Community resistance and the inclusive city: Devising strategies in São Paulo

ABSTRACT

The global call for inclusive cities suggests that all residents should have equal access to the benefits of urban life. Across cities, however, displacement and lack of affordable housing segregate urban residents and limit their access to power, resources, and opportunities. Though social movement literature has long assessed how movements influence officials for reform from the outside, scholars of governance argue that civil society must act from the inside to achieve political and territorial inclusion. Here I ask whether movements confronting removals in São Paulo implement direct strategies and, if so, what are the factors that shape why movements choose direct over indirect strategies. I find that an ideology based on rights encourages direct strategies, but a radical perspective or a weak relationship with the state instead pushes movements toward activities that promote indirect influence. Networking across movements is key for increasing the capacity of movements to access new democratic institutions.

Acknowledgments

I thank Cecília Maria de Morais Machado Angileli and Elaine Moraes Albuquerque for their assistance with this project in São Paulo. Finally, I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Funding

I acknowledge financial support from the GAIA Center at Rutgers University, which made this research possible.

Notes

1. Please see Marcuse and Madden (2016) for a discussion of the increasing commodification of housing and the need to prioritize housing as “home” rather than real estate. The authors detail the history of housing and mobilization in New York City.

2. For more detail on Lefebvre’s conception of the right to the city, please see, Lefebvre (1995), Harvey (2003), Mitchell (2003), and Purcell (2014).

3. I refer to these organizations as movements, consistent with how leaders refer to themselves.

4. Research assistants based in Brazil conducted interviews with leaders in 10 communities following the survey. For purposes of brevity, much of this information is not included here.

5. This finding confirms the conclusions of Belda-Miquel et al. (2016), who found that the radical ideology of the Movimento dos Sem Teto da Bahia in Salvador, Brazil, also turned them away from participation in formal governance institutions.

6. During his time as mayor of São Paulo, Gilberto Kassab was a member of three different parties, the Partido da Frente Liberal, Democratas, and the PSDB.

7. Mayor Haddad replaced a center-right housing secretary associated with 1990s-era corruption in the city with João Sette Whitaker, a left-leaning professor from the University of São Paulo, following the dissolution of the political coalition between the PT and the right at the national level.

8. Coutinho (2010) reviewed 500 decisions involving the right to housing issued by the São Paulo Court of Appeals from 2000 to 2010 and found that almost all of the cases were decided in favor of property owners.

Additional information

Funding

I acknowledge financial support from the GAIA Center at Rutgers University, which made this research possible.

Notes on contributors

Maureen M. Donaghy

Maureen M. Donaghy is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Public Policy and Administration at Rutgers University, Camden, NJ. Her research interests include urban politics, Latin America, and participatory governance institutions. She is the author of Civil Society and Participatory Governance: Municipal Councils and Social Housing Programs in Brazil (2013) and a forthcoming book on the strategies of community housing organizations across the United States and Brazil.