing is the physical removal to jails or prison, or, if that is impossible, the destruction of African-Americans whose very presence threatens the “real estate values” that the finance industry and its local allies hold dear. This goes far to explain the more than 1000 people killed by local police every year in the US, of whom more than one fourth are African-American; the one third of African-American men between ages 19-35 who are “justice involved” – in jail awaiting trial, on bail, undergoing trial, in prison, on probation or parole; and their disproportionate representation in the US’s incarcerated population, the largest per capita in the world.

Nancy Fraser (2016) observes that there is an historical dialectic between the conditions that set out “normal” exploitation of the working force, and the conditions of expropriation of the lives, labor, and property of racialized and vulnerable (e.g. immigrant) populations — as two complementary means through which the accumulation of capital can and does take place under capitalism. Fraser argues that that the new being of neoliberal global capitalism is “the expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker,” and that “the racialized subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits” (Fraser 2016:163).

A group of people holding a sign Description automatically generated
Image 1: Black Lives Matters Protests in Durham, U.S. (Credit: Durham Workers Assembly Durham, North Carolina, with kind permission) 

We can see these two modes of appropriation of surplus value in the tense interconnections between whites and the African-American population in the United States through the latter’s vexed history with respect to agro-industrial and finance capitalism. These interconnections are potentially the point of class differentiation between the increasingly precarious white “middle class” and urban African-Americans, who straddle a black employed working-class subjected to intensified exploitation on one hand, and a lumpen-proletariat subjected to police-impelled expropriation and dispossession, on the other. 

Ongoing criminalization and the indebtedness of black people (the latter a tool of finance capital’s domination) are the instruments driving large numbers of urban black workers disproportionately employed in the agro-industrial food sector toward the toxic mix of indebtedness, unemployment (where employers often refuse to hire blacks holding consumer debt), bankruptcy, evictions from shelter, police “stop and frisk” harassment, enforced fines and fees levied (via police and private firms working for straitened municipalities),  assault, imprisonment, and death (Wang 2018:99-192).  

Don Nonini is Professor of Anthropology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent books are “Getting by”: Class and State Formation among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell, 2015), and The Tumultuous Politics of Scale: Unsettled States, Migrants, Movements in Flux, co-edited (Routledge, 2020). His most recent publication in FOCAAL is “Theorizing the Urban Housing Commons” (2017). 

References 

Baptist, E. E. (2014). The half has never been told : slavery and the making of American capitalism. 

Camp, J. T. and C. Heatherton (2016). Policing the planet : why the policing crisis led to black lives matter. 

Cowie, J. (2010). Stayin’ alive : the 1970s and the last days of the working class. New York, New Press : Distributed by Perseus Distribution. 

Fraser, N. (2016). “Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies 3(1): 163-178. 

Harvey, D. (2018). Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. New York, Oxford University Press. 

Heffernan, W. and D. H. Constance (1994). Transnational corporations and the globalization of the food system. From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food. A. Bonanno, L. Busch and e. al. Lawrence, KA, University Press of Kansas Press: 29-51. 

Kalb, D. 2020. “Covid, Crisis, and the Coming Contestations”, FocaalBlog, June 1st, http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/01/don-kalb-covid-crisis-and-the-coming-contestations/.

Nonini, D. M. (2003). American neoliberalism, ‘globalization,’ and violence: Reflections from the United States and Southeast Asia. Globalization, The State, and Violence. J. Friedman. Walnut Creek, CA, Altamira Press (Rowman & Littlefield): 163-202. 

Schlosser, E. ((2001), 2012). Fast food nation : the dark side of the all-American meal, with a New Afterword. Boston, MA, Mariner books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). 

Smith, N. and D. Harvey (2008). Uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space. Athens, University of Georgia Press. 

Striffler, S. (2005). Chicken : the dangerous transformation of America’s favorite food. New Haven, Yale University Press. 

Stuesse, A. Scratching out a living : Latinos, race, and work in the Deep South. 

Wallace, R. (2016). Big Farms Make Big Flue: Dispatches on infectious disease, agribusiness, and the nature of science. New York, Monthly Review Press. 

Wang, J. (2018). Carceral capitalism.  Semiotext(e) Interventions, 21. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e).

Cite as: Nonini, Don. 2020. “Black Enslavement and Agro-industrial Capital.” FocaalBlog, 3 July. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/03/don-nonini-black-enslavement-and-agro-industrial-capital/

Features, Urban Struggles

Raúl Acosta, Flávio Eiró, Insa Koch and Martijn Koster: Introduction: Urban struggles: governance, resistance, and solidarity

This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).

The global trend away from rural living and towards urbanization continues unabated. This is so despite high levels of inequality, poverty and forms of exclusion that are part and parcel of city life for the many. Indeed, across the globe, growing numbers of urban dwellers struggle to meet even the most basic needs for housing, security, and income. In response to these challenges, governments have attempted to present solutions that are too often palliative, addressing merely the symptoms of inequalities rather than their causes. In a similar vein, highly mobile policies are frequently implemented under the banner of terms like “good governance,” “participation” or “crisis management” that reinforce the social exclusion of the most marginalized, often contrary to their stated intentions (Peck and Theodore 2015). Cases of such exclusion include mass evictions, the rise of gated communities, the securitization of urban spaces, shifts towards austerity measures, punitive policies of migrant populations, and the regulation of the informal sector.  

As such, cities are places of multiscale struggle (Mollona 2014) where a variety of different actors, from (inter)national and local government bodies to charities, corporations, grassroots movements and citizens make competing claims of legitimacy and express visions for future living (Harvey 2003, Susser and Tonnelat 2013, Lazar 2017). Indeed, cities have become focal points for various class struggles.  

Based on a panel held at the IUAES conference in Poznań, Poland, in August 2019, this collection of papers addresses both the various forms of resistance to, and the reproduction of, exclusionary urban policies. Our main ambition is to expand important conversations in anthropology on urban mobilizations emerging from Henry Lefebvre’s “right to the city” and the “production of space” via a focus on the character and persistence of urban struggles (Lefebvre 1991, Banerjee-Guha 2010, Kalb and Mollona 2018, Koster and Kolling 2019). In this post and the contributions to this feature blog, we understand the study of urban struggles as a collection of productive tensions where governance, resistance and solidarity play out in plural and often unexpected ways within global frameworks of highly unequal regimes of accumulation (Susser 2014).   

Urban governance: facing challenges and reproducing inequality  

Cities grow by layers of time. This is related to both population growth and changes to the built environment. The number of urban dwellers grows not merely through the reproduction of those already living in urban spaces, but through constant immigration that originates in the countryside from surrounding areas and often from much further afield (Davis 2006). Many migrants who are attracted to urban life consider the city to be full of opportunities that cannot be found elsewhere, even as they find upon arrival that their status and rights to the city are often less recognized and sometimes actively suppressed compared to those of more established populations. The steady growth of cities across the planet has created, in turn, new pressures on local government bodies to keep up with the provision of infrastructure, public goods and employment opportunities needed to meet even the most basic demands for living (Caglar and Schiller 2018). 

To respond to the challenges faced by urban dwellers and the risk of social turmoil these entail, governments have come to implement a range of policies aimed at improving the urban lived environment. Governments thus tend to see larger cities both as centers where political legitimacy is built and where their ideologies and visions of the future take shape. Because of this combination, cities have also become sites of experimentation for states, where policies are tested before being rolled out more broadly. Often sold under the banner of buzzwords like “civilizing cities”, promoting “active participation”, “community building” or embarking on “crisis management”, these policies promise to improve the quality of life and built environment of the most vulnerable (Nuijten 2013, Schinkel 2010, Masco 2017). To do so, many come to rely on new forms of technocratic governance that uses the matrix of statistics and quantitative science in implementing various political and legal projects, ranging from social housing provisions to environmental policies to regeneration projects (Koch 2018). 

While these various initiatives may have ostensibly democratic goals, their implementation all too often reproduces the structural conditions of exclusion that they are meant to address (Alexander, Bruun and Koch 2018). The objective or neutral language of urban initiatives disguises the complex ways in which these policies are embedded in, and further promote, capitalism’s circuits of value and accumulation. Decisions by government policy makers usually favor the segments of the population who already hold most capital in the city. Meanwhile, urban infrastructure projects and regeneration initiatives attract real estate developers and to gentrify neighborhoods (Evans 2016). Both processes are aggravated when budget cuts and austerity measures fuel the outsourcing of urban governance to third-party actors – private companies and non-governmental organizations alike – that are often unwilling and sometimes unable to adequately provide public goods.  

Urban struggles as resistance and solidarity 

Cities, as sites where different actors compete for legitimacy, are the locus of productive urban struggles. We use the term urban struggle to refer to the complex and varied sets of negotiations through which city dwellers, grassroots movements, activist groups and political and development brokers critically engage with the claims to legitimacy and visions for the future that are promoted by official channels. As these groups face a wide variety of problems from insufficient housing (Cohen 2014) and infrastructure to environmental hazards, they develop an equally vast repertoire of resistance strategies, tactics and responses. These include, as the contributions to this feature show, amongst others, squatting initiatives, land occupations, grassroots art exhibitions, and the expansion of informal ties that are often viewed with suspicion by the state. There is thus a constant push and pull between dispossession and resistance, austerity and solidarity, exclusion, and inclusion unfolding in urban spaces.  

Image 1: Street graffiti in Recife, Brazil  (Photo: Martijn Koster, 18  August 2015) 

Yet, creative engagements seemingly opposed to neoliberal urban policies do not produce unequivocal forms of resistance, less even a singular anti-capitalist stance against structures of oppression (Kalb and Mollona 2018). On the contrary, ambiguities and contradictions prevail as citizens move within the same unequal processes of accumulation that frame official policies (James and Koch 2020). One example of this concerns the case of slum dwellers who aspire, above all, to become landlords and rent out rooms to even poorer slum dwellers under extractive conditions. Hence, the practices of the poor are not necessarily expressions of unequivocal solidarity and care (Palomera 2014). Likewise, social movements and grassroots initiatives, while often deploying a universal language of humanitarianism, may only benefit particular groups of urban dwellers, thus generating resentment and jealousy amongst those excluded (Wilde 2020). Urban struggles do not necessarily produce a better city, even as their spokespersons claim to speak on behalf of the most vulnerable and excluded (Gutierrez-Garza 2020).  

Acknowledging the contradictions that are at the heart of urban struggles opens the space for a particular analytical lens: one that conceptualizes cities as assemblages of productive tensions where a variety of actors, groups, movements and policy makers define, and continuously compete over, the meanings of urban citizenship, “rights to the city”, and democratizing access to infrastructures and public goods. This, in turn, can help us see how social responses, including those of social movements, grassroots initiatives, and local care networks, should not be romanticized as simple expressions of political resistance. Neither, however, does such a lens lend itself to a dystopian view in which capitalism erases all alternatives. Instead, cities emerge as places of ongoing, open-ended power struggles. Ethnography, with its focus on the lived experiences of urban dwellers, is particularly well placed to capture both the moments of solidarity that continue to exist and the wider forces disabling them. The papers in this feature seek to do precisely this.  

Ethnographies of urban struggles 

Our blog contributions highlight urban struggles and their complicated politics in a range of settings, taking the reader from Latin American’s mega-cities to European urban centers to recent urban developments in Asia. In Mexico City, Raúl Acosta analyses how cycling activists, intent on improving the infrastructure of the city, engage in a project that uses technical expertise to put forward a moral project of improving life in the city. However, the capacity to claim such moral projects is not evenly distributed, as activists on the “periphery” – both in the spatial and the social sense of the word – find that they lack the economic and cultural capital to be heard by power holders. In Brazil, questions of resistance and power are also at the center of the urban activism practiced by the poor. Sven da Silva explores how occupancy urbanism of the poor is negotiated in the context of development projects in the fast-growing Recife, in Brazil. Here, community leaders engage in political activities to resist real state pressure and in favor of what they view as community interests. Adam Moore’s contribution presents the hopes and dreams of victims of development in Medellín, Colombia. Looking at practices of autoconstruction, he explores the ‘human cost’ of ‘urban renovations’ and challenges the hegemonic narrative about urban transformation in Medellín, which heralds the local government as exemplary in its commitment to equitable and pro-poor urban development interventions. 

In Europe, struggles over governing urban populations and spaces similarly abound, bringing together a complex network of third sector organizations, private actors, Universities and state bodies. In the “policy laboratory city” of Rotterdam, frequently celebrated for its allegedly inclusive and innovative social policies, conflicting views over how to govern migrant populations have opened the space for new technologies of control. Here, Lieke van de Veer shows that the effort on the part of local groups claiming a role on the reception infrastructure of migrants often become riddled with internal tensions over funding and resources as different groups are unequally positioned to access these competitive funds. Meanwhile, in the UK, two of our blog contributions focus in more closely on questions of inequality in the city. Sarah Winkler-Reid’s work on Newcastle-Upon-Tyrne focuses on the university’s role in the network of actors influencing urban development proclaiming to create the “good city”. Here, the rapid growth of privately owned, mostly purpose-built student accommodation, create new forms of inequality in the city’s historical centre. In her contribution on the voluntarization of welfare advice in Manchester, Janne Heederik demonstrates how a withdrawal of state funding and a shift of tasks and responsibilities from government officials to citizens have transformed the landscape of welfare provision. If solidarity is the basis of the relationships between claimants and non-state advisers, they are also marked by tensions that are the result of the structural shifts austerity has imposed on the welfare system. 

In all of the contributions considered thus far, concessions and gains experienced by one urban group can simultaneously constitute a loss or betrayal for another. Indeed, this insight is also key to Anne-Christine Trémon’s ethnography of the city of Shenzhen in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where the authorities’ attempts to gain the status of a “national civilized city” – a status bestowed by the PRC government in recognition of “quality of life and a higher degree of urban civilization” – have introduced new forms of inequality for migrant populations vis a vis the typically much wealthier natives. Trémon makes use of the concept of “variegated governance” to make sense of how cohabiting residents in the same territorial unit receive differential treatment depending on their respective economic valorization and the political acknowledgement of their social worth. Finally, in Ezgi Guler’s contribution on urban Turkey, we move closer to questions about the possibility of collective resistance to oppressive urban structures and policies. Yet, once more, while the transgender sex workers with whom she carried out fieldwork rely on dense networks of mutual support and care, these rarely translate into collective political action as material pressures, including financial stress, inequality, competition and stigma also make workers deeply suspicious of one another.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679614).

Raúl Acosta is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He currently carries out research on urban activism in Mexico City in a sub-project of the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded Urban Ethics Research Group. His monograph “Civil Becomings: Performative Politics in the Brazilian Amazon and the Mediterranean” examines activist and advocacy networks. 

Flávio Eiró is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology and Dvelopment Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He has conducted ethnographic research on electoral politics and conditional cash transfers in Northeast Brazil, and currently works in the ERC funded project “Participatory urban governance between democracy and clientelism: Brokers and (in)formal politics”.  

Insa Koch is Associate Professor in Law and Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her recently published monograph “Personalizing the State: an Anthropology of Law, Politics and Welfare in Austerity Britain” offers an ethnographic study of the crisis of democracy and urban citizenship in Britain.  

Martijn Koster is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. Currently, he leads the ERC funded project “Participatory urban governance between democracy and clientelism: Brokers and (in)formal politics”. 

References 

Alexander, C; M Hojer Bruun; I Koch. 2018. Political economy comes home: on the moral economies of housing. Critique of Anthropology 38(2): 121–139 

Banerjee-Guha, S. (Ed.). 2010. Accumulation by dispossession: Transformative cities in the new global order. SAGE Publications India. 

Caglar, A. S. and N. G. Schiller. 2018. Migrants & city-making: dispossession, displacement, and urban regeneration. Durham, Duke University Press. 

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Enikő Vincze: Post-covid “Economic recovery” in Romania: forget labor, save capital, and support militarization?

Enikő Vincze, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoc

On May 28th the liberal Romanian government published the last data on the employment situation. This is therefore a good time to review the fate of Romanian labor in and after the lockdowns. I argue that we see a deepening of the export oriented neoliberal paradigm that demonizes the “social” and represses social reproduction in favor of subsidies to capital. Moreover, some of those subsidies now go towards increased militarization and the further beefing up of policing. What the liberal government calls “economic recovery” policies, turn out to be nothing more than a return to the “normality” of state supported international capital accumulation that has characterized much of post-socialist Europe after 1989.

Reviewing labor contract data from the end of March to the end of May, one notices a steady increase in the number of both suspended and terminated contracts. By the end of April, this trend changes: suspensions decline while terminations increase. By the end of May, the total number of suspensions and terminations reaches alarming proportions: over 1 million. More than four hundred thousand workers (especially in manufacturing, retail, and construction) had their labor contracts fully terminated. These workers receive paltry unemployment benefits of 25% of the minimum wage, amounting to about 330 lei/68 euro per month. If they are lucky and can claim technical unemployment, they receive 75% of their salaries. This probably means that some 600,000 former manufacturing and retail workers will now receive a monthly benefit of about 1,000 lei/208 euro (75% of the minimum wage). By the end of May, then, about 1,100,000 workers have less than some 200 euro per month while the value of the minimum consumption basket is even in the official calculation more than double that amount (at the end of 2019, the minimum consumption basket was over 2650 lei/525 euro per month).

Image 1: “Poverty kills”, Romanian protesters in Cluj (Photo: Enikő Vincze, 2020)

The labor crisis is exacerbated by the return of Romanians who used to work abroad: 1,270,000 of them at the end of April, of which at least 350,000 are actively looking for a job and receiving unemployment benefits. Of a total Romanian population of 17/18 million, some 1,5 million people, then, live on an income that just allows for bare survival. However, one should point out that this is not new for them: they were pretty bad or very bad off even before the pandemic, when they had fully paid jobs. Now, they hardly differ from the more than 4,632,000 persons who, according to Eurostat 2019 data, lived below the official poverty line, meaning on less than 900 lei/191 euro per month. In sum, 30 years after the revolution and 12 years after EU accession, Romania, a belated but by now dedicated student of neoliberal transition economics, may well have some 6 million people just above or under the poverty line, about half the working population. Against the policy rhetoric, these people have no “normality” to return to after the pandemic (keep in mind that In the “old good times”, over 30% of Romania’s employees (or 42% of formal employment contracts) earned only half the value of the minimum consumption basket per month). But the current government does not even talk about inequalities, poverty, or the public responsibilities of the state for the dispossessions brought by capitalism. Instead, it dreams of returning to a fictitious normal that for many never existed. As in the past, the crisis of capitalism induced by the Covid pandemic is solved through the “normality” of state supported capital accumulation: further enrichment of the rich, facilitation of transnational capital, and even deeper impoverishment of the many.

The current government’s “economic recovery plan” is leading to the further pauperization of labor (for more details see here). The plan is based on state aid schemes used throughout EU in the context of the pandemic: guaranteeing commercial loans for firms, but also capital and investment loans for both small and medium-sized enterprises, and large companies; subsidizing the interest rates of bank loans; offering aid to newly established companies. Moreover, there are several other facilities granted to large property owners: reducing the price of electricity for large consumers, refunding VAT, halting seizure on their debts. The government also foresees some measures to support employers who keep employees in their jobs or plan on hiring new staff. However, it does not provide anything that would directly support labor, like raising wages or improving labor conditions. In short, it is imagined as an economic recovery but not for ordinary people.

These ordinary people are told the EU funnels billions of euro to aid Romania’s recovery. At the same time, the government refuses any talk of wage rises, social protection, or public housing investment. Such talk is branded “toxic populism” or “economic ignorance” of the critical role that investment rather than consumption plays in growth. Romanian labor is no longer interesting, not even as a consumer. This supply-side policy in support of capital is based on the expectation that labor must remain cheap (regardless of the problems that further decreases in demand would create for many local small enterprises), so that international capital may come along to exploit it. But will an export-led model work in a global economy interrupted by a global recession, with shrinking returns to capital? True, for Romania it did work in 2010. But will it again?

After the pandemic has shown so clearly that labor is the very carrier of production, the current Liberal government chooses to further disregard workers. Instead, it’s doing everything possible to grant state aid to multinational companies operating in Romania. For that goal this government is also ready to borrow on the international market or from international financial institutions, which will push debt over the 50% of GDP threshold that rules as “normality” in CEE, in which case international pressure will force it to cut public sector spending such as on public wages, social assistance, and social protection. Saving capital goes therefore hand in hand with austerity measures (as prescribed in the Convergence Program 2020 of Romania, see Vincze 2015). Once again we see the tasteless spectacle of arrogant private entrepreneurs being saved by the visible hand of the state, grinning with satisfaction at public sector cuts while claiming the right to be supported at all costs, looting the public sector on behalf of their apparently deserved private profits.

In contrast to the 2008 crisis, however, this time Romania bets that the military industry will save the economy. “Among the government’s priorities are greenfield and offset investments in industries such as the military,” says the prime-minister. This option crowns former initiatives such as the acquisition of the $ 3.9 billion American Patriot missile system, promoted by the country’s president since his first mandate. The 2020 budget allocations provide for an 18% rise of military budget as compared to 2019, while the Ministry of Internal Affairs can do with an extra 13% on top of the increased budget for the Romanian Intelligence Services.

In this increasingly troubled world with various contradictory scenarios for the future, there is a risk that the current crisis of capitalism will be resolved not only by the militarization of the economy but also by rising political and social fascism. There is consistency there. Promoting racialized hatred (Stoica 2020), provoking interethnic conflicts and tensions between social classes is part of the justification for investments in a police state with military muscle. As other branches of industry are struggling hard to recover from the recession, capital needs war industry investments to save itself. Perversely, Romania’s leaders also offer the domestic reserve army of labor the opportunity to make a career out of warfare. President Iohannis recently stated that Romania’s armed forces can be made available for participation in missions and operations outside the Romanian state, claiming “important resources for equipping the Romanian Army make it possible to achieve national defense capabilities within the collective defense system of NATO and, at the same time, coherent multiannual programs can offer the Romanian industry the chance to relaunch. especially through institutional cooperation with the companies of our allies.”

We may not be surprised by these developments, but we can and must revolt against them. We could begin by imagining different economic recovery scenarios. What if the state took over the companies that can no longer function according to the rules of the “free market”? What if state aid came with the demand for decent wages for the employees? What if the state taxed large fortunes in real estate and banking accumulated over the past decades? What if the state decided to implement measures in support of people rather than profit: banning forced evictions, municipalization of public utilities, controlling private rents, achieving a significant stock of social housing through various methods? What if the state acted for the benefit of labor? For peace and disarmament? What if we did all of this now, to mark 75 years since the defeat of fascism and the promise of a better era for humanity? Why long for the “normality” of capital accumulation when we can long for other possible worlds?

This is the English version of an article published in Romanian on the platform Baricada, June 4th, 2020. The Romanian version contains additional graphs and references. Accessible here: https://ro.baricada.org/relansarea-economica-a-romaniei/

Enikő Vincze is Professor of Sociology at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, and a political activist for housing justice with the group Căși sociale ACUM/ Social Housing NOW!

References

Stoica, Maria & Enikő Vincze 2020. “The suspension of Human rights during COVID-19: For Roma in Pata Rât they have been suspended for a very long,” LeftEast, April 27, https://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/covid-19-roma-in-pata-rat/

Vincze, Enikő 2015. “Glocalization of neoliberalism in Romania through the reform of the state and entrepreneurial development,” Studia Europaea, 1: 125-152, https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=142030

Cite as: Vincze, Enikő. 2020. “Post-covid ‘Economic recovery’ in Romania: forget labor, save capital, and support militarization?” FocaalBlog, 19 June. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/19/eniko-vincze-post-covid-economic-recovery-in-romania-forget-labor-save-capital-and-support-militarization/

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