Tag Archives: urban struggles

Features, Urban Struggles

Janne Heederik: The Voluntarisation of Welfare in Manchester: A Blessing and a Burden

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).

As a result of welfare reform and continuing budget cuts, social service agencies in the UK have struggled to make ends meet and match the still-growing demand on their services. Local councils and the voluntary sector have both suffered cuts. The former are increasingly looking to the voluntary sector for help, while the latter used to rely heavily on grants from statutory bodies and suffers from increased funding restrictions. In the context of welfare reform, a model of active citizenship and participation has emerged. This model focuses on decreasing citizen dependence on welfare and social services while encouraging the ‘responsibilisation’ of citizens (Verhoeven & Tonkens, 2013). This policy agenda, supported by successive UK governments, has painted a picture of the ‘active citizen’ as a solution and improvement to the budget cuts in the voluntary sector. Citizens are encouraged to ‘take more responsibility’ instead of ‘depending on remote and impersonal bureaucracies’. As part of this responsibilisation, volunteers have taken center stage and their positive impact on communities is emphasized and celebrated (Schinkel & Van Houdt, 2010). Volunteers play an increasingly crucial role in welfare provision and the welfare system relies heavily on their work.

The extent of this reliance became clear during my fieldwork in Manchester in 2018 – 2019. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Manchester for 16 months, during which I worked with several advice centers in Greater Manchester. In November 2018, I attended a ‘Volunteer Day’ organized by the advice center I had been volunteering at for the past year. This annual event celebrates volunteers and gives paid staff and management a chance to thank volunteers for their work and commitment. The day was opened by a speech from Jack Puller, member of the charity Manchester Alliance for Community Care (MACC), who ‘supports and encourages local people to be active citizens through volunteering and other forms of participation’. His speech focused on impact and how to measure it. In numbers, he states that more than 110,000 people in Manchester volunteer, putting in a total of 278,000 hours of work each week, and having a total worth of 252 million pounds. Puller also mentioned that impact cannot be measured in numbers alone. Volunteers are vital to social services, arguing that they reflect the spirit of Manchester and are crucial to the existence of places like the advice center.

While this still presents a positive image of the impact of volunteering, the reality is that many advice centers can no longer survive without volunteers and there is a constant need for more volunteers to fill the gaps in advice services. Advice centers, along with other social services, have suffered from a ‘double squeeze’:  a withdrawal of public services has led to an increase in demand, while they simultaneously have to work with shrinking budgets (Evans, 2017). As a result, many depend on the work of volunteers more than before and even then, many fail to meet the demand and have to send people looking for their help away on a daily basis, as I experienced during fieldwork. Voluntarism in British welfare provision is thus not as straightforward and romantic as Puller depicted it, and both volunteers and paid advisers often struggle to navigate their workload and the relationship between them. The double squeeze on advice centers has not only made them more dependent on volunteers but has also changed the role of volunteers, who have become central more in the advice centers. In this contribution, I further analyze how the dependence on volunteers has changed their role within advice centers, showing how this affects the relationships between paid advisers and volunteers and analyzing how narratives of active citizenship often translate into different realities. Specifically, I lay bare how a politics of austerity has resulted in a paradoxical relationship with volunteers, where they are perceived as both a blessing and a burden.

Many social services, including advice centers, have aimed to bridge the growing gap between demand and capacity by relying more heavily on the work of volunteers, with some advice centers I worked with even being completely volunteer-run. This gap is usually characterized as a gap in more professional work, where paid advisers can no longer cover all their tasks due to lack of time and resources. As a result, the growing reliance on volunteers in the provision of social services is also characterized by the increasingly professional nature of the work volunteers do. As Verhoeven and Bochove note, volunteers are now expected to do more than provide complimentary work to the work paid advisers do, they are increasingly expected to take over parts of the paid advisers’ responsibilities, referred to as the ‘volunteer responsibilisation’ (Verhoeven & Van Bochove, 2018). However, my fieldwork showed that many volunteers are underprepared when they first start their work and are not able to carry out those responsibilities, which complicates the working dynamics at the center. At an advice center in the North of Manchester, where about two thirds of staff members are volunteers, all prospective volunteers must attend a training program to prepare them for volunteer responsibilities. I volunteered here as well and attended the 9-week training program, with one training day a week. The training aimed to prepare volunteers for both the practical and emotional labor ahead of them, but often proved insufficient once volunteers started their voluntary activities at the advice center. The large majority of volunteers felt underprepared for the complexities and intensities of advice work. For example, a former volunteer named Susan told me that she enjoyed helping clients with more straightforward form-filling, but struggled with more complex cases. For her, it resulted in high levels of anxiety and guilt, to the extent that she eventually stopped volunteering as an adviser. ‘It felt like I was just sitting there with my hands cut off, watching someone in front of me die’, she told me.

Figure 1: Volunteers during their weekly training on the welfare system and advice sector (photo: Janne Heederik, 2018)

Welfare advisers often have to deal with difficult and complex situations, with their clients struggling to make ends meet and often coming to the advice center feeling desperate and upset. It is the task of advisers to guide their clients through the welfare system, approach authorities on their behalf, and manage benefit outcomes to their best ability. However, the welfare system has grown increasingly complex, and advisers often have to engage in a ‘complex web of relations’ to assist their client (Forbess & James, 2014:80). For volunteers like Susan, the practical skills and emotional labor required to do good advice work, often feel like too big a responsibility to carry. Similarly, during my time as a volunteer at this advice center, I had to help clients who were about to be evicted, clients who had lost all their income, clients who had escaped abusive relationships, and clients who were depressed and sometimes even suicidal. While the training program provides basic information on how the welfare system operates and how advisers navigate it, these intricacies of advice-giving are too complex to teach in a course. Many volunteers, like Susan, are in need of more guidance, but more often than not volunteers are thrown into the deep-end and have to cover tasks previously done by professionals. Unlike their paid colleagues, however, they have to do without the financial or practical support: they do not receive monetary pay, nor do they receive the proper training to teach them how to deal with the complex client cases and the emotional labor that comes with it. In addition, the high demand and the lack of space, time, and resources, means that there is little time to process such events. Volunteers I spoke to often felt alone in dealing with some of the hardship they were faced with when seeing clients. One volunteer described how he often felt inadequate and how this resulted in him researching ongoing developments and policy changes at home:

I feel like I am always at the limits of my knowledge, and I already know a lot more than the average person. Volunteers like me have to put in a lot of time. You don’t just do your hours here. I often have to research stuff at home too.

Whilst active citizenship is thus envisioned as an enriching and fulfilling experience, for many volunteers this is only part of the story. The work they take on is more intense and demanding then initially anticipated and some volunteers struggle with the pressure they feel to respond to the demand adequately. These high expectations of volunteer work and the contradictory lack of training and preparation imply that volunteers can no longer be seen as amateurs supporting social services, but as professionals who deliver unpaid yet essential work (Coule & Bennett, 2018; Verhoeven & Van Bochove, 2018). It is an attempt for voluntarism to strengthen the welfare system despite reform and budget cuts, but it falls short in its assumption that welfare advice can be done by anyone at any time.  

Advice centers thus need volunteers to fill certain gaps in their work capacity, but at the same time struggle with the knowledge that volunteers often cannot fill these gaps with the same level of professionalism as paid advisers. Volunteers often turn to paid advisers for both practical and emotional support. Advisers might have to jump in or even take over appointments from volunteers who are unable to help their clients sufficiently. The manager of one of the advice centers expressed her concern regarding the center’s reliance on volunteers, stating it worried her that ‘this type of work is done by volunteers. Such overly complicated issues like almost all benefit cases rely on volunteers’. She worried for the clients, who might not get the right help if volunteers tried to solve client’s cases on their own, but was equally worried about volunteers and whether they were able to cope. Furthermore, often having to rely on assistance from paid advisers, the use of volunteers within advice centers often leads to an increase in workload for paid advisers. This leads to a paradoxical situation, where advisers must rely on volunteers for the survival of the advice center, but at the same time experience an increase in their workload as many volunteers need guidance and training.

This paradox is further complicated by the fact that relying on volunteers always comes with certain levels of insecurity as volunteers are not bound to contracts and employment conditions like paid advisers are. The turnover of volunteers was high at all the advice centers I visited, with volunteers staying anywhere between weeks and months, but rarely longer than a year. Additionally, coming from a wide variety of backgrounds, volunteers often had a wide range of skills and abilities, meaning not every volunteer could handle the same tasks and paid advisers spent a lot of time figuring out what volunteer would cover which task.

For permanent staff and management, relying on volunteers is thus necessary for the survival of the advice center, but never easy. And it can at times be burdensome. Volunteers cannot fulfill certain roles and end up sitting around and doing nothing, while at the same time there is never enough staff to do everything that needs doing. As a result, staff end up having to spend more time helping volunteers then they might gain form their presence. This situation forces paid advisers to engage in ‘volunteer management’ (Verhoeven & Van Bochove, 2018). Volunteer management involves the dividing of tasks among volunteers according to their skills and abilities, keeping track of who will be present on what day and making sure volunteers are spread out evenly across the week, checking in with volunteers to make sure they can cope with the demand and emotional labor of their work, and assisting volunteers in their work whenever necessary.

In addition, volunteer management also impacts the relationship between volunteers and advisers. Dividing tasks among volunteers often resulted in an unequal distribution of tasks, where more highly educated or experienced volunteers would be given many and more complex tasks, whereas other volunteers struggled to get any tasks at all. During a volunteer meeting at one of the advice centers, volunteers had the chance to raise any questions or issues they had. One volunteer mentioned an incident where she had been asked to see a client, but she did not feel comfortable taking on the tasks as she felt unqualified to deal with the complexity of the client’s case. Another volunteer had offered to step in, but the adviser assigning the task would not listen. ‘I was essentially told to just get on with it’, the volunteer said, adding that it had made her feel very uncomfortable and hesitant to ask the adviser for any tasks in the future. Volunteers who were given more complex tasks mentioned that they often felt they were not prepared for the difficulties of these cases, and struggled to deal with them emotionally and practically. On the other hand, volunteers who struggled to stay busy, mentioned that they were bored, could not develop their skills, and felt they could not help as much as they had wanted to. The paradox of volunteers being both a blessing and a burden resulted in difficulties for paid advisers and volunteers and affected their relationship. However, despite having tensions in the workplace, where advisers sometimes feel volunteers just add to their workload and volunteers feel left to their own devices, these tensions did not seem to translate into frustration with one another. Volunteers were always acutely aware of the workload that paid advisers had to carry and understood that they simply lacked time to train volunteers. Furthermore, whilst being aware that as volunteers they sometimes added to this workload, volunteers said they felt respected and accepted by their paid colleagues. Advisers were always grateful and positive about the volunteers, highly aware of the advice center’s dependence on their work: ‘We would be closing our doors without them’, one adviser said. Similarly, the manager of the advice center stated: ‘Volunteers have played more and more of a key role, they are at the front of our service’.

However, the paradox of the volunteer as a blessing and a burden remains, and many advisers felt frustrated with their working conditions. Rather than resulting in frustration towards volunteers, this frustration was predominantly aimed at the government, and there was a strong sentiment that the government had failed the voluntary sector while at the same time having offloaded its responsibility onto citizens under the banner of active citizenship. The key issue advisers pointed to was almost always funding. As one adviser stated:

If they want this [advice work] to be free, they need to provide the proper funding […] Look at us, advisers can’t help you properly because they are busy with five other cases, volunteers are taking on responsibilities they shouldn’t be, and we are all overworked. And it’s the government that is to blame.

These tensions between advisers and volunteers are therefore more than workplace quarrels; they are political. They reflect the everyday reality on the frontlines of a policy agenda of budget cuts and ‘citizen activation’. The responsibilisation of voluntary work is therefore problematic not just in the heaviness of the responsibilities that volunteers have to carry and its effect on their relationship with advisers, it also lays bare the problematic nature of a policy agenda that aims to offload government responsibilities onto the voluntary sector and citizens, without providing them with the necessary financial assistance and substantive support. The experiences of paid advisers and volunteers tell a clear story: advice services – among many other social services in the UK – are in crisis, but as important as volunteers are, it should not be their role to rescue these services. However, the outcry for change is still predominantly focused on those they are trying to help: they protest and advocate for the rights of welfare claimants, and in the process forget to advocate for their own rights. Individual voluntary commitment can be a blessing, but the overall use of voluntarism as a solution to budget cuts and welfare reform is a burden.

Janne Heederik is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University and a member of a ERC-funded research project on participatory urban governance. Based on ethnographic research in Manchester, UK, her research explores welfare, poverty, and brokerage in contemporary Britain.

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).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coule, T., & Bennett, E. (2018). State-Voluntary Relations in Contemporary Welfare Systems: New Politics or Voluntary Action as Usual? Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 47(4), 139–158.

Evans, S. (2017). A Reflection On Case Study One: The Barriers to Accessing Advice. In S. Kirwan (Ed.), Advising in Austerity: Reflections on Challenging Times for Advice Agencies (pp. 23–27). Bristol: Policy Press.

Forbess, A., & James, D. (2014). Acts of Assistance: Navigating the Interstices of the British State with the Help of Non-profit Legal Advisers. Social Analysis, 58(3), 73–89. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2014.580306

Schinkel, W., & Van Houdt, F. (2010). The Double Helix of Cultural Assimilationism and Neo-liberalism: Citizenship in Contemporary Governmentality. British Journal of Sociology, 61(4), 696–715. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01337.x

Verhoeven, I., & Tonkens, E. (2013). Talking Active Citizenship: Framing Welfare State Reform in England and the Netherlands. Social Policy and Society, 12(3), 415–426. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746413000158

Verhoeven, I., & Van Bochove, M. (2018). Moving away, toward, and against: How front-line workers cope with substitution by volunteers in Dutch care and welfare services. Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, 47(4), 783–801. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279418000119

Cite as: Heederik, Janne. 2020. “The Voluntarisation of Welfare in Manchester: A Blessing and a Burden.” FocaalBlog, 2 October. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/10/02/janne-heederik-the-voluntarisation-of-welfare-in-manchester-a-blessing-and-a-burden/

Features, Urban Struggles

Adam James Moore: The human cost of city upgrading in ‘pro-poor’ Medellín

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 1st March 2018, a group of protestors blocked a dual-carriageway in front of Acevedo Metro (and Metro cable line) Station in the North of Medellín, Colombia. Those who have read something about Medellín’s internationally acclaimed urban transformation in recent years will have almost definitely found their gaze drawn to the image of a cable car suspended above a tapestry of terracotta roofs that cascades down Medellín’s Aburra Valley. This image has become emblematic of a wondrous turning-point in Medellín’s contemporary urban trajectory. Once a hotbed of urban violence, state abandonment and spatial disconnection, these underprivileged peripheral neighbourhoods received state investment in bold infrastructural projects, and via the introduction of participatory governance mechanisms, now enjoy an empowering degree of protagonism in shaping Medellín’s urban future. Welcome to the ‘pro-poor’ city of Medellín.

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Features, Urban Struggles

Lieke van der Veer: Group-making and distrust within the infrastructure of refugee support

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).

In the Netherlands from 2015 onwards, the ‘spectacle’ (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015) of people arriving into Europe seeking refuge was channeled by vast media attention and political debate. These events triggered a vast response of bottom-up initiatives in the Netherlands wanting to support refugee status holders. In this contribution, I focus on such newly emerged initiatives that seek to support refugee status holders in Rotterdam, the second-largest city in the Netherlands. It discusses the struggles that the initiators of these initiatives face, who more often than not have a refugee background themselves. It shows how these struggles originate from the ambiguous categorizations of group-making that experimental policies presuppose in the field of refugee reception and support in urban spaces today.

I focus on initiatives that are not established yet, but are still in the process of becoming. By studying initiatives that are still fine-tuning their focus, grappling for funds, searching for volunteers, seeking collaborations with others et cetera, I had an insight in the constitutive and generative elements of the infrastructure of refugee reception and support.

During a 12-month ethnographic fieldwork period in Rotterdam in which I studied such initiatives, I followed several aspiring initiatives in their efforts to establish partnerships with other organizations. When the community organizers of these initiatives would meet with people who know about funding circuits, discuss their project proposals with the municipality, pitch their plan in network sessions, organize events to acquire volunteers and so on, I joined them. In doing so, moments of breakdown (Larkin 2013) were particularly insightful; when my research participants hoped for or anticipated something that did not arrive, I learned about who may do what, where and how.

Rotterdam is an illuminating case to study grassroots initiatives in the field of refugee reception and support. It is considered ‘policy laboratory’ (cf. Van Houdt and Schinkel 2019) and is celebrated for its allegedly innovative urban and social policies, including in relation to migrant integration. Rotterdam cherishes its alleged hands-on mentality – a mentality captured by the popular slogan ‘actions speak louder than words’. Contrasting with Rotterdam’s self-image as experimental and bold, the city has the highest number of low-income households in the Netherlands. Another central force in the city is Livable Rotterdam [‘Leefbaar Rotterdam’], a rightwing party with populist traits and the highest share of votes in local elections. Their policies focus on so-called immigrant assimilation and are explicitly anti-immigration – which translates into policy frameworks that the resident initiatives I study here are affected by and provides context to the fierce anti-immigrant protests in the city in 2015.

Intersecting struggles

Between 2016 and 2020, the so-called Rotterdam Approach for Status Holders explicitly reached beyond the integration objectives articulated by the national government. For example, in Rotterdam, the City Council expects refugee status holders to pass the civic integration exams one year earlier than usually required. In addition, through the ‘Time Obligation’ measure [dagdeleneis], the City Council expects refugee status holders to be ‘active in society for at least four days a week or more with education, work, or voluntary work’. This measure is part of the so-called ‘Participation Act’, which applies to everybody in receipt of benefits. Although a policy evaluation pointed out that only 47 per cent of the status holders in Rotterdam was indeed ‘active’, the most recent (2019-2022) Rotterdam Approach to Status Holders largely continues the existing approach. As a consequence, the refugee status holders that I worked with struggle to live up to the demand to integrate fast, struggle to find their way in the incomprehensive field of initiatives, and fear to be unsuccessful in managing their new lives.

Resident initiatives that seek to support status holders struggle too – although on first sight, Rotterdam seems the place to be for resident initiatives. The Rotterdam Approach for Status Holders states that, in ‘coordinating additional activities’ for accepted asylum seekers, it ‘smartly uses […] private initiatives for refugees and volunteer work,’ thus explicitly opening up the floor for participatory initiatives to play a role. The document claims to ‘believe in the added value of civil society,’ to recognize ‘that creative and innovative initiatives from volunteer organizations give new energy and help integration,’ and that it ‘encourages such initiatives wholeheartedly.’ It thereby responds to recommendations from The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) to mobilize to ‘society’ and ‘volunteer projects’ in ‘speeding up integration’, as well as to the general appeal to ‘active citizenship’.

In practice, however, funds are drying up. In 2014, the city administration agreed to ‘stop irrelevant subsidies in the field of diversity and emancipation,’ for ‘tax payers’ money gets lost’ and ‘subsidizing activities is not a goal in itself’. This shift away from subsidized activities is explicitly mentioned in a recent policy document regarding support to refugee status holders: ‘only a small part of the budget remains available for subsidies for small-scale, innovative initiatives from society,’ the document points out. As such, the initiatives I worked with find themselves faced with competitive funding schemes; they fear being excluded from subsidies and collaborations, while trying their best to build an image of professional legitimacy.

Opaque group-making

The different forms of struggle identified thus far can also come to intersect, as illustrated in the case of Aida. Aida received a refugee status several years ago, is in receipt of social benefits, and is in the process of setting up an initiative to help Eritrean status holders with their paper work. However, she is afraid she will not be able to get support from the City Council. This is so because the abolishment of the so-called ‘target group policy’ in Rotterdam prescribes that policies should target the population of Rotterdam in general, and not have specific interventions that assume ethno-racial differences (such as people with an Eritrean nationality). Although the Netherlands has a strong tradition of implementing targeted policies, the shift from group-specific policies to generic policies has been a political priority since at least the 2000s (Scholten and Van Breugel 2018). As a result, there is evidence of a declining consciousness of migrant integration concerns, because generic policies often fail to incorporate immigrant integration priorities in the ‘mainstream’ (idem).

For Rotterdam, Dekker and Van Breugel have deconstructed the move from target group policies towards generic policies. They identify a ‘continuous act of balancing between generic and specific policies’ (Dekker and Van Breugel 2019, 128) that at one time implements targeted policies for migrants and at another time subsumes migrant interest under generic policies. These interchanging approaches to group-making in Rotterdam now seem to have reached an equilibrium in which generic policies are the norm. Regarding the support of civil society organizations that seek to assist refugee status holders, the municipality decided to no longer support ‘mono-ethnic and/or mono-religious activities’ to the extent that initiatives ‘will not be financed, unless there are substantive reasons to do otherwise’ because activities should be ‘focused on participation and integration.’ In another policy document, the city’s discouragement of such activities is explicitly linked with Rotterdam’s earlier-mentioned self-image as ‘innovative city’: in ‘giving room to new innovative organizations and ideas,’ the City Council explicitly breaks with ‘whatever is done in the past’.

Yet despite the fact that Rotterdam seem to have reached an equilibrium in which generic policies are the norm, the city publishes annual reports on the achievements of ‘people with a migration background’ that fly in the face of any ‘generic’ policy assumption. Moreover, to my research participants, the ‘group policies’ are elusive and subject to change. For example, Rotterdam’s ‘Somali-resolution’ in 2015 has resulted in the formal recognition of people of Somali descent as ‘group’ and led to the subsequent availability of subsidies to community organizers that sought to assist this ‘group’. And considering recent publications about ‘the Eritrean group’ – such as this and this and this one – my research participants now expect the same thing to happen to people from Eritrean descent as ‘group’.

Exactly because of this instability and opacity with regards to group-making, community organizers such as Aida are striking out blindly with regards to what ‘groups’ can be identified without risking eligibility to municipal funding.

What adds to Aida’s confusion, is that different municipal departments work through different logics. The department that is responsible for procurements in the field of refugee receptionand support (Work and Income) has different expectations from initiatives than the department that is responsible for subsidies (Social Support). The former department is now experimenting with so-called ‘customer profiles’. As an example of such profiles the policy advisor mentions ‘the single mother with three kids’ and adds that ‘customer profiles are a good way to offer tailor-made solutions without working with target groups.’ Customer profiles thus are meant to ‘objectively’ describe ‘groups’ of city dwellers without assuming ethno-racial differences, they make use of stereotypes such as ‘the single mother with three kids’ – a figure that appears as ‘the inversion of morality and family values par excellence’ (Koch 2015). To Aida, it is unclear to what extent these customer profiles are something that concern her and her endeavors; although she now applies for subsidies, she hopes for her activities to be included in the procurement structure some time. Again, she gropes along in the dark.

Eclectic initiatives

As a result of her insecurity about what constellations of people are accepted as a target group, Aida has started to organize dinner parties for long-term Rotterdammers with little money, alongside offering administrative support to Eritrean refugee status holders. She does so because she is scared that if the municipality found out that she only offers support to Eritreans – which she in fact does, with a few exceptions – she would be accused of catering only for one ‘target group’ and as such miss out on funding and collaborations.

These dinner parties however create awkward moments, because the long-term Rotterdammers – who are all white – usually sit on separate tables to black Eritrean people. It is not that Aida has intentionally designed the dinner-setting as such; it is rather that she does not know how to deal with the situation. Recently, the initiative of Aida was declined funding again. In the refusal letter said that ‘there are good reasons to assume that the subsidy would not (or not sufficiently) be spent on (or contribute to) the (policy) objective for which the subsidy is meant.’ In a subsequent meeting with a policy advisor at the town hall, it was specified that Aida’s initiative was considered ‘too broad’. Never mind that very reason the constellation of beneficiaries is indeed quite diverse is that Aida is scared to be accused of focusing on one group in the first place.

Image 1: Right-wing protest in Rotterdam (Banner on the right says: ‘Preserve Dutch Culture Traditions Norms and Values’; Photographer: Lieke van der Veer, 2018)

Reception brokers

Because it is so difficult for Aida and other initiatives to navigate the municipal frameworks, she has asked the help of Jozefien. Jozefien is a woman who has co-founded the platform called You Are Welcome. She once introduced herself as ‘from a little village in the Netherlands’ yet added that ‘I feel more like a Middle-Eastern person, I think.’ You Are Welcome was established to strengthen bottom-up initiatives that engage with refugee status holders, and to spread a positive message on integration. The platform was launched in 2015, explicitly in response to violent protests that broke out during an information meeting about the construction of the reception center.

What is problematic, however, is that some of the initiatives that Jozefien helps, dislike one another. In particular, Aida really dislikes Luciano, the founder of another aspiring initiative for Eritreans, who is born in Rotterdam in a family of refugee parents. Aida is upset because she fears that Luciano is trying to take clients from her. Aida is hurt, she says, because she feels that Luciano is a smooth-talker, that he smiles arrogantly at her on the street, and that, given that Luciano has more contact with city administrators, he forces Aida into the shadows.

For Jozefien, although she tries to equally promote both initiatives, it is difficult to deal with the tension between the two. It also has ramifications for her own relationships with Aida and Luciano. Especially for Aida, the competition she experiences with Luciano makes her deeply distrust Jozefien. One afternoon, Aida complained to me that ‘so often she [Jozefien] is at Luciano’s. But she doesn’t come to us! And she has taken him to the councilor [‘wethouder’]! She has arranged an appointment for Luciano with the councilor! I asked Luciano if I could join. But Luciano said: “no”.’ […]  And she [Jozefien] has never even come to our Friday dinners! She only came once, to take a picture, and then she left again. From the very beginning, I didn’t feel welcome at You Are Welcome.’

Discussion: solidarity, humanitarianism and neoliberalisation

Recent ethnographic work contrasts solidarity with humanitarianism and juxtaposes emic accounts that frame solidarity as horizontal, anti-hierarchical, and as an emphasis on similarities between people with the viewpoints of professional humanitarian NGOs (see e.g. Cabot 2014). In Rotterdam, because grassroots initiatives generally turn to the municipality for funding and collaboration and feel pressured to professionalize, the distinction between solidarity and humanitarianism is remarkably fuzzy. The community organizers of refugee support initiatives ‘yearn for’ the state (Jansen 2015) to formally recognize their initiative through a tendering contract and compete to perform professionalism. They seek to use licensed software to prove impact, assimilate to municipal buzzwords, match funding calendars, formalize their organizational form, and forge lucrative partnerships.

These emerging forms of humanitarian volunteering (Youkhana and Sutter 2017; cf. Rozakou 2017) summon a complex assemblage of forms of humanitarian reason, forms of authority and technologies of government (Fassin 2007). Because grassroots initiatives seek to incorporate policy objectives (cf. Van Dam et al. 2014), are subject to mechanisms of raising funds that are part of the technologies of government (Fassin 2007, 151), and thereby gamble on which ‘target groups’ the municipality will acknowledge, they are shaped by these forms of authority and technologies of government. The case of Aida is an example of how refugee support has become intertwined with control mechanisms that are part of experimental municipal policies.  

To Aida as well as to the brokers she turns to for advice, is unclear which ‘groups’ may be identified and which not. A lot of ‘information’ in this regard is distorted and comes from hear-say. Although the interchanging approaches to group-making in Rotterdam now seem to have reached an equilibrium in which generic policies are the norm, this equilibrium is unstable, as reports about specific ethnic groups have proven to result in the recognition of these groups and the subsequent availability of subsidies. Moreover, different municipal departments – that deal with subsidies and competitive tendering contracts respectively – work in accordance with different logics, yet is it unclear where one logic begins and the other one ends.

This opacity of group-making policies and related funding schemes gives rise to fierce competition and distrust between initiatives, which has fueled divisions within the refugee solidarity movement. In the grappling race for funds between (aspiring) initiatives which give in to the criteria for competitive success, neoliberal market logics and humanitarianization become further entwined. Community organizers seek to act as successful entrepreneurs – by reaching targets, increasing numbers, seizing volunteers, and laying hold of the target group. In doing so, they may present their core issues as side affairs and vice versa.

This contribution shows that not only beneficiaries suffer from the contemporary mechanisms that mix care and control; some of the aspiring community organizers with a refugee background find themselves in a precarious position as well. Underneath the seemingly universalizing pretense of generic policies, ambivalent practices of institutional selectiveness exclude vulnerable community organizers and the initiatives they are trying to launch. The inequalities that these exclusions are premised on are produced as well as obscured by the mantra of generic policies.  

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).

Lieke van der Veer (Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology in an ERC-funded research project on participatory urban governance. She has a background in Philosophy. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Rotterdam in 2018, she studies aspiring grassroots initiatives that provide support to people with a refugee background.

References

Casas-Cortes, Maribel, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Nicholas De Genova, Giorgio Grappi, Charles Heller, Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, et al. 2015. “New Keywords : Migration and Borders.” Cultural Studies 29 (1). Taylor & Francis: 55–87. doi:10.1080/09502386.2014.891630

Dekker, Rianne, and Ilona van Breugel. 2019. “‘Walking the Walk’ Rather than ‘Talking the Talk’ of Superdiversity: Continuity and Change in the Development of Rotterdam’s Immigrant Integration Policies.” In Coming to Terms with Superdiversity: The Case of Rotterdam, 107–32. IMISCOE Research Series.

Fassin, Didier. 2007. “Humanitarianism: A Nongovernmental Government.” In Nongovernmental Politics, edited by Michel Feher, 149–60. New York: Zone Books.

Houdt, Friso Van, and Willem Schinkel. 2019. “Laboratory Rotterdam. Logics of Exceptionalism in the Governing of Urban Populations.” In Coming to Terms with Superdiversity: The Case of Rotterdam, edited by Peter Scholten, Maurice Krul, and Paul van de Laar, 133–51. IMISCOE Research Series.

Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: “Normal Lives” and the State in Sarajevo Apartment Complex. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Koch, Insa. 2015. “‘The State Has Replaced the Man’: Women, Family Homes, and the Benefit System on a Council Estate in England.” Focaal–Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 73: 84–96. doi:10.3167/fcl.2015.730107.

Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–43. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522.

Rozakou, Katarina. 2017. “Solidarity #Humanitarianism: The Blurred Boundaries of Humanitarianism in Greece.” Etnofoor 29(2), 99-144.

Scholten, Peter and Ilona van Breugel, eds. 2018. Mainstreaming Integration Governance: New Trends in Migrant Integration Policies in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Cite as: van der Veer, Lieke. 2020. “Group-making and distrust within the infrastructure of refugee support.” FocaalBlog, 3 August. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/08/03/lieke-van-der-veer-group-making-and-distrust-within-the-infrastructure-of-refugee-support/

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/

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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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/

Features, The Worldwide Urban Mobilizations

Massimiliano Mollona: The Brazilian “June” revolution: Urban struggles, composite articulations, and new class analysis

The June 2013 revolution that shook Brazil last year took everybody by surprise. It started in Sao Paulo as a small gathering against a looming rise in the cost of public transport, and in two weeks it spread to 400 cities and towns, bringing millions of people (6 percent of the national population) to the streets and forcing President Dilma Rousseff to start a process of constitutional reform. For many political observers, this “movement of movements” was a labor movement, which brought together diverse forces of labor—the kind of Latin American “bricolage” socialist movements described by Göran Therborn (2012).1 But, are these bricolaged, working-class formations—to use the expression of Van der Linden—“atypical”? Atypical in relation to what? Are they not part of the same tradition of working-class “communing” described by Susser (2013) and Kalb (2014) for the United States and Europe? Contemporary urban struggles are complex and complicate traditional, factory-based, approaches to class. Below, I describe and analyze the struggles that took place in Rio de Janeiro in the summer 2013 and offer some ideas on how anthropology, geography, and political economy can be put in dialogue for a contemporary class analysis.2

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