In this book Lucy Earle makes a significant contribution to the analysis of social movements, to our understanding of housing and land ‘markets’ in Latin American mega-cities, and to our ideas of citizenship as applied in contexts where fluctuations in the parameters of rules and institutions are a customary consequence of shifts in the occupants of power.
The author describes a system of urban governance, in particular of land use and property title, in a permanent state of crisis management, forced to accept spaces of illegality (and sometimes insurgency) and unable to operate within the formal institutional rules because of pressure from politicians and market operators and from collective mobilisations bearing an infinity of conflicts and demands. There is no shortage of studies of housing-based movements in mega-cities, but the originality of this one is that, by explaining the distinctive (but probably not unusual) features of the São Paulo housing market as it evolved in the twentieth century, it provides indispensable context, and by taking us into the ramifying connections of the leading political and bureaucratic actors from the municipal level right up to the state and federal governments, as well as their various housing-related quasi-governmental attachments, it provides us with a picture of a ‘system’ – a system of which social movements, however oppositional their rhetoric, are a constituent part.
The basic structure of the São Paulo real estate and land markets consists of a more or less rule-bound urban centre in which for a time ever-increasing demand pushed out the less fortunate. These then joined the millions of migrants on the periphery where (to simplify) they have been left to their own devices to establish the rules of property, to hustle for supplies of water and electricity, to provide their own transport and no doubt their own security – though the book does not mention security or the drug traffic. Gradually, in response the city's explosive growth during the first half of the military government, the periphery responded with demonstrations and occupations and thus a semblance of co-governance was achieved by institutions, both official and informal, charting a path to access to land and services, however precarious.
The population of the periphery is far from homogeneous: very large numbers manage to establish title to property of some kind, but hundreds of thousands of others, with even more precarious livelihoods, have been excluded even from that scramble, giving rise in the late 1980s to the mutirão (mutual aid) movement, led by the very basista União de Movimentos de Moradia (Union of Housing Movements, UMM). The UMM organised people to seize land and build their own houses, doing so with a degree of support-cum-complicity from local government and housing finance agencies. But this remained a self-help solution to keep the excluded on the margins of the city, where services were poor and journeys to work impossibly long. UMM leaders understood that a crisis on the edge of a megalopolis of this size receives only limited attention from the powers that be, so in the 1990s they started to organise occupations of buildings in central neighbourhoods. At the time (and even now) the once-fashionable and pricey centre was losing its cachet: people were moving to protected leafy suburbs and businesses to swanky office complexes and malls where building regulations are tightly enforced, leaving behind very large buildings, some of which came to resemble vertical favelas. The occupations were planned with meticulous precision and in such a way as to make their removal practically and politically very difficult, but they still needed a lot of courage: as Earle describes them the buildings seized were far from pleasant or secure places to live, requiring for example the removal of tons of debris and the installation of precarious services. (In some abandoned office blocks the debris included the remnants of long-forgotten social security claims and cultural heritage.) There would then follow months or years of negotiation and physical pressure while the occupiers fought to stay put or be rehoused in central locations. Living in the centre is important because the poor transport services to the periphery raise the cost of working in the centre.
When the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT) came to power, first in the city in the late 1980s, and later nationally, the movements were caught in a classic dilemma: accustomed to deploying a language of autonomy and unyielding opposition to power, their leaders now found they could achieve further benefits for their followers, but at what price? For many writers this would be a signal to embark on a moralistic reflection about ‘selling out’, complicity or worse, but Earle avoids the moralism. In her analysis movements have to engage in a complex negotiation involving periodic transgression (as in her title), which forces the hand of the bureaucracy and the politicians. Movement leaders were appointed as assessores to politicians or to bureaucratic positions, whereupon they were able to continue, to varying degrees, to work with their grass-roots followers – some almost full time, others more informally. But not all: while some organisations continued to operate in formal politics, others, like the Movimento de Trabalhadores sem Teto (Homeless Workers’ Movement, MTST – a cousin of the rural Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Terra, Landless Workers’ Movement, MST), firmly rejected them. Yet even the MTST engaged with the state by other means, for example by propaganda coups threatening the completion of football World Cup installations.
These and many other tracks are followed in a manner which enables the author to develop a (polite) critique of much of the social movement literature both in general and as applied to Latin America. She dissents from the idealisation of movement autonomy and from assumptions which pose movements and the state as occupying incompatible worlds of bureaucracy and spontaneity, or manipulative power and unspoilt idealism. In its place she posits her concept of transgressive citizenship, in which rights are constructed by breaking rules and negotiation, by oscillating between ‘invited’ and ‘created’ spaces. This may be unsurprising for historians, but it is not a familiar track in contemporary work on Latin American social movements. Also, unusually for a literature notorious for its superficial treatment of such matters, she takes account of the implications of the construction of citizenship rights as she observed it for ‘high’ political theory represented by figures like Rawls and Sheingold.
Apart from a not-very-helpful index, what is missing? Curiously, as hinted above, the issues of security and trafficking do not get a mention. Although, given how complicated and vast they are, this is understandable, I still think some reference and a brief discussion would have been suitable, if only to point out that these movements managed to develop and make some gains without interference from the drugs traffic which, if we are to believe ‘what we read in the papers’, wield extensive and violent power across the city. The other omission is the international NGO network: again, if the movements discussed do not receive material support from international NGOs, that would be a fact worthy of note since it would imply that, exceptionally, they were funded by the grass-roots membership.
But these are minor points: Lucy Earle's book is more than a ‘welcome addition’; it is a truly original contribution which deserves to be widely circulated and, importantly, translated into Portuguese.
