Sur-Urbano Latin American Cities Working Group

Welcome to Sur-Urbano! Our guest today, Raquel Rolnik, may be known to many of you for her critical scholarship and prominent defense of the right to house and the city: Raquel Rolnick. Based out of Sao Paulo, Raquel is professor at the Architecture and Urbanism Department at the University of São Paulo. She has held various government positions including Director of the Planning Department of São Paulo and National Secretary for Urban Programs of the Brazilian Ministry of Cities, and between 2008 and 2014, she was the UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing. 

On this episode, we discussed one of her papers which we translated to rent-seeking landscapes, and landscapes for life: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/indisciplinar/article/view/32741

She described how new financial instruments and technologies have transformed the way we produce or relate to housing.

We discussed her views about  land value capture instruments 

And she ended by talking about how creativity, and resistance, rather than planning, can create new possibilities and change reality

En 2022 la convención constituyente de Chile presentó la propuesta para una nueva constitución que declaraba, entre otras cosas, el derecho a la vivienda digna y adecuada, al amparo del Estado. 

Esto iba en contra de décadas de lo que se conoce como el modelo Chileno de vivienda, que fue creado durante la dictadura militar de Pinochet, y fue el primer programa del mundo en subsidiar la demanda para comprar viviendas.

Para muchos, es el neoliberalismo encarnado, porque está basado en la idea de que el paper del estado es solo como facilitador para que el mercado responda a las necesidades habitacionales del país. 

A pesar de ello, el modelo ha sido celebrado como un éxito - redujo los asentamiento informales, permitió a miles de personas acceder a la casa propia y finalmente, transformó la ciudad de Santiago. Y por eso, ha sido exportado y replicado por todo el mundo. 

Pero, como veremos hoy, este modelo tiene sus límites. Junto con Catalina Vásquez-Marchant, entrevistamos al antropólogo Miguel Pérez, quien estudia cómo se ha ido profundizando la crisis de vivienda en Santiago desde la perspectiva de las personas migrantes.

Leímos su artículo de NACLA, “A Home for All in Chile’s New Housing Occupations".

Miguel argumenta que la experiencia de los y las migrantes muestra los problemas estructurales del tal modelo chileno, pero que también abre oportunidades para nuevas soluciones y formas de ciudadanía en Chile. 

Miguel Pérez es Director de la Escuela de Antropología en la Universidad Diego Portales. Es también Doctor en Antropología Social por la Universidad de California, Berkeley.

Catalina Vásquez-Marchant es licenciada y maestra en Historia por la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Actualmente es estudiante doctoral en University of Connecticut. Su investigación se enfoca en las dinámicas de urbanización en Santiago, Chile durante los años 1970s, 80s y 90s, con énfasis en la vivienda social, los cursos de agua urbanos y las relaciones socio ambientales entre el agua y la ciudad.

Este es nuestro segundo episodio hecho en colaboración con NACLA, el North American Congress on Latin America.  NACLA fue fundada en 1966 para examinar y criticar el imperialismo estadounidense y su intervención política, económica y militar en el hemisferio occidental. Es una poderosa fuente de investigación y análisis sobre América Latina.

When we think of the Amazon region, I think its fair to say that most of us think of the vast expanses of virgin rainforests, crossed by the largest river who gives the area its name. We don’t usually think of cities. And yet, Amazonia is home to 40 million people, 80% of which live in cities. IN other words, from the perspective of the human population, Amazonia is urban. To discuss this, I talk to Adrián Lerner Patrón about two articles. The first, published in NACLA, is titled “The Amazon’s Forgotten Cities’, and the second titled “The Ruins of a Steel Mill: Planetary Urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon”, linked in the show notes.

We talk about the history of urbanization in Amazonia, focusing on Iquitos in Peru and Manaos in Brazil, including the particularities of cities formed in extractive frontiers, the militarized logic to secure them, and the rise and fall of developmentalist hubris.

We delve into the histoyr of the SIDERAMA (Companhia Siderúrgica da Amazônia Sociedade Anônima) steel mill - created in 1961 and liquidated in 1997 - through the lens of planetary urbanization. Overall, Adrián invites us to think about what is unique about Amazonia cities, but also to understand the global reach of urbanization during the 2nd half of the twentieth century and the need to rethink the role of Amazonia during the Anthropocene.

Adrián Lerner Patrón is a Philomathia Fellow in the Consortium for the Global South at the University of Cambridge, with a focus on “Ecologies in Place,” and a lecturer and research associate in Global History at the Free University of Berlin. 

I also want to add that this episode is our first in collaboration with NACLA - the North American Congress on Latin America. (NACLA) is an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1966 to examine and critique U.S. imperialism and political, economic, and military intervention in the Western hemisphere.



You can find the two articles here: "The Amazon's Forgotten Cities" in NACLA

 "The Ruins of a Steel Mill: Planetary Urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon” in the Journal of Urban History

This episode is about stolen cars, the relationships between illegal and legal markets, and public security in Brazil. We talk to Prof. Gabriel Feltran from Sciences Po about his new book Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo's Urban Conflict. Stolen Cars is an ethnography of urban inequalities and violence in São Paulo, told by Gabriel and ten other contributors.

Through the journey of 5 stolen cars in the city, they tell us how stories of everyday life in São Paulo are intertwined with global capitalism, they discuss which social actors are involved in the journey of a stolen car, and how the theft of a car is associated not only with violence, but also with socioeconomic, racial, gender, and spatial inequalities.

Gabriel is an urban ethnographer and Director of Research at CNRS (National Scientific Research Centre – France) and a full Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po. Currently, researches criminal groups and illegal markets in Brazil, based on previous work on everyday social/political dynamics in urban outskirts, focusing on collective action, marginalized groups and "the criminal world" in São Paulo. 

Marcos Campos is an urban ethnographer and a postdoctoral researcher in the International Postdoctoral Program at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap). He is also a researcher affiliated with the CASA Group and MTTM. Marcos holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the State University of Rio de Janeiro.



Book: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Stolen+Cars%3A+A+Journey+Through+S%26atilde%3Bo+Paulo%27s+Urban+Conflict-p-9781119686163

CEBRAP article by Feltran (mentioned during the episode): https://novosestudos.com.br/formas-elementares-da-vida-politica-sobre-o-movimento-totalitario-no-brasil-2013/#gsc.tab=0

¡Bienvenides a nuestra cuarta temporada de Sur-Urbano!

Arrancamos con un estallido. El 28 de Abril de 2021, se declaró un paro nacional en Colombia como reacción en contra de una controversial reforma fiscal impulsada por el gobierno de Iván Duque en medio de la pandemia. En todo el país, las calles se llenaron de manifestantes, se escuchaba el eco de los cacerolazos, y durante meses fuimos testigos de una impresionante experimentación política de resistencia.  Aunque su importancia trascendió lo electoral, tuvo mucho que ver con la elección de Gustavo Petro y Francia Marquez, el primer gobierno de izquierda en la historia de Colombia. 

Alejandra Azuero Quijano, nuestra invitada de hoy, es doctora en derecho y antropología y actualmente es profesora en Swarthmore College, Filadelfia. En su libro El Paro como Teoría, nos propone pensar al paro como un “estallido epistémico”, un acontecimiento que tiene la capacidad de cambiarlo todo: la política, las condiciones sensibles y los modos del saber.

Junto con Ana Marrugo Gómez, hablamos con ella sobre qué significa eso de entender al paro como teoría, sobre las temporalidades y espacialidades y sentidos nuevos que el mismo creó y sigue creando, y sobre cómo repensar el pasado para entender y actualizar el presente. 

This episode is about planning in Palestine, and especially Gaza. As you all know, this is a podcast about Latin American Cities. However, right now it seems difficult to talk or think about anything other than the genocide unfolding in Palestine. Many of those of us who think critically about Latin American cities find so many connections between our histories and struggles and the settler-colonial project of Israel and its occupation of Palestine. This is particularly true when we reflect on the role of planning and architecture in cementing the occupation, dispossession and violence upon Palestinian people, and particularly Gazans. This is the focus of today’s episode. 

To discuss this, it is truly my privilege to host cohost, Mekarem Eljamal and our two guests, Dana Erekat and Eyal Weizman. 

Dana is a Palestinian architect and planner, with a BA in architecture from UC Berkeley and an Masters in City Planing from MIT. The list of positions she has held is as impressive at it is long. Among these, she has worked with the UNDP, with the World Bank, the Kenyon Institute, and more. From 2013-2012, she was Head of Aid Management and Coordination Directorate/ Special Advisor to the Minister at the Palestinian Ministry of Planning and Administrative Development, during which she led the technical committee for the 2014 Gaza Reconstruction plan. She is currently the CEO of the data analytic company Whyise. 

Eyal Weizman is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and founding director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is perhaps most known as the founder and director of Forensic Architecture,  a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London that uses architectural techniques and technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world.