Search Results

The focus of this chapter is the effect of contemporary globalization on poverty and inequality in cities of the ‘global south’. Specifically it addresses the impact of globalization on marginalized communities—slums, squatter settlements, and shantytowns—collectively called ‘informal settlements’. This is a timely issue given that over the next 25 years virtually all of the population growth worldwide will be in the cities of developing countries largely concentrated in such settlements. The chapter takes a critical look at current assumptions about globalization, urban poverty, and inequality, distinguishing between different constructs and aspects of globalization and separating causality from coterminality. It questions how the informal sector would fare in the face of advanced capitalism and technological transformations, absent the global component. Using Brazil as an example, the chapter draws comparisons between the lives of the poor during the isolationist period of ‘import substitution’ and the military dictatorship and their current lives in the context of pervasive globalization of ideas, icons, and identities. The findings are based on a longitudinal panel study conducted in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro between 1968 and 2005, examining the changes over time, space, and generations. The presumed effects of globalization on the lives of the urban poor, on the levels of inequality between them, and the rest of the city and on public policy are thrown into question. The answers are sought in the people's perceptions of the impact of globalization on their lives, in the historic transformations of the country and city, and in the life‐history, survey data, and open‐ended interviews collected over this 35‐year period.

Due to industrialization and employment opportunities, Brazil's urban population experienced a significant increase that started during the 1950s. However, because legal and affordable housing options were evidently limited, migrants had to resort to making use of unused private and public land which are referred to as favelas. Although such favelas accommodate a huge part of the population and because of how these communities have been established illegally, favelas are not without problems, such as poor living conditions, high population density, irregular construction, and limited access to various services such as sanitation, running water, and electricity, among others. Recently, legislation and policies have veered away from eradicating favelas and moved towards recognizing property rights and integration through such measures as the Favela-Bairro programme. This chapter examines how residents of one of Rio de Janeiro's largest favela have been able to use community, city, and legal resources in dealing with various issues.

In this chapter I examine James’s and Oiticica’s “discovery” of what I conceive of to be the active remains of the motley crew in the aesthetic sociality of blackness. I explore the claim they each make on it, on its modes of composition, arrangement and assembly, and the claim it makes on them, by way of some of their early experiments—James’s Minty Alley, the novel he wrote in Trinidad as an “exercise,” and Oiticica’s Parangolé, the banners, tents and capes whose activation would constitute what he would come to describe, through a phrase he adopts from Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa, as an “experimental exercise of freedom.” Both claim the aesthetic sociality of blackness by “appropriating” elements of the creative practices they encountered, the spectacular performance of cricket and samba and the more quotidian performances connected to them, the forms of assembly that James observed in conversations in the barrack-yards and that Oiticica observed in the architecture of the favelas. I look at the ways their claims take shape in these early works and the way the counterclaim of that sociality opens up those shapes, using it as a vehicle for its own expression, one that can’t quite be contained by the works themselves or the gesture of appropriation.

The introduction historicizes the evolution of favelas in the imaginary of the city. It illustrates how favelas, constructed as a site of Otherness and/or authenticity, have become more recently a consumable good. With the pacification process, favelas have become a seductive component of the city, attracting many interests, and a clear process of urban development is under way. The chapter describes how successive urban remodeling plans have resulted in the eviction of many residents—mostly low-income, black segments of the population. It defines favela-based cultural productions as counter-narratives that are implicated in the articulation of alternative identities and geographies. Finally, it conveys the methods used in the book and the general organization of the book.

This chapter studies the messages and values in City of God (2002). Violence is City of God's main theme and the driving force of the film. Fernando Meirelles has stated that his intentions in making the film were to bring the terrible conditions of the favelas to the public's attention. He tried to avoid showing violence, but only the effects of the violence. Indeed, much of the praise for City of God centred on its revelation to audiences of the scale of the violence and the extent of the problems of the favelas. This was seen as an intended social comment, a humanitarian and worthy position supporting the idea that the making of the film had been motivated by a wish for change. Other critics, however, were not so positive. Ultimately, raising debate about the nature and power of cinema and the effect it may have on its spectators is perhaps the most important component of studying City of God.

Rio de Janeiro began the twentieth century as capital of a nation that had ended slavery and monarchical rule only in 1888-89. In the new republic, coffee exports and early industrialization concentrated in São Paulo. Rio drew people recently out of slavery and/or escaping the struggling sugar economy of Northeast to irregular subdivisions and informal favelas. As the century moved forward, both the Vargas regime (1930-54, 1950-54) and the military dictatorship (1964-85) promoted formal urban development with land titles and services while the national capital and much of the bureaucracy moved to Brasilia after 1960 and Rio’s limited industrial base corroded. The urban population kept growing, driving a return of informal development as military rule ceded to re-democratization. Favelas, informal subdivisions, and social marginality spread again as criminal enterprises linked to the global drug economy brought limited prosperity and rising violence to the metropolis—contradictions that hosting the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics could not resolve.

Rio de Janeiro has undertaken massive urban transformations in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. The chapter examines the coupling of favela urbanization programs—such as the PAC favelas and the Morar Carioca program—with the public security policy known as the Pacification Police Units (UPPs). It is particularly concerned with how this juxtaposition produces new spaces, territorialities, and structures of legitimization for community leaders.

The chapter covers the first two decades of the twentieth century, when a drastic Paris-inspired urban reform in the Old City helped to create the idea (and to an extent the reality) of ‘two Rios de Janeiro’: one modern and beautiful, the other uncivilized and inhabited by the undesired. The chapter focuses not only on the ‘other’ city, but on mediating figures that frequented its different spaces, like the composer Chiquinha Gonzaga, and two mulatos and prominent writers whose works assume critical importance: João do Rio, a mixture of flâneur and investigative journalist, and the ‘damned’ novelist Lima Barreto, an active critic of the republic and its urban reforms. Less-well-known texts, like the travel accounts of João Pinheiro Chagas (a future prime minister of Portugal), also generate broader insights about urban development, and into the Cidade Nova’s role as a type of contact zone between expanding suburbs, the commercial and political centre, the port, and nascent favelas, or shanties built on hillsides.

Stuart Hall has inspired, influenced, and often provoked at least two generations of scholars and activists, across Britain and far beyond. He has held distinguished academic positions in both Cultural Studies (a discipline, or discourse, in whose making and remaking he has been a central figure) and Sociology. But his ideas and their impact have not been, and could not be, confined to any disciplinary mould, nor to the academic world alone. He has written on and been a significant and original voice in debates on popular culture, media and the arts, Thatcherism and the future of the Left, Marx and Gramsci, modernism and postmodernism, racial theories and race relations, concepts of diaspora, globalization, ethnicity, identity, and hybridity—and even that is just a near-random selection from among the themes that his work has addressed. His influence may be encountered, his name invoked, among artists and film-makers, especially younger black British ones, as well as academics. Strikingly, in a recent poll seeking to rank the ‘100 Greatest Black Britons’, Hall was the only living intellectual to feature at all prominently (at no. 10) among musicians, sportspeople, and TV personalities. This polymathic presence does not, however, extend to absolute ubiquity: it should be pointed out that the presenter of the once-popular TV show ‘It’s a Knockout’ was an entirely different Stuart Hall. Our Stuart Hall is, on the face of it, very much a ‘public intellectual’. This is a label more familiar in America than in Britain, and one which sometimes seems to mean ‘glib, media-friendly polemicist’. That is clearly not Hall at all, and perhaps the idea of the public intellectual fits him better if it is redefined: not (just) as someone who appears frequently in the public sphere, but as one whose efforts have always been directed towards defending and extending that sphere, its integrity, democracy, and inclusiveness. It is an ethical as well as a political endeavour. Hall’s lifelong adherence to it, no less than the subject-matter and intellectual power of his essay here, makes him an apt choice to open this collection of Oxford Amnesty Lectures.

James David Wolfensohn is a surprising figure. A wildly successful investment banker, he nonetheless found time to take up the cello in middle life; he would cross the Atlantic on Concorde, buying two seats so that his cello could fly with him. A corporate insider, he nonetheless identified with the world’s least fortunate; he took an interest in international family planning, the environment, and AIDS, even as he was merging and restructuring the world’s leading companies. Appointed to lead a World Bank known chiefly for prescribing macro-economic austerity, Wolfensohn distanced the institution from both macro-economics and prescriptions. He spoke the language of poverty-fighting groups such as Oxfam, and demanded social justice; and after his first press conference, the World Bank’s chief spin doctor, who was concerned that the Bank not be seen as ‘soft’, remarked that Wolfensohn had not been ‘on message’. ‘He’s the President,’ another official said. ‘I think you’ll find that is the message.’ Since that exchange in 1995, Wolfensohn has reshaped the Bank, a formidable, sprawling institution with nearly ten thousand employees and projects in about one hundred countries. The emphasis on macro-economic structural adjustment, which had dominated the Bank’s programmes since the start of the 1980s, was phased out; questions of governance— the transparency of political institutions, the level of corruption, the quality of judicial or media or civil society oversight—came to preoccupy the Bank almost as much as price signals and sound budgeting. Before Wolfensohn’s arrival, the Bank’s apolitical charter was thought to put these governance issues at least partially off limits. But in a speech in 1966, Wolfensohn denounced ‘the cancer of corruption’, and a taboo that had lasted since the Bank’s creation in 1944 was abruptly shattered. Wolfensohn’s focus on poverty and social justice come through strongly in his contribution to this volume. Before his arrival at the Bank, the institution was often vilified for technocratic elitism: its officials’ idea of ‘field work’ was a meeting with a finance minister in a five-star hotel, according to the critics. But in this lecture we find Wolfensohn recounting the life of a poor mother in a Brazilian slum, and explaining that the worst feature of poverty is ‘voicelessness’.

Should the urban poor be asked to pay their way out of poverty? Should transnational corporations be invited to profit from the plight of the urban poor? I fear that, if we use privatization to solve urban poverty, then we are answering ‘yes’ to these questions. In his impassioned and challenging contribution to this collection, World Bank President James Wolfensohn describes the World Bank’s Cities Without Slums action plan. This plan is in the process of upgrading infrastructures and services in urban slums globally. However, this plan and others like it seek in part to solve urban poverty by using the specific privatization technique of the public– private partnership. By harnessing the power of transnational corporations to solve urban poverty, such partnerships demand that the poor pay private companies for what should be their birthright: a basic social and economic infrastructure. In this response, I’d like to highlight three pieces for special attention: the lectures by Stuart Hall, David Harvey, and James Wolfensohn. Hall and Harvey’s account of the relationship between globalization, privatization, and urban poverty is very different from that offered by Wolfensohn. For Hall and Harvey, globalization impoverishes, while for Wolfensohn it is the key to solving the problem of urban poverty. With minor qualifications I will side with Hall and Harvey and argue that, while Wolfensohn’s position has important merits, it should be modified in significant ways. It seems to me that many of the problems of urban poverty are caused by globalization. The bill for eradicating urban poverty should be handed to the beneficiaries of globalization, not to its victims. I’ll start by fleshing out a recurring theme in all three chapters, the privatization of our cities, before giving some sense of how the privatization of urban infrastructure has come about over the last twenty-five or so years. Then I’ll turn to the lectures by Hall, Harvey, and Wolfensohn. The privatization of urban infrastructures started in the late 1970s in the United Kingdom. It was part of what Stuart Hall in his contribution refers to as ‘the privatization of public goods’.