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Index City of COOP | Imprint |
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Stephan Lanz |
For many years, the images of Rio de Janeiro shown in our media have been vacillating between eroticism, exoticism and violence: One can count on the theme being either the carnival or the bloodily waged war between drug gangs, police forces and death squadrons. In 2003, when regular military forces were deployed to protect the world's largest orgy against threats from gangs, both suddenly mingled. The global image of the cidade maravilhosa, the "marvellous city", in the 1950s and 60s was based on a cultural and architectural production that bore witness to Brazil's emergence into modernity and was illustrated by the overwhelming cityscape and the rustle und bustle in the glamorous quarters of Ipanema and Copacabana near the beach. Today, this image has been replaced by that of the favela - as the seat of the most famous samba schools and the paramilitary, local drug trade and the symbol of the divided metropolis ridden by excessive violence. Although it was not legalized for decades, repeatedly destroyed by the state and stigmatized by the "myth of marginality", the irregular favela was always a highly productive part of Rio de Janeiro. With samba and carnival, the marginalia of the city's consciousness engendered the urban culture with which Rio is globally marketed today. In economic terms, the official city is dependent on the services (cleaning, cooking, guarding, constructing, drugs, sex, etc.) of the favelados in offices, enterprises and domestic households. On the other hand, the favela served politics to discursively exclude undesired inhabitants from urban society. Even a large number of policemen and soldiers live in the morros (hills), which are usually falsely labelled as shanty towns, while revealing a more densely woven, civil-societal network than the official city. Today, the municipality is attempting to urbanize the informal settlements by means of public infrastructure programmes. Nonetheless, the stigma has not disappeared: Racist discourses blame "the favela" for the brutal drug economy and revive the myth of the social marginality of its population. The cultural metropolis of Buenos Aires, like New York a long-standing symbol of the New World for poor European emigrants, is portrayed in the global press, as well as in the left-wing press, as a declining city unsettled by social conflicts. In December 2001, when a mass revolt swept away five national governments within two weeks, Buenos Aires was in the eye of the worldwide public. Beforehand, a radical neoliberal economic policy had deindustrialized the country for more than a decade, plundering public property and destroying the socio-political functions of the state by means of so-called structural adaptation measures. A speculative economy triggered a spiralling social polarization that led to the impoverishment of the former middle classes as rapidly as it generated profit for the elites speculating with the capital they possessed. Along with pictures of militant protests mounted in what is most certainly the most European metropolis of the subcontinent, images of destitution suddenly reached the Old World, depicting throngs of waste collectors pushing their carts through the streets at night. Not only in terms of urban development had colonially borne Buenos Aires hitherto resembled large European cities; the "social pact" between the classes, which the populist president Juan Peron had put through in the 1940s, remained effective up until the 1980s. A broad, relatively prosperous middle class, low unemployment rates and a - for Latin American standards - densely woven state infrastructure had ensured a certain degree of social integration of its inhabitants. Buenos Aires had been spared the masses of poor people characteristic of other Latin American metropolises - until the 1990s, when all of a sudden self-built slums started to spread rapidly. This fifth volume of the metroZones series is not an attempt to comprehensively analyse the situation in the two cities briefly described above. Moreover, the customary perception of crises threatens to cover up and naturalize the fundamental relations of power and rule. The situation of both cities is less that of crisis than the result of political projects of the elites at the cost of various social groups who are now increasingly fighting back. These practices of resistance of urban everyday life in the metropolitan spaces across the globe are what metroZones primarily focuses on. While the first two volumes, Space//Troubles and Learning from * (both 2003), raised the question of how cities are produced and governed in the wake of the dirty globalization processes in the shadows, the following volumes discuss their self-organized and resisting appropriation: in Hier Entsteht as participatory building and planning processes, particularly in European cities, in Self Service City: Istanbul (both 2004) as informal urban development through migration, and now in City of coop as urban social movements and self-organized substitute economies based on the example of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. The term urban social movement was coined by the urbanist Manuel Castells in the early 1970s. Castells started from the assumption that in late capitalism the state increasingly organizes collective consumption (housing, social and cultural infrastructures etc.) and that this manifests itself in the cities and thus politicises urban everyday life: He maintained that protests against the cuts of previously granted state benefits or against their contents - e.g., the demolition of historical residential quarters (in Europe) or self-organized settlements (in Latin America) in favour of modernist public housing - could lead to broad political alliances against the capitalist state, to urban social movements that would transform it (Castells 1977). But in his book "The City and the Grassroots" from 1983, Castells already denied the urban movements a system-transforming character, claiming that they are merely "reactive utopias": "Thus urban social movements are aimed at transforming the meaning of the city without being able to transform society. They are reaction, not an alternative". (327) A reaction, namely, to the logic of capitalism that transforms cities into commodities, to the logic of an authoritarian etatism that prevents cities from becoming democratic communities, and to the logic of a standardized mass culture directed against the cultural autonomy of individual groups of the population. Since both the labour movement and progressive political parties had failed in the "resistance against economic exploitation, cultural dominance and political suppression" (Castells 2002: 66), the population is only left with autonomous self-organization on the level of their place of residence. Therefore, urban social movements are collective actors organized in an urban territory and independent of political parties struggling for fair collective consumption and the utility value of their city, for cultural autonomy and neighbourly life, as well as for local political self-determination. Examples range from the Paris Commune in the 19th century or the Madrid citizens' movement during the dissolution process of the Franco dictatorship, up to the gay communities in San Francisco or the house and land squatting movements in Europe and Latin America. Looking back at the 1980s and 90s, Castells again recapitulates the urban movements and distinguishes between four lines of development: First, many of their discourses and actors have been integrated in the practices or even apparatuses of local administrations. Second, environmental movements supported by the middle classes have spread, although frequently fighting against progressive local projects, e.g. public housing, for egoistic not-in-my-backyard motives. Third, a "huge number of poor communities" concerned with their collective survival (2002: 68), and fourth, criminal types of movements that have spread in the form of violent gangs with no progressive political aims whatsoever. Castells now reduces the meaning of urban movements to local communities that do represent specific sources of identity, but "in most cases react defensively to the unreasonable demands of global disorder and uncontrolled, rapid change" (ibid.: 70). The question raised by the movement researcher Chris Pickvance, "Where have Urban Movements gone?" (1995), is a perfect example of the widespread lament about their decline in the 1990s caused among other things, by their cooptation by the state. Now this is not to be primarily understood as a communal reaction to the challenges of the urban movements but as part of a structural transformation of local politics. While it was their task - up into the late 1970s as the extension of the nation-state - to provide public infrastructures for "services of general interest" in the cities, the crisis of Fordism led to the quest for new modes of regulation: In the wake of globalized, locational competition, the cities began to understand themselves as economic players, pursuing a proactive economic policy, and assessing all sorts of local actors as to their potentials for economic growth and social cohesion. Urban movements with their collective housing, their cultural and social neighbourhood projects or alternative forms of generating income for the jobless appeared from this perspective as cheap producers of infrastructures that the local state was no longer willing to finance. Many movements, in turn, professionalized themselves to become cultural and social service providers that not only cooperated with local administrations but increasingly took over their tasks. The political scientist Margit Mayer points out that, today, "self-help, grassroots participation and sustainability are recurring clichés" (2003: 125) in urban development programmes in Europe and North America. Even programmes of the World Bank aimed at supporting female entrepreneurship in the cities of the South now revert to feminist and anti-colonial traditions: "While the desired 'mobilization from below' rhetorically invokes the tradition of oppositional movements, it does so by redefining this tradition in a specific, restricted formal way" (ibid.). All over the world a governance model has established itself, a new form of local government that integrates private-economy and civil-society players in "partnerships", while with the local withdrawal from providing services of general interest, traditional welfare rights which the state had hitherto guaranteed are eroding (cf. e.g. Mayer 2000).
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