We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2024
INTRODUCTION
In Brazil, social urban conflicts motivated by large urban projects and sports mega-events have generated new and autonomous forms of social organization, which add a new dimension to existing social movements in search of new paths for political action. In this chapter, we propose a reflection on new practices born and developed in the context of social struggles and resistance to large urban projects using two illustrative cases. These are the processes of production of counter-plans, or the so-called “popular plans”, of two distinct areas in the city of Rio de Janeiro: Vila Autódromo, an informal settlement next to Rio's Olympic Park built for the 2016 Olympic Games, and the Vargens region, a low-income neighbourhood in the west of the city.
In the first part of this chapter, we present the context in which social conflicts occur. Major public investments in large urban projects in the city of Rio de Janeiro promised to change urban dynamics via public– private partnerships (PPPs) and resulted in forced evictions of consolidated lowincome neighbourhoods, here termed popular neighbourhoods. The implementation of the housing scheme “Programa minha casa, minha vida” (“My house, my life programme”; hereafter PMCMV) – a federal government initiative that produced tens of thousands of low-income housing units in Rio de Janeiro, almost always in peripheral areas far from principal employment centres – helped to legitimize the evictions.
In this context, we highlight a new phase in urban struggles in Brazil, composed by articulated actions for the defence of popular neighbourhoods and the increase of urban occupations of empty land and buildings organized by social movements. These forms of resistance have in common not only the demand for the recognition of popular neighbourhoods but, more than that, the recognition for their way of producing housing and the urban space.
The two cases represent forms of popular resistance and autonomous planning practices that take place outside the purview of the state, supported with technical advice from university urban laboratories and from political networks involving both traditional and new social movements and activists.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
