Rethinking the City from the Margins: Doing Research in Latin America’s Urban Peripheries

This workshop brings together early-career and senior social scientists who are researching the Latin American urban periphery. Cities in Latin America have historically suffered from high levels of social and economic inequality. Housing shortages, unemployment, and poverty are pressing challenges in most cities in the region. The urban periphery is the spatial locus of intersectional and structural marginalization. Although its population is diverse, ranging from the extremely poor to the emerging lower middle class, it is composed of residents who frequently—often daily—experience discrimination, exclusion, and various kinds of deep insecurity. In addition to pointing to a specific locus, the urban periphery also offers a unique vantage point from which to rethink the city: it offers new ways of understanding the politics and economy of the city. It is this vantage point that we aim to explore in this workshop.

Our research interests span a wide range of topics, such as housing, the informal economy, environmental hazards, gender, violence, racism, activism, and electoral politics. These different topics and perspectives help us discuss how we can rethink the city—its governance, politics, economy—from the periphery. To do this, we want to focus on local understandings of the city and residents’ emic conceptions of politics and economy.

During this day, a select group of invited senior researchers will present their research in the urban periphery of Latin America. We will close the day with a plenary discussion in which we explore how we can rethink the city from the periphery. Our speakers are Flávio de Souza (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil), Pieter de Vries (Wageningen University), Luisa Steur (University of Amsterdam) and Sonja Marzi (Radboud University).

In the workshop we will ask questions such as: What does the city look like when viewed from the margins? How are low-income neighbourhoods currently connected to the city centre and to the urban economy? How is the state present in the margins? How are the politics of residents of the periphery connected to the state? How would a perspective from the margins influence the ways in which we theorise the city? We invite anyone interested in urban issues to join us in this collective effort to rethink cities from their margins.

The workshop is organized within the CSPS Urbanscapes Cluster, as part of the POPULAR research project which is financed through an ERC Consolidator Grant (grant no. 101087109).

Programme

9.45 coffee

10.00 welcome + introduction

10.15 Bridging the gap: Principles and practices of urban inclusion through the right to housing in Recife by Flávio de Souza (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil)

11.00 Welcome to the desert of the Real: The obscure side of Medellin’s success by Pieter de Vries (Wageningen University)

11.45 break

12.00 ‘Volviendo a vivir’ (Coming back to life): Displaced women resisting violence and practicing activism to (re)build urban futures by Sonja Marzi (Radboud University)

12.45 lunch + walk

14.15 “They didn’t even make a bulla”: Sanitation workers and structural racialization in globalizing Centro Habana by Luisa Steur (University of Amsterdam)

15.00 plenary discussion: rethinking the city from the periphery

16.00 wrap up

16.15 goodbye drinks

Abstracts

Bridging the gap: Principles and practices of urban inclusion through the right to housing in Recife
– Flávio A M de Souza (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil)

In Recife, ZEIS (Special Zones of Social Interest) areas are vital for understanding urban development and housing challenges. Despite a supportive legal framework for housing rights and urban inclusion, a significant gap exists between these principles and their actual implementation. This gap underscores the need for better application, improved socio-economic equity, increased community involvement, and sustainable housing solutions. Systemic issues, such as the failure of housing markets for the urban poor and governmental neglect, exacerbate housing insecurity. Forced removals in protected areas—where environmental goals often take precedence over housing rights—present a rationale that is nearly impossible to contest, further complicating the situation. The powerlessness of the urban poor and their forced relocation to city outskirts highlight deep-rooted challenges in realizing housing rights. Addressing these issues requires comprehensive strategies in Recife and Brazil, focusing on social housing, improved urban governance, streamlined processes, and community empowerment for equitable and sustainable development.

Welcome to the desert of the Real: The obscure side of Medellin’s success
– Pieter de Vries (Wageningen University)

There is ample literature on the re-invention of Medellin describing the city as innovative, creative and resilience, after a period of lawlessness and chaos. Several factors have been mentioned to account for this putative revival such as the quality of its administrations and the entrepreneurial spirit of the paisas (the surname of the native people). There is also a growing literature on the branding of Medellin, pointing out the role it has played in the promotion of Medellin in order to make it a world class city. Yet, there is little academic literature on the complicity between the city’s administration, the military and paramilitary in repressing social movements and installing a regime of terror in the popular neighborhoods as part of a broader governance strategy aimed at commoditizing land and natural resources.

“They didn’t even make a bulla”: Sanitation workers and structural racialization in globalizing Centro Habana
– Luisa Steur (University of Amsterdam)

There has been ample academic debate on the existence of racist prejudice and institutional racism in socialist Cuba. In contrast, there has been little debate that engages with the “darker red” theorization of racism as a systemic, even if shapeshifting, companion of capitalism (Kundnani 2023). This paper asks whether the capitalist dynamics accompanying the reforms in contemporary Cuba, intended to make Cuban socialism survive in a “globalizing Caribbean” (Sprague 2019), are also introducing the specter of structural racism. Based on an anthropologically inflected dialectical method and fieldwork, from 2015 onward, amongst the street sweepers and garbage collectors of a neighborhood of the municipality of Centro Havana, this paper demonstrates that, despite countervailing socialist forces, there are concrete indications that structural racialization is indeed affecting the neighborhood and the lives of these workers in the form of three major shifts: the shift from an everyday working experience of socialist integration to one of economic precarity; the shift from sanitation workers being socialized into the neighborhood to them becoming alienated from it; and the shift from sanitation workers being targeted for “socialist civilizing” to them becoming subject to punishment.

‘Volviendo a vivir’ (Coming back to life): Displaced women resisting violence and practicing activism to (re)build urban futures
– Sonja Marzi (Radboud University)

In this paper, I present co-produced research on displaced women’s resistance to violence with gendered forms of activism to (re)build more feminist and emancipatory urban futures. Within a participatory action research project I use creative audio-visual methods including participatory filming and workshops with displaced and conflict-affected women in the Colombian cities of Bogotá and Medellín. Working hybridly (online and face-to-face) over several months, displaced women co-produced knowledge and a documentary in which they demonstrate how they resist violence and claim spaces of the city inside and outside their homes. Violence is understood as multiple, ongoing and intersecting, perpetrated by intimates, armed groups and the state, including institutional neglect (in and of the city) and it is racialised and gendered. I, therefore, draw particular attention on how violence (as well as (urban) trauma intersect with displaced women’s spatial biographies but also on how they resist violence to rebuild their lives in the city with activism(s). Their forms of activism transcend the sites and scales of public and private spheres, national and global crises, and individual and community responses. To explain how displaced women ‘come back to life’ through these different transcending forms of activism they use metaphors of plants, roots and growth. In the city they come together, they build solidarity networks and alliances, and imagine, aspire to and practice alternative feminist and emancipatory urban futures.