Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil

by James Holston, 2007

Insurgent citizenships have arisen in cities around the world. This book examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, its entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and its contradiction in violence.

James Holston argues that for two centuries Brazilians have practiced a type of citizenship all too common among nation-states--one that is universally inclusive in national membership and massively inegalitarian in distributing rights and in its legalization of social differences. But since the 1970s, he shows, residents of Brazil's urban peripheries have formulated a new citizenship that is destabilizing the old. Their mobilizations have developed not primarily through struggles of labor but through those of the city--particularly illegal residence, house building, and land conflict. Yet precisely as Brazilians democratized urban space and achieved political democracy, violence, injustice, and impunity increased dramatically. Based on comparative, ethnographic, and historical research, Insurgent Citizenship reveals why the insurgent and the entrenched remain dangerously conjoined as new kinds of citizens expand democracy even as new forms of violence and exclusion erode it.

Feminist Praxis, Citizenship and Informal Politics

by Faranak Miraftab, 2006

This article focuses on the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) in Cape Town, South Africa, which is part of the larger anti-privatization movement, mobilized by disadvantaged township residents to assert their constitutional rights and resist evictions and service disconnections. It introduces the mutually constituted concepts of invited and invented spaces of citizenship and stresses the range of grassroots actions spanning those. The article also sheds light on the gender dynamics of the Campaign and how its patriarchal order is being destabilized. The AEC case study engages the pioneering feminist scholarship on citizenship that has embraced both formal and informal arenas of politics. The study points out the risk in constructing yet another binary relation between grassroots coping strategies (in invited spaces) and resistance strategies (in invented spaces). The article calls for a refinement of feminists’ extended notion of politics, recognizing the oppositional practices of the poor in order to construct an inclusive citizenship. It argues that doing so better reflects the practices of the grassroots and furthers a progressive feminist praxis.

Insurgent Planning: Situating Radical Planning in the Global South

by Farnak Miraftab, Planning Theory, 2009

This article revisits the notion of radical planning from the standpoint of the global South. Emerging struggles for citizenship in the global South, seasoned by the complexities of state–citizen relations within colonial and post-colonial regimes, offer an historicized view indispensable to counter-hegemonic planning practices. The article articulates the notion of insurgent planning as radical planning practices that respond to neoliberal specifics of dominance through inclusion – that is, inclusive governance. It characterizes the guiding principles for insurgent planning practices as counter-hegemonic, transgressive and imaginative. The article contributes to two current conversations within planning scholarship: on the implication of grassroots insurgent citizenship for planning, and on (de)colonization of planning theory.

Insurgency and Spaces of Active Citizenship: The Story of Western Cape Anti-eviction Campaign in South Africa

by Faranak Miraftab & Shana Wills, 2005

This article concerns the struggle waged by the poor in Cape Town, South Africa, to assert their constitutional rights to shelter and basic services and protect their life spaces against neoliberal policies. Using insurgent urbanism and active citizenship as its conceptual guide, this article attempts to enhance understanding of grassroots spaces for practicing inclusive citizenship, stretching beyond a limited interpretation of formal citizen participation. Through the example of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign in South Africa, the article aims to contribute to a recent opening in the planning inquiry by overcoming the selective definition of what constitutes civil society and public participation and underlining the significance of invited and invented spaces of citizen participation in the formation of inclusive citizenship and just cities.