Melanie Boehi considers the possibilities of reconfiguring city-space in her response to Teresa Caldeira and Edgar Pieterse
How do city forms influence demonstrations?
How do we think about urban forms and citizen engagement? What connects desires
and design sensibilities? These and other questions were addressed in a panel
hold on Tuesday, June 25, at the Goethe Institute. Teresa Caldeira presented an
interpretation of the unfolding political protests in Brazilian cities and
Edgar Pieterse talked about the need to better understand the functioning of infrastructure
and networks in slum urbanism.
In early June 2013, the Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare Movement)
called for a demonstration in São Paolo that was quickly followed by a series
of large demonstrations all over the country. While the first demonstration
focused on the demand for free public transport, subsequent demonstrations also
asked for changes regarding corruption, investments for the FIFA World Cup, LGBT
rights, pensioner’s rights and racism, and highlighted a class conflict between
poor and middle class protestors. The police countered violently and politicians
and the media reacted to the demonstrations with expressions of surprise and
quickly labelled the marchers as vandals. In response to the inadequate
reporting, the demonstrations became spaces of dialogue between what
politicians and the press said and what people posted on the internet.
Demonstrators carried messages on cardboards directed at the TV audience and
social media users. The press was constantly contested and the main TV station
hindered from covering the events in the streets.
According
to Caldeira, the unfolding demonstrations emerged in two contexts. The first
one is the demonstrations occuring globally since the beginning of the
Arab spring. Demonstrators’ posters frequently express solidarity with other cities
of protest. The second one is the prevalence of mass gatherings at cultural
events in contemporary Brazil that have emerged over the past ten years and are
now increasingly politicised, e.g. music and theatre festivals, demonstrations,
gay parades, evangelical demonstrations. In São Paolo, the form of the city
influenced the peripheral organisation of the demonstrations. Since the 1940s,
migrants who couldn’t afford the city built houses in the periphery.
With their social upward mobility, these houses were upgraded and
urban social movements successfully demanded the supply of infrastructure such
as water and electricity. The city had arrived in the periphery. In the 1990s,
a series of negative factors affected life in the periphery, marked by economic
downturn, youth unemployment and crime. Crime decreased after 2000, accompanied
by an increase of artistic and cultural movements that embraced the notion of
the city as a space for circulation. “A city only exists for those who can move
around it” became a prominent slogan. Unlike elsewhere, the demonstrations in São
Paolo did not focus on a square but were mobile. In a city with 11 million
inhabitants, 7 million motor vehicles and an incredible amount of traffic,
circulation was issue around which mass protest was first mobilised.
A
different basis for mobilization for city changes exists in the slums in which
62 % of sub-Saharan Africa’s urban population live, where urban life is marked
by low and erratic household incomes, small tax bases and dysfunctional
politics. Negative trends accumulate to an urban polycrisis, affecting the
ecosystem, supply of water, energy and food, land distribution, employment and
violence. According to Pieterse, participatory development is essential but
insufficient to tackle the challenges of slum urbanism. Participatory
development becomes ineffectual when the scope of challenges is vast, goes
beyond urgent short-term concerns and includes high levels of complexity. It is
therefore necessary to recognise the importance of city-wide networks, apply
systemic thinking and take design seriously. Pieterse emphasised that much work
needs to be done to understand the auto-constructions of urban slum citizens –
desires, aspirations, affective registers, as well as focus on the
understanding of networks, including the ones shaped by religious belief
systems. |
| Image: Melanie Boehi |
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| Image: Melanie Boehi |
A more detailed discussion of Teresa's critique can be found here http://kafila.org/2013/07/05/sao-paulo-the-city-and-its-protests-teresa-caldeira/
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