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At the same time, the development of the imperial metropolis cannot be separated from the process of colonization: In London, for instance, profits from the exploited colonies financed cultural institutions like the Tate Gallery and a huge reconstruction of the central city. Bank Junction, the headquarters of the Bank of England and the London Stock Exchange, became the symbolic heart of the Empire and is still today London's City.

Urban development controlled from the colonial metropolis was in turn supposed to integrate the colonies into the empire. Although the world city London dominated colonial cities like Delhi or Bombay, the world-encompassing British Empire generated in both comparable structures that continue to have an impact today. In each case, globally-operating colonial administrations, banks, or trading companies dominated urban development. Like London, these colonial cities also served as destinations for the migration within the empire. Elites often "commuted" between these centres: Immigrants sought out their fortune on the respective other continent. Since the colonial regime was built upon a racism that was institutionalized even in the legal order, power and opportunities were distributed along ethnic lines. While an international class of colonialists and privileged natives dominated the cities, an immigrant class made up of many ethnic groups formed the lowest social segment of the world's metropolises (see King 1990, Lanz/Becker 2001).

In the Wake of Neoliberal Globalization

The patterns ordering the megacities of the South can thus be read against the backdrop of this coercive historical "globalization" of the European urban model. Examining on a global level some current variants of urban relations of violence, it becomes clear that they should simultaneously be interpreted in the context of current political and economic processes of globalization controlled from Western centres.

- The Drug Complex
A Rio de Janeiro newspaper recently described the border between the city and the favela as "Where Bosnia begins in the middle of Brazil." The article was ostensibly about the docu-thriller Cidade de Deus, a film produced for the world market that shows an "orgy of violence in the criminal milieu of the favela", as the German magazine Spiegel put it (39.02, p.176). The film "provides an especially realistic look at the complex of drug crime and urban everyday life."

In the global tourism capital Rio de Janeiro alone, more young people were killed between 1987 and 2000 in conflicts between drug gangs, the military, and the police, than in the wars in Columbia, Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Israel/Palestine combined (Ramonet 2002). If Cidade de Deus is a good example for the asfalto's classifying gaze on the morro, the perspective from the bourgeois city to the favela, detailed studies by urbanists like Marcelo Lopes de Souza or the documentary makers Joao Moreira Salles and Katía Lund on the territoriality of drug trade show how this image feeds on racist prejudice. They emphasize in contrast the multiplicity with which the drug gangs and favela communities are interwoven with one another in an economy of violence in which police, politicians, paramilitary groups, and middle-class customers are also implicated. "The police of Rio de Janeiro," as the former police chief Helio Cruz openly admitted in an interview, "is in reality not there to fight violence and drugs, but to preserve the status quo" (Salles/Lund 1999). According to him, their task is to secure a socially highly unjust society against political instability. Otherwise, as Cruz argues, they would have to "storm the beach houses were the owners celebrate their coke orgies." Using the example of Swiss arms dealers he also exposes the international components of the drug complex.

Lopez de Souza in turn attributes the danger of a "parallel drug mafia state" conjured up by governmental bodies - something that despite all the violence does not reflect the reality of the more or less chaotically structured gangs - to the fact that the military required a new scenario of threat after the end of the "Communist menace". According to the criminologist Guaracy Mingardi (2000, p. 38), the myth of "parallel states" assumes that the state and the drug mafia exist parallel to one another without any contact. This merely serves to veil the fact, she argues, that organized crime was only able to spread because governmental bodies cooperated by way of financial deals and "clientele networks." For Lopes de Souza (2000, pp. 243 ff), the brutality with which regular army troops took over three favelas from helicopters between 1994 and 1997 makes clear how the "climate of a civil war" driven by the middle classes militarizes and de-democratizes society: He argues that it is not just the drug mafia, but the middle class as well, which increasingly cuts itself off and isolates itself from social problems, that has increasingly fragmented the city into island-like enclaves that no longer even communicate with one another. The notion of the "ungovernability" of the megacity, he continues, ultimately serves to displace responsibility for the social decay of the city from processes of polarization and exclusion driven by the civil society and the state to gang violence, justifying the use of the military and police to secure the status quo.

Contrary to the middle-class racist view that links drug violence solely with the majority black favela population, in some Left circles the rather romantic notion circulates that the drug barons are something like heroic Robin Hoods. According to this view, the drug barons, patriarchs responsible for their communities, take care of the social needs not fulfilled by a state apparatus that is only interested in controlling poverty by police means. It is indeed true that patriarchal variants of the drug trade do fill in the vacuum left by the state in the social economy of the favelas: While the state there possesses absolutely no legitimacy, since it only appears as a brutal force of order, the quadrilhas at least generate jobs and income, take on some social costs that the poor cannot afford, and create an order that although based on violence is still able to offer some protection from arbitrary police attacks. All the same, this does not mean that the mafia is the "last remainder of civilization" in the favelas, as Robert Kurz writes (1991, p. 208). Instead, the communidade subjects itself to a tyrannical regime of power that suppresses any hope of emancipation. It is not just the police here that secure the status quo, as Helio Cruz correctly points out, but the drug gangs as well: They terrorize all authorities of political self-organization that refuse to meet their needs, even murdering their representatives, or smuggle trusted associates to the top of these Associacoes de Favela to decrease their political legitimacy. At the same time, as the drug trade is internationalized and brutalized, the quadrilhas also increasingly divorce themselves from the context of the communities in which they were originally embedded by place of residence or ethnic origin. Since for them the favelas degenerate to economic locations that they solely produce through violence for their needs, the precarious bonds of mutual commitment dissolve; the drug mafia thus also loses its remaining legitimacy in the eyes of the residents, especially since local government seems to be breaking with the policy of mere repression. New urbanization programs at least attempt to integrate some morros into urban society, and in so doing get caught up in a conflict of interests with the gangs' own security needs.

Using the example of Medellín, Raul Zelik - in his contribution to this book, for example - has shown that the order of violence in the urban barrios interwoven with the drug economy exhibits a strongly international component. Not only the drug mafia, urban institutions, and the bourgeois city are interwoven with one another; in a division of labour with the military, paramilitary units also cooperate in the "war against drugs" with US secret services, international arms traders, and military service providers, that simultaneously serve as extended plant security for transnational corporations like Coca Cola or British Petroleum (see Zelik 2002). The war between right-wing paramilitary forces and left-wing militias in Colombia is however an openly social and political conflict, a dimension that in the Brazilian drug complex only exists in sublimated form.

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