In increasingly unequal cities, what role can civil society organizations play in promoting affordable housing? Today, nearly a billion people worldwide live in inadequate housing, and the United Nations projects that by 2030, the urban housing shortage will be of about 2 billion people (p. 5). At the same time, cities are increasingly becoming sites of urban investment, and their leaders are choosing market-driven strategies that exacerbate urban inequalities. It is clear that urban mobilization for affordable housing exists, but can organizations play a role in actually defining what more affordable urban development will look like?
In this useful and extremely well researched book, Maureen M. Donaghy draws our attention to a set of questions that are generally ignored in urban sociology: How do community-based organizations actually engage institutions to shape development? And what are the consequences of these choices? The answers to these questions are based on richly developed case studies that are then put in conversation. The author develops an unusual—and quite productive—comparison of four cities (Atlanta and Rio, for their Olympic development, and São Paulo and Washington, DC, for their central-city development strategies). Donaghy argues, generally speaking, that organizations are more successful in protest in “outside” strategies to prevent displacement than in “inside” strategies of proposing policies that would shape urban development and secure the gains achieved otherwise. This points us in important directions as we think about how to construct a more democratic city.
In addition to a series of chapters dedicated to each of the case studies, the book also includes a theory chapter that offers a number of important correctives to the literature, particularly the social movements scholarship. By moving the discussion away from movement tactics and the dichotomy of contention and cooperation that mostly defines that literature, the book moves us to consider the longer arc of strategies that movements adopt. It also makes the very correct point that much of the literature on governance assumes that movements are inherently normatively oriented to participation, when in fact there are a range of strategic orientations that are responsive to opportunities and context.
Each of the rich case studies, then, provides one set of strategic orientations. São Paulo’s is, in the book’s telling, the most successful one. There, movements are able to have a voice within the state via participatory institutions, while at the same time adopting outside pressure tactics, such as direct action to hold officials accountable. Rio’s is presented as the contrast: Outside tactics by Vila Autódromo were able to mobilize public opinion to prevent some of the worst displacement of the Olympics and World Cup projects. In Washington, DC, there was a success as well: After five years of campaigning, the Housing For All Campaign was able to preserve some measure of existing affordable housing in the city while the city council adopted its proposal for the creation of a trust fund for the production of affordable housing in the city. While this was not the creation of an institutionalized channel of influence and voice within city government, it represented a tangible victory. And Atlanta represented the least community influence: In a city dominated by real estate interests, community organizing lacked capacity or the vision for demanding change.
Democratizing Urban Development has many strengths. The careful research behind each chapter here is evident, and one of the book’s real assets is the way that activist voices and stories come through. Another strength is the way the author navigates disparate elements—rich case studies, comparisons between cases across countries, a commitment to analytic clarity, and the subtlety of stories—quite well. And the conceptual literature is also made to travel in a welcome way. Much of the framework here—such as civil society, relationships with the state—is more “Brazilian” than “North American.” It is not very common to see U.S.-based case studies deploy these terms, and it is rewarding to see them put to work this way.
Some scholars may nevertheless find specific substantive disagreements with aspects of the argument advanced here, despite the book’s many merits. While the analytic descriptions of movement strategies is incisive, some readers might disagree with the causal weight put on strategies themselves. The cases of São Paulo and Rio as a comparison illustrate the point. São Paulo movements are successful not only because of their combination of participatory and outside strategies: These strategies are possible because of not only a friendly political administration but also due to a series of lasting reforms and legacies of reforms to the state and to the way that politics are conducted in the city, dating to the first progressive administration of that city in the late 1980s. The state and political parties—the structures of opportunity within which organizations operate— are porous to bottom-up demands in a way that is vastly different from a city like Rio, which is actually somewhat anomalous in southeastern Brazil for the inability of movements and progressive parties to make institutional inroads. Rio has never had either a progressive mayor or very significant progressive presence on its city council. The “playbook” for community organizations to learn from São Paulo surely should include—beyond “a strong relationship with the state” and a “mix of strategies” (p. 154)—reforming the state and political parties there so that such a relationship could come to be in the first place.
Perhaps the greatest qualm some will have with the book, however, was an absence of an explicit discussion of race and racism, surely one of the most important dimensions structuring urban inclusion and exclusion in the first place. In the U.S. cases, particularly Atlanta and DC, gentrification and displacement are racially loaded terms, both in the popular imagination and in activist discourse. And in Brazil, the scholarship is beginning to recognize what activists have known for a long time: that behind the race-neutral language of urban development there are sharp and violent mechanisms of racial segregation. Not naming racial dynamics and sentiments that structure urban development takes away from an otherwise very incisive book.
Thinking through questions of race and racism through a lens of democratizing development will be an urgent task for critical urban scholars in the next years. And even if Democratizing Urban Development does not carry out this task, it provides us with important clues to what might be found when we move in that direction.
