Contained in:
Book Chapter

Walling the peripheries: porous condominiums at Brazil’s urban margins

  • Matthew Richmond
  • Moisés Kopper

This chapter discusses a widespread but underexplored phenomenon in Brazilian cities: the growing presence of walls and other security infrastructures in low-income, peripheral neighborhoods. This practice can often take the form of bounded and internally regulated regimes of residential organization at a hyper-local scale, associated with the emic term condomínio (condominium). The authors propose the concept of “walling” to theorize the practices of socio-material assembly through which peripheral condominiums emerge, driven by the efforts of urban subjects to reconstruct a sense of well-being within environments experienced as precarious and insecure. While walling can significantly reshape socio-spatial relationships and everyday flows of bodies, the authors argue that broader social conditions and relationships in peripheries tend to promote forms of spatial and temporal porosity that weaken or even undermine these regimes of self-segregation. The chapter explores varying dynamics of peripheral condominiums through the presentation of contrasting case studies from three different Brazilian cities: a recently completed Minha Casa Minha Vida (My House My Life) public housing project in Porto Alegre; a partially walled and symbolically partitioned favela in Rio de Janeiro; and an occupied and subsequently formalized public housing project in São Paulo.

  • Keywords:
  • walling,
  • peripheries,
  • infrastructures,
  • condominiums,
  • Brazil,
+ Show More

Matthew Richmond

LSE, London School of Economics, United Kingdom - ORCID: 0000-0002-1563-3615

Moisés Kopper

Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium - ORCID: 0000-0003-0327-7681

  1. Anand N., Gupta A., Appel H. (eds.) 2018, The Promise of Infrastructure, Duke University Press, Durham and London.
  2. Benjamin W. 1986, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Ed. P. Demetz, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London.
  3. Caldeira T. 1994, A Política dos Outros: O Cotidiano dos Moradores da Periferia e o que Pensam do Poder e dos Poderosos, Brasiliense, São Paulo.
  4. Caldeira T. 2000, City of Walls: Crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
  5. Caldeira T. 2017, “Peripheral urbanization: Autoconstruction, transversal logics, and politics in cities of the global south,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(1), pp. 3–20.
  6. Cardoso A., Lago L. C. do. 2013, “O Programa Minha Casa Minha Vida e seus efeitos territoriais,” in A. Cardoso (ed.), O Programa Minha Casa Minha Vida e seus Efeitos Espaciais, Letra Capital, Rio de Janeiro.
  7. Carvalho B. 2014, Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool.
  8. Cavalcanti M. 2009, “Do barraco à casa: tempo, espaço e valor(es) em uma favela consolidada,” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, 24(69), pp. 69–80.
  9. D’Andrea T. 2020, “Contribuições para a definição dos conceitos periferia e sujeitas e sujeitos periféricos,” Novos Estudos CEBRAP, 39(1), pp. 19–36.
  10. DaMatta R. 1997, A Casa e a Rua: Espaço, Cidadania, Mulher e Morte no Brasil, Rocco, Rio de Janeiro.
  11. Donoso R. E., Elsinga M. 2018, “Management of low-income condominiums in Bogotá and Quito: The balance between property law and self-organization,” International Journal of Housing Policy, 18(2), pp. 312–334.
  12. Feltran G. D. S. 2011, Fronteiras de Tensão: Política e Violência nas Periferias de São Paulo, Editora Unesp, São Paulo.
  13. Fischer B. 2008, A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Stanford University Press, Stanford.
  14. Fischer B., McCann B., Auyero J. (eds.) 2014, Cities from Scratch, Duke University Press, Durham and London.
  15. Freyre G. 1978, Casa Grande e Senzala: Formação da Família Brasileira sob Regime da Economia Patriarcal, José Olympio, Rio de Janeiro.
  16. Gupta A. 2012, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, Duke University Press, Durham and London.
  17. Holston J. (ed.) 1999, Cities and Citizenship, Duke University Press, Durham and London.
  18. Holston J. 2008, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
  19. Jensen C. B., Morita A. 2017, “Introduction: Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments,” Ethnos, 82(4), pp. 615–626.
  20. Kopper M. 2019, “Porous Infrastructures and the Politics of Upward Mobility in Brazil’s Public Housing,” Economic Anthropology, 6(1), pp. 1–13.
  21. Kopper M., Ide I. H. 2019, “Do Estado ao Empreendedorismo Social: Burocracias Cotidianas, Risco Moral e Gestão da Vulnerabilidade em uma Empresa de Regularização Fundiária em São Paulo,” Revista Brasileira de Sociologia, 7(15), pp. 30–52.
  22. Kopper M., Richmond M. A. 2020, “Subjetividades Periféricas: Uma Conversa Interdisciplinar,” Novos Estudos Cebrap, 39(1), pp. 9–17.
  23. Kowarick L. 1979, A Espoliação Urbana, Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Editora Paz e Terra, São Paulo.
  24. Lancione M., McFarlane C. 2016, Infrastructural Becoming: Sanitation, Cosmopolitics, and the (un)Making of Urban Life at the Margins, in A. Blok, I. Farias (eds.), Urban Cosmopolitics: Agencements, Assemblies, Atmospheres, Routledge, London, pp. 45–62.
  25. Low S. 2003, Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America, Routledge, London.
  26. Lopes de Souza M. 2000, O Desafio Metropolitano: Um Estudo Sobre a Problemática Sócio-Espacial nas Metrópoles Brasileiras, Bertrand Brasil, Rio de Janeiro.
  27. Maricato E. 1979, A Produção Capitalista da Casa (e da Cidade) no Brasil Industrial, Alfa-Ômega, São Paulo.
  28. Marques E. 2014, Introdução – São Paulo: Transformações, heterogeneidades, desigualdades, in E. Marques (ed.), A Metrópole de São Paulo no Século XXI, Editora UNESP, São Paulo.
  29. McFarlane C. 2011, “The city as assemblage: Dwelling and urban space,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(4), pp. 649–671.
  30. Miagusko E. 2011, “Mutirão Autogestionário e o Contexto Da Experiência Democrática Revisitado,” Caderno CRH, 24(61), pp. 167–81.
  31. Monkkonen P. 2018, “Do we need innovation in housing policy? Mass production, community-based upgrading, and the politics of urban land in the Global South,” International Journal of Housing Policy, 18(2), pp. 167–176. 
  32. Richmond M. A. 2018, “Rio de Janeiro’s favela assemblage: Accounting for the durability of an unstable object,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36(6), pp. 1045–1062.
  33. Richmond M., Kopper M., Oliveira V., Garza, J. (n.d.), “Introdução: Espaços periféricos, ontem e hoje,” in M. Richmond, M. Kopper, V. Oliveira, J. Garza (eds.), Espaços Periféricos: Política, Violência e Território nas Bordas da Cidade, UFSCAR/CEM, São Paulo.
  34. Shimbo L. Z. 2012, Habitação Social de Mercado: A Confluência entre Estado, Empresas Construtoras e Capital Financeiro, Com Arte, São Paulo.
  35. Simone A. 2010, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads, Routledge, New York.
  36. Small M. L. 2009, “‘How many cases do I need?’: On science and the logic of case selection in field-based research,” Ethnography, 10(1), pp. 5–38.
  37. Torres H. da G., Marques E. C. 2001, “Reflexões Sobre a Hiperperiferia: Novas e velhas faces da pobreza no entorno municipal,” Revista Brasileira de Estudos Urbanos e Regionais, 4, pp. 49–70.
PDF
  • Publication Year: 2022
  • Pages: 74-95

XML
  • Publication Year: 2022

Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Walling the peripheries: porous condominiums at Brazil’s urban margins

Authors

Matthew Richmond, Moisés Kopper

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-661-2.04

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2022

Copyright Information

© 2022 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Embodying Peripheries

Editors

Giuseppina Forte, Kuan Hwa

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

304

Publication Year

2022

Copyright Information

© 2022 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-661-2

ISBN Print

978-88-5518-660-5

eISBN (pdf)

978-88-5518-661-2

eISBN (xml)

978-88-5518-662-9

Series Title

Ricerche. Architettura, Pianificazione, Paesaggio, Design

Series ISSN

2975-0342

Series E-ISSN

2975-0350

183

Fulltext
downloads

159

Views

Export Citation

1,348

Open Access Books

in the Catalogue

2,262

Book Chapters

3,790,127

Fulltext
downloads

4,421

Authors

from 924 Research Institutions

of 65 Nations

65

scientific boards

from 348 Research Institutions

of 43 Nations

1,248

Referees

from 380 Research Institutions

of 38 Nations