Conceptualizing Resistance

Do practices of “commoning” constitute a form of resistance? Why/why not?  

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Paying for Pipes, Claiming Citizenship:
Political Agency and Water Reforms
at the Urban Periphery

MALINI RANGANATHAN

Abstract
This article interrogates the nature of political agency deployed at sites of
market-oriented water reforms. It presents a case study from Bangalore, India of a water
project mandating significant ‘beneficiary’ cash contributions from lower-middle-class
dwellers for the capital cost of extending piped water to the city’s peripheries. Drawing
on quantitative and ethnographic data, it illustrates why property owners who lack
formal water access and land tenure — groups referred to in this article as the
‘peripheralized middle class’ — consent to paying for pipes rather than resist all
together despite the high cost involved. It argues that far from reflecting an
internalization of a ‘willingness to pay’or ‘stakeholder’ethos celebrated by development
practitioners today, payment for water provides an insurgent means to bargain for
greater symbolic recognition, respectability and material benefits from the state. In
particular, payment for pipes enables peripheral dwellers to strengthen their claims to
secure land tenure in an era of exclusionary and punitive spatial policies. Payment thus
comprises a terrain of contested meaning making and political struggle, at the heart of
which lie the stakes of urban citizenship. In documenting the process by which property
related interests and tenure claims are advanced under a scenario of reforms, this article
contributes to Gramscian political-ecological conversations on subaltern political
agency and the lived character of hegemony in urban environments.

Introduction
In 2003, the city of Bangalore in the southern Indian state of Karnataka launched the
Greater Bangalore water project to connect over a million peripheral residents to the
piped water network. For the first time in the history of the city’s infrastructure, a
market-oriented cost recovery framework was experimented with by the public water
utility. Unlike previous grid extensions that were funded by the state, this time peripheral
‘beneficiaries’1 — also dubbed ‘stakeholders’ by project proponents — were told that
they had to bear part of the burden of paying for the pipes connecting their homes.
Despite the high cost relative to incomes in the area, over the next 6 years nearly double

I would like to sincerely thank Ananya Roy, Jeremiah Bohr, Jesse Ribot, Ashwini Chhatre, and three
anonymous IJURR reviewers for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts. All shortcomings remain my
own. This research was supported by an American Institute of Indian Studies Dissertation Research
Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant
(#727308).
1 Following the convention used by Katherine Rankin (2010: 195), I place ‘beneficiaries’ in quotations

throughout this article to signal my interrogation of the use of this term by project proponents.

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Volume 38.2 March 2014 590–608 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
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the anticipated amount was collected across the peripheries, largely from property
owners with informal land tenure. In many neighborhoods, residents kept careful rosters
of the amounts they paid, and leveraged this information to engage with state authorities
over the status of their settlements. How are we to understand the nature of political
agency deployed at sites of market-oriented water reforms at the peripheries of cities
today?

Development practitioners might understand the case of the Greater Bangalore water
project as evidence of consumers’ ‘willingness to pay’ for improved services in which
they have a stake. Indeed, the best practice rhetoric accompanying the project insisted
that collections from citizens were predicated on their sense of ‘ownership’ in the
project.2 Governmentality scholars, however, might interpret the conduct of peripheral
dwellers through the idea of neoliberal moral ‘responsibilization’ — or the successful
inculcation of an ethos of self-care in subjects in line with rational market principles (e.g.
Rose, 1999; Lemke, 2001; Ong, 2006).

This article takes a different view. It shows how peripheral ‘beneficiaries’, most of
whom are property owners with tenuously legal tenure, used payment for water pipes
under the project — often in excess of one month’s household income — as a way to
bargain for legitimate tenure and recognition in the eyes of the state. Struggles over
tenure have taken on a particularly urgent tenor in the current moment in light of
moralizing policies that penalize illegal settlements at the fringes. The analysis here
lends insight into the little studied political agency of India’s informal peri-urban middle
class, or members that I group under the term ‘peripheralized middle class’. It also
reveals how market-oriented water policies win consent and legitimacy because they
harness ‘the general interests of the subordinate groups’ (Gramsci, 2000: 205, emphasis
added), articulating with their claims to recognition and belonging. The conduct of
paying for water pipes thus needs to be situated within a history of micro-politics and
citizenship practices at the urban periphery.

The broader relevance of this work lies in the ubiquity of cost recovery-driven
water-pricing policies, especially at the outskirts of cities where massive new
infrastructural investments are needed. As Karen Bakker (2011: 353) has noted, with the
‘partial retreat’ of the private sector in the water sector since the early 2000s following
multiple financial crises and anti-privatization protests, a host of alternatives are being
considered today. Instead of — or sometimes as a precursor to — privatization, public
water utilities across the developing world are implementing institutional reforms that
call on consumers to take an active role in the financing and management of services.
This ‘second wave’ of water reforms, as Laïla Smith (2004: 375) refers to it, still has
neoliberal echoes in that it involves the ‘incursion of private sector principles into a
traditional public sector ethos’. Although the literature has reported on the modalities of
second wave neoliberalism, it has not probed how such rationalities become intertwined
with existing micro-political formations, the cultural meanings attached to payment, and
the grounded negotiations that enable new policies to take root. In documenting the
process by which tenure claims are advanced under a scenario of water reforms, the
article’s goal is to improve our understanding of why and how market-oriented pricing
logics in infrastructure sectors, rather than simply being ‘resisted’, ultimately do gain
legitimacy. Such an endeavor is crucial for challenging technocratic constructions of
success and for contributing to theoretical debates on ‘how top-down schemes “take”
in everyday situations’ (Barnett, 2005: 9), or how rule is compromised over and
accomplished (Li, 1999).

Theoretically, this article takes up the call of Ekers and Loftus (2008: 710) for a
research approach to water politics and power that leverages the productive tensions

2 See for instance how the UN Habitat’s best practices database (2008) lauds the Greater Bangalore
water project: URL http://www.unhabitat.org/bestpractices/2008/mainview.asp?BPID=1932
(accessed 25 March 2012).

Political agency and water reforms in Bangalore 591

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between Foucault and Gramsci — between the subjectifying rationalities of rule and the
broader struggles and compromises surrounding rule (see also Moore, 2005; Li, 2007).
It contributes to Gramscian political-ecological conversations on the lived character of
hegemony in the urban waterscape (Loftus and Lumsden, 2008), and, in particular, the
role of meaning making among marginalized groups. I understand hegemony, following
Roseberry (1994) and others, not as a monolithic ideological formation, but as a
problematic, contested, political process of struggle. Specifically, I understand it as the
process by which the subordinated are recruited into projects of their own rule through
‘identifying their particular interests with a more universalizing one’ (Moore, 2005: 11).
I show how peripheral agents consent to water reforms because they identify their
interests in claiming propertied citizenship with the neoliberal push for devolving costs
on marginalized users like themselves. The situated meanings they ascribe to the act of
paying for water pipes are key to the production of consent. Pricing reforms in the water
sector thus evolve through ‘parasitical co-presence’ (Peck et al., 2010: 96) with existing
socio-cultural rhythms and political formations.

To grasp the workings of hegemony and explain the contradictory and historically
molded political agency of peripheral dwellers, I navigate the literature on urban politics
and resistance, drawing in particular on notions of ‘occupancy urbanism’ (Benjamin,
2008), ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ (Bayat, 2000) and ‘insurgent citizenship’
(Holston, 1999; 2008). While the actions of peripheral dwellers cannot be read as
counter-hegemonic, we will see how their payment strategies nonetheless open up the
‘room to maneuver’ — i.e. the space of political possibility — within the operation of
hegemony (Hart, 2002: 36).

I start with my research methodology and then move to a theoretical discussion of
political agency at the urban periphery. I then address the evolution of ‘second wave’
water reforms in urban India, focusing on the multiple (neoliberal and liberal)
rationalities that animated the Greater Bangalore water project. Following this, I turn to
the quantitative data I collected between 2007 and 2009 on the payment behavior of
peripheral citizens and triangulate this with ethnographic findings on how peripheral
agents constructed a meaningful and material framework through which to interpret and
act on their payments for water pipes. I conclude by returning to the question of political
agency and what the Bangalore case tells us about a philosophy of urban water praxis.

Methodology
This article stems from a larger multi-sited ethnography on the politics of water reforms
in peripheral Bangalore, research for which was conducted between 2007 and 2009. Data
on the rationalities of the Greater Bangalore water project, including the ‘beneficiary’
contribution policy, governmental technologies and decision-making processes were
gathered through 50 in-depth interviews with technocrats at the Karnataka Urban
Infrastructure Development and Finance Corporation (the main state agency through
which financing for urban reforms flows), engineers at the Bangalore Water Supply and
Sewerage Board (BWSSB), bureaucrats at urban development line agencies, private
consultants, and development practitioners. These interviews were corroborated through
a coding of project documents, meeting minutes and news articles.

Data on the payment behaviors and political strategies of peripheral dwellers
were collected through fieldwork conducted primarily in the peripheral zone of
Bommanahalli, located roughly 15 km from central Bangalore on the southeastern
fringes. This area was selected because of its density of informal, poorly serviced
settlements along a major radial highway leading to the city’s premier technology park,
Electronic City. Formerly a cash-strapped city municipal council (CMC), Bommanahalli
now forms one of eight zones officially incorporated into the Greater Bangalore City
Corporation as of 2007. To collect payment data, I made routine visits to the zonal head

592 Malini Ranganathan

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office in Bommanahalli to build enough trust with frontline workers for them to share
payment profiles with me. To understand the political practices of peripheral agents, I
carried out 44 semi-structured interviews with residents, several of whom belong to
homeowner associations known as ‘resident welfare associations’ (RWAs) in India. The
semi-structured nature of these interviews allowed me to probe forms of engagement
with the state, perceptions of the new water project, reasons for and bargains made by
paying, and the situated meanings attached to payment. I also collected petitions filed by
residents to government agencies and attended neighborhood and city-wide meetings in
which they discussed their involvement in the water project and their struggles against
‘regularization’ drives — periodic punitive moves by the city government to formalize
or ‘regularize’ land tenure via monetary penalties. In sourcing multiple modes of
self-representation, these ethnographic approaches yielded insights into the complex
contours of political practice.

Urban peripheries and political agency
The urban periphery is a critical milieu for the enactment of citizenship struggles and the
exercise of hegemony (Simone, 2007; Holston and Caldeira, 2008; Roy, 2011). As
Ananya Roy (2003: 217) argued in her study of Calcutta’s fringes, the inherent volatility
of peripheries ‘shapes the logic, mechanisms, and possibilities of hegemonic
articulations’. In recent scholarship, peripheries have been interpreted as the physical
space fringing cities — the constantly evolving, equivocal boundary between urban and
rural, between the city and its other, referred to by practitioners as the ‘peri-urban
interface’ — and as a metaphor connoting myriad ‘site(s) for remaking urban life’
(Simone, 2010: 39). In this section, while focusing on the periphery as the physical space
encompassing Bangalore’s outer municipalities and villages, I am also interested in how
peripheries shape the possibilities and limits of particular forms of agency.

Bangalore’s peripheries are perhaps best known for concentrating large-scale
land speculation and illegalities (Nair, 2005; Goldman, 2011). Michael Goldman’s
(2011) research on ‘world-city making’ projects in Bangalore has recently shown that
speculative global investment in the real estate sector and land brokering by government
parastatals at the outskirts have combined to dispossess farmers of their land. Such dark
renditions of contemporary processes are crucial for understanding how Bangalore’s
peripheral land is shaped by global capital flows and rescaled regulatory regimes. Yet
they do not capture the ordinary, everyday nature of claim making at the peripheries that
implicates not only the global rich, but also a variegated middle class and a host of local
and regional state actors. In other words, ‘informal’ or ‘illegal’ dealings around land are
neither exceptional nor are they restricted to the poles of the income spectrum. Rather,
they describe the actually existing tenure conditions and settlement patterns of 40–70%
of urban dwellers in most Indian cities (ALF, 2003: 98).

In Bangalore, informal settlements are referred to colloquially as ‘revenue layouts’
because they are built on land officially designated as agricultural or ‘revenue’ land in
colonial census language. My archival review shows that although such layouts can be
traced to the 1960s, they experienced a spurt in growth in the 1990s following India’s
liberalization. Widely prevalent at the peripheries, revenue layouts are affordable,
minimally serviced peripheral settlements occupied by a wide spectrum of lower- and
middle-class urban buyers who yearn to own property. Born out of the ‘the oldest dream
of owning a house’ (Citizen Matters, 2008), the vast majority of homes in revenue
layouts are owned rather than rented.

Formed by private fly-by-night developers who buy parcels of land from farmers
seeking to avoid acquisition by the state, revenue layouts are deemed ‘unauthorized’ in
the eyes of the main parastatal planning entity, the Bangalore Development Authority
(BDA). This is because revenue layouts have not been formally approved by the BDA

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and do not conform to its planning norms. As a result, unlike the more expensive planned
BDA-approved layouts that are pre-serviced with utility connections, in revenue layouts,
people move in even without network connections and paved roads. Revenue layouts can
still acquire a certain degree of legitimacy if residents convert them to residential land
use via a regional authority (the District Commissioner), pay taxes and fees to local
governments, and make small investments in infrastructure over time. The legality
of such settlements is highly fluid, entailing opaque transactions between residents,
politicians, middlemen, landowners, and municipal and regional authorities. As I have
argued elsewhere, rather than a clear demarcation between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, revenue
layouts exhibit a spectrum of land tenure conditions ranging from ‘more unauthorized’
to ‘less unauthorized’ (Ranganathan, 2011).

The political agency of those inhabiting such spaces is inextricably linked with their
fluid land tenure conditions and the material and symbolic borders that they inhabit.
Solomon Benjamin’s (2008: 723) notion of ‘occupancy urbanism’ aptly captures the
‘subversive politics on the ground’ deployed by those living under dubiously legal tenure.
‘Occupancy urbanism’ constitutes a politics that is materially centered on land relations
through which the lower bureaucracy is leveraged to negotiate infrastructural
improvements and regularize tenure over time. For Benjamin, it is these processes that
explain the ‘extensive political consciousness’ of the poor and that, in turn, pose
‘stringent resistance to neoliberal globalization’ (ibid.: 720). My ethnographic research
confirms the centrality of land relations to the political agency of Bangalore’s peripheral
residents and the deep implication of local and regional state entities in mediating the
materialities of peripheries. However, my interpretation of the political agency of
peripheral dwellers differs from Benjamin’s in two respects.

First, rather than being confined to the poor, I find that occupancy urbanism describes
a much broader set of groups, including the vernacular and lower middle classes. These
vernacular groups are not contenders for India’s gentrifying, securely propertied,
English-speaking ‘new middle class’ on which important scholarship exists (e.g.
Fernandes, 2006; Upadhya, 2009; Ghertner, 2011), but they are also by no means the
poor. Rooted in regional cultures and languages,3 educated, and crucially, property
owning (though not securely so), these are groups that I refer to as the peripheralized
middle class — groups that are far more numerous than their elite counterparts. This is
urban India’s ‘missing middle’ (cf. Skocpol, 2000), its ‘lumpen middle class’ (Bayat,
2000), which includes, among others, those who have witnessed a decline in their social
positions accompanying the decline of the public sector and concomitant rise of the new
global economy. Several inhabitants of peripheral revenue layouts, for instance, are
retirees from public sector factories once located in distant townships. For these retirees
who moved to the peripheries because there was ‘no other option’ if they wanted to
secure the dream of ‘a small place to own’4 on a modest pension of US $125–2005 a
month, revenue layouts were far more affordable and accessible than planned BDA areas.
Today, many among the peripheralized middle class are retired, self-employed or work
in lower-level white-collar jobs (e.g. as technicians or nurses) with uncertain scope for
upward mobility. It is the peripheralized middle class and their propertied dreams of
citizenship that are being targeted by many new infrastructure policies today.

Second, rather than see the ‘occupancy urbanism’ strategies of the peripheralized
middle class as ‘resisting’ neoliberal governmental schemes as Benjamin does, I found
that the strategies of this grouping are politically far more ambiguous. Resistance is
simply not a comprehensive description of agency in this case. Sometimes the strategies

3 Bangalore’s location between four linguistic regions contributes to its linguistic diversity. In the
Bangalore urban district, Kannada is spoken by about a third of the population, followed by Telegu,
Tamil and Urdu. As in other major Indian cities, English is also spoken but tends to be the
conversational language for an elite minority (Srinivas, 2001).

4 Interview, 17 July 2008.
5 All dollar amounts are stated at the 2008 exchange rate of US $1 = Rs 40.

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of this grouping do pose resistance to market-based governmental programs, but at
others, they appear to be rehearsing elements and discourses of those very programs ‘so
as not to jeopardize their standing within the rubrics of hegemonic power’ (Rankin, 2010:
187). Strategies of the peripheralized middle class tend to move between ‘invited’ and
‘invented’ spaces of public participation (Miraftab, 2009), typically involving organized
collective action in the form of RWAs to lobby for neighborhood improvements and to
‘build good rapport with the government’.6 As one resident (a retiree of a public sector
automotive parts factory) of a Bommanahalli revenue layout told me:

Everyone here has the same problems — no UGD [underground drainage], no roads, no
streetlights, no water. In 2003, we formed an association and got it registered under the
Societies Act.7 Now for a complaint, we go through the association; otherwise no work gets
done. We have to coordinate between society and government. We contacted the panchayat
[village elected council] and the councilors8 about our complaints. We also got peoples’
donations for streetlights and metalling of roads.9

As this quote depicts, forming an association and getting it officially registered so that it
is recognized by the state, and liaising between residents and government officials over
civic complaints, are key tactics deployed by peripheral homeowners. Such tactics were
mentioned repeatedly in my interviews. In addition, residents engage in performative
street protests and blockages [horatas in Kannada] to direct media attention to the
state’s neglect of peripheral areas.10 Importantly, collecting donations for community
infrastructure and organizing property tax payments are also key strategies, an aspect of
political agency that we will revisit later. In brief, the political agency of the peripheralized
middle class does not show signs of resistance so much as it demonstrates a range of tactics
and strategic positionings to advance material interests and respectability vis à vis the state
— often in ways that reproduce rather than challenge given power structures. In this way,
agency here resembles Asef Bayat’s (2000) ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ — a
nebulous politics that involves action to acquire the basic necessities of urban livability, but
one that is expressly not a politics of resistance. However, in contrast to the largely
individualized nature of Bayat’s ‘quiet encroachment’, in Bangalore, the actions of the
peripheralized middle class are largely collective.11

Thus, while both ‘occupancy urbanism’ and ‘quiet encroachment’ are useful in
clarifying aspects of political agency at the periphery, they do not by themselves describe
the political ambiguity and collective nature of agency in this context. It is James
Holston’s (1999; 2008) ‘insurgent citizenship’ that perhaps best captures both missing
aspects. For Holston, insurgence is found fundamentally in struggles over substantive
membership in the modern state. It is characterized not by acts of radical resistance to the
status quo, but by acts that in some way ‘empower, parody, derail, or subvert state
agendas’ (Holston, 1999: 167). Crucially, insurgent citizenship involves the formation of
organized collectivities. In his study of Sao Paulo’s peripheries, for instance, Holston
finds that informal residents invested in ‘new and reinvented forms of organization . . . in
which the criterion of membership is residence and the core agenda the articulation
of claims to resources’ (Holston, 2008: 247). Once formed, however, neighborhood

6 Interview, 12 August 2008.
7 The Indian Societies Registration Act of 1860 enacted under British Rule provides for the formal

registration (and thus state sanction) of charitable, voluntary or educational organizations.
8 Note that the very fact that village and municipal elected representatives were mentioned in the

same breath is evidence of the fluid rural and urban jurisdictions that characterize Bangalore’s
peripheries.

9 Interview, 1 September 2007.
10 See for instance The Hindu (2007).
11 Bayat himself recognizes that the prevalence of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East (the

context for his research) prevents organized collective action among urban informals.

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associations advance their interests at the expense of new poorer immigrants; in other
words, insurgent citizenship can also act to maintain social hierarchies.

It is precisely because insurgence presents such a complicated picture of agency — as
advancing material interests, yet operating within and reinforcing prevailing relations of
power — that it provides such a useful vocabulary for understanding the texture of
political consciousness or ‘common sense’ as Antonio Gramsci put it. Grappling with the
failure of the revolutionary project in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, Gramsci wrote that
common sense — a mode of conceiving the world created through fragments of folklore,
religion and philosophy — must be overcome for radical social change to occur. Because
subaltern groups belong to ‘multiple social worlds . . . composed of heterogeneous
fragments of fossilized cultures’ (Gramsci, 1989: 217), their common sense is not
‘critical and coherent12 but disjointed and episodic’ (Gramsci, 2000: 325), leading to a
type of ‘contradictory consciousness’ (ibid.: 333). While contradictory consciousness
may contain the seeds of radical critique, most often people use it to justify and thereby
reproduce the hegemonic relations in which they are embedded (Crehan, 2002; Loftus,
2012; Perkins, 2013). This incoherence is, for Gramsci, typical for classes trapped
in structurally subaltern positions (Thomas, 2010). Similarly, I see the political
consciousness of Bangalore’s peripheralized middle class — a group that is subaltern
relative to the securely propertied, wealthier middle classes and subordinated to new
reform rationalities — as profoundly contradictory. The associations representing the
peripheralized middle class aim to improve living conditions while simultaneously
reinforcing social hierarchies; they oppose particular governmental schemes while also
buying into others to advance their property-related interests; and they recognize their
subjection to cost recovery even while making bargains with it as I show below.
Understanding the complexity of subaltern agency is crucial because it serves as an
avenue through which to analyze the dynamics of rule itself, a subject to which I turn
next.

The rationalities of water-pricing reforms in peripheral Bangalore
Over the last 30 years, areas like Bommanahalli have witnessed profound
transformation from scattered villages, farms and pastureland to traffic-jammed roads
and densely populated informal settlements overshadowed by glimmering technology
offices. The ‘unauthorized’ status of Bommanahalli’s residential settlements and the fact
that it did not formally fall within Bangalore’s jurisdictional orbit until recently have
meant that the area was not connected to the BWSSB’s piped water and sewerage
network. Within the core city, the public utility services around half a million household
connections by treating, pumping and distributing around 1,000 million liters per day
(MLD) from the Cauvery River, located approximately 100 km away from the city.
Most households in the core still have to supplement utility-provided water with
groundwater derived from a variety of sources. In places like Bommanahalli, however,
its bourgeoning population is still wholly dependent on groundwater sourced through
water tankers, private borewells, and municipal borewells — all of which are
unregulated and erratically supplied (Ranganathan et al., 2009). By the early 2000s, a
growing concentration of technology industries, real estate ventures and job
opportunities, combined with limited water supply, had all contributed to fears of an
imminent water crisis at the periphery.

To address this crisis and the bevy of infrastructure shortcomings that were
threatening the city’s ‘world class’ aspirations,13 in the early 2000s urban bureaucrats in

12 As Alex Loftus (2012: 81) recently pointed out, ‘coherent’ for Gramsci did not signify ‘logical’ or
‘rational’, but rather a fusion of theory and practice.

13 In the early 2000s, articles such as Indian Express (2004) were lamenting the ‘crumbling’ of
Bangalore’s infrastructure and the tarnishing of its image as a ‘world class’ city.

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Bangalore began to initiate a series of infrastructure and governance reforms through
external loans. One of these reform-driven projects was the Greater Bangalore water
project,14 a project to extend piped, treated Cauvery water to the peripheries via a
market-based financing framework. Instead of relying on the government of Karnataka to
fund this project as was the precedent, decision makers — influential bureaucrats and
technocrats — experimented with financing 29% of the project’s capital costs (roughly
US $90 million at the time) through municipal bonds and 35% through peripheral
‘beneficiaries’. In other words, it was expected that over $30 million would be raised
from the residents who were to benefit. The main financial architect of the project was the
United States Agency for International Development (USAID), already active in creating
a municipal bond market in India, even in less credit-worthy municipalities. Meanwhile
the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program financed the ‘willingness to pay’ study
that supported the project’s cost recovery policy (World Bank, 2005).

To understand the emergence of this water project and its constellation of domestic
and international actors, let us briefly consider the political-economic context in which
the project was born. This is not simply to read off transformations in water policy
through macroeconomic change, but to locate water relations within a wider historical
geography (Heynen et al., 2006). By the turn of the millennium, the state of Karnataka
was emerging from a financial crisis. While the state’s financial health had been in
decline for several decades, policy changes in the late 1990s mandating higher salaries
for civil servants across India catalyzed a sharp deterioration in its fiscal deficit
(Toshniwal and Vyasulu, 2008). Karnataka was certainly not the worst hit. Yet, owing to
its political leadership and longtime familiarity with international lenders, Karnataka’s
crisis provided a window of opportunity for external agencies to step in with reform-
tied structural adjustment loans. Given this atmosphere — and the broader shifts at
the federal level realigning infrastructure policy along commercial principles — the
Greater Bangalore water project adopted a model that was strongly market based and
fundamentally pro cost recovery.

The main vehicle through which cost recovery was to be achieved was the ‘beneficiary
capital contribution’ policy. Known in some countries as an ‘infrastructure charge’,
capital contributions are designed to partially offset the cost of a public works project by
charging future users a lump-sum fee. Frequently justified via participatory rhetoric, a
‘beneficiary’ capital contribution is levied over and above income or property tax, and is
in addition to the cost of a service hook-up and meter costs, not to mention recurring
water consumption bills.

Bangalore was not the first developing city that experimented with such a policy. In
Buenos Aires in the late 1990s, for instance, an infrastructure charge ranging from $43
to $600 for water and up to $1,000 for sanitation was levied by the private concessionaire
on unserviced lower-income urban households. Given average incomes at the time,
residents were hard pressed to contribute such amounts, even when payments were
staggered over several months (Loftus and McDonald, 2001; Estache et al., 2002). The
devolution of costs from the state to citizens, regardless of whether privatization has
occurred, is what Smith (2004) refers to as a ‘second wave’ of neoliberalism in the 2000s
— the ‘first wave’ being a more dogmatic emphasis in the 1990s by international
agencies on privatization. In India, first- and second-wave water reform approaches
have proceeded simultaneously. However, by far the most common approach in the last
decade has been to institute cost recovery and a host of institutional and regulatory

14 Officially, the project is known as the Greater Bangalore Water and Sanitation Project or GBWASP.
The sanitation component of the project, financed through a loan from the World Bank, was
executed separately from the water component. Since I do not address the sanitation component
here and to minimize acronyms, I use ‘Greater Bangalore water project’ throughout the article to
refer to the project.

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reforms without necessarily privatizing the water sector (Coelho, 2005; Gandy, 2008;
Sangameswaran, 2009).

Although privatization was pursued initially in Bangalore, it was strongly opposed by
the water board and activist groups, and ultimately the capital contribution policy went
ahead without privatization. Under the new policy, peripheral residents were required to
pay between $60 and $375 towards the capital costs of network expansion (mainly for
feeder lines and distribution pipes) based on the dimensions of their properties.15

Property dimensions were divided into four categories: less than 600 ft2, between 600
and 1,200 ft2, between 1,201 and 2,400 ft2 and greater than 2,400 ft2. Each category was
charged progressively higher amounts which had to be paid years before the anticipated
delivery of water. To ‘enforce compliance’ (GoK, 2004), if payment was not made by
the deadline of 31 July 2005, each category accumulated a penalty ranging from $1 to
$8 per month. This coercive dimension of the policy was complemented by an attempt
to cultivate consent: a non-governmental organization was recruited to promote
participation in the peripheries and generate awareness about the importance of paying
on time. In other words, both coercive and consensual aspects of rule — to be executed
via what Gramsci called the ‘integral state’, or an amalgamation of the state and civil
society — were written into the very design of the project.

How did the project justify devolving costs historically borne by the state on
certain marginalized users? What were its political rationalities? Foucault’s (1991: 82)
methodological preoccupation with grasping the logics that underlie particular
governmental technologies or ‘programmings of behavior’ and constructions of the
subject can be put to use here. Under a heading titled ‘Why should we pay?’ in a
‘Frequently asked questions’ pamphlet circulated about the water project by the
Government of Karnataka, the logic was stated as follows:

The project has a very large capital expenditure with the primary benefits of this expenditure
flowing to the households that take the connections. The burden has to be, therefore, shared by
the beneficiary citizens to some extent. In this process, the status of citizens is elevated to that
of stakeholders which will facilitate their participation in the management of the assets created
under the project. Further, by these improved facilities the value of properties will improve and
this will be a direct benefit to citizens. There is therefore a good case for citizens paying for
capital costs as envisaged in the project (GoK, 2005: 9).

The language embedded in this justification says much about the multiple political
rationalities that animated this water project. First, the suggestion that the ‘burden’ of the
capital expenditure has to be ‘shared’ by beneficiaries invokes the neoliberal proposition
that citizens must take responsibility for services, since the state can no longer be relied
upon for its welfarist role. The promise that ‘the status of citizens’ will thereby be
‘elevated to that of stakeholders’ is reminiscent of ‘Third Way’ discourses under Britain’s
New Labour that called for an active and self-reliant stakeholder society to replace
welfare dependence on the state (Rose, 1999). Second, in saying that the benefit of
paying is that ‘the value of properties will improve’, the payment policy plays on
decidedly liberal and bourgeois ideals of property ownership and the enhancement of
value through individual effort. In effect, the logics of cost recovery interwove neoliberal
rationalities of self-reliance with a much more deeply rooted liberal political ethos
celebrating private property. It is thus that programs of rule are never singularly
neoliberal, but exhibit unplanned outcomes from the intersection of one governmental
technology with another (Rose and Miller, 1992). Just as Gramsci understood the
character of hegemony as ‘multi-dimensional and multi-arena’ (Hall, 1986: 15), so too
was Foucault alert to the ‘multiple, intertwining’ nature of rationalities within any given

15 The beneficiary capital contribution policy underwent multiple downward revisions. These amounts
reflect the final revision announced in 2005.

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regime of rule (Donzelot, 1979: 77).16 We will see how the co-presence of plural
rationalities in this project, in turn, ignited struggles along multiple axes at the grassroots.

In sum, this section situated the emergence of the market-oriented Greater Bangalore
water project in a particular political-economic moment and discussed the project’s cost
recovery logics. The cost recovery policy sought to offload part of the financial burden of
building a new piped water network onto peripheral ‘beneficiaries’ well before the
anticipated arrival of water. While the project’s rationalities displayed overtones of a
second wave of neoliberal water reforms, it also tied payment to liberal principles of
property ownership — a marriage that, in turn, shaped the terrain of political struggle for
homeowners in Greater Bangalore. Having discussed the nature of agency at the
periphery as well as the rationalities of rule that targeted peripheral dwellers, the
following section addresses how these aspects became articulated together at a key
conjunctural moment.

Bargaining with hegemony: paying
for pipes as insurgent struggle
As I argued above, resistance does not describe the insurgent agency of peripheralized
middle-class groups because it does not account for the heterogeneous and often
contradictory nature of their political practices. Moreover, it does not anticipate how or
why people ‘(sometimes) act as neoliberal subjects’ (Larner, 2003: 511) or ‘routinely
make bargains with hegemony even as they might realize their own subjection to it, or the
contradictions within it’ (Rankin, 2010: 187). In this section, I return to the question
of political agency by assessing the payments collected from peripheral dwellers for
the water project both quantitatively and ethnographically. I show how historically
embedded fiscal relations between citizens and the state in ‘unauthorized’ revenue
layouts shaped meanings attached to paying for the water project.

Between 2007 and 2009, I made routine visits to the municipal headquarters of
Bommanahalli because this local office maintained careful records of how much money
had been collected under the water project’s capital contribution policy. Residents were
required to pay their contributions in cash at the branches of two banks in the area; these
banks, in turn, forwarded copies of all receipts to the municipal headquarters for
recordkeeping. Every receipt from 2003 onwards stacked neatly and tallied manually in
a spreadsheet was kept under lock and key in a heavy stainless steel cabinet. As I built
trust with local officials, this cabinet became my archive. I surveyed the receipts and
spreadsheets for cumulative amounts collected per month, per ward, and per category of
property in individual wards. I compared this with secondary data on average household
income for each category. This archive provided an aggregate profile of payment, while
ethnographic research was needed to historicize payment and uncover its meanings.

By 2008, $60 million — double the amount originally anticipated by USAID and
government experts — had been collected from ‘beneficiaries’ throughout the
peripheries, well in advance of the actual date of water delivery. In Bommanahalli alone,
my calculations showed that approximately $12 million had been collected largely from

16 Although I bring Foucault and Gramsci into conversation in this article, I also recognize the tensions
between them as flagged by Barnett (2005), Ekers and Loftus (2008) and others. In particular, Ekers
and Loftus (2008) point out that while Gramsci affords a prominent role to struggle among the
subordinated classes, Foucault questions the inevitability of struggle. Instead, Foucault (1994: 143)
is interested in the ‘perpetual linking’ and ‘perpetual reversal’ between ‘a relationship of power’ and
‘a strategy of struggle’. I have tried to bring this more cautious view of struggle to bear on my largely
Gramscian reading of the political agency of the peripheralized middle classes by showing that their
insurgent strategies are volatile and always constitutive of a new ‘frontier of the relationship of
power’ (ibid.: 143).

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revenue layout residents and new apartment buildings. That said, not all peripheral
households contributed; some could not afford to pay and others preferred to wait until
the water arrived. Part of this larger-than-expected collection can be explained by the fact
that developers could not get their plans approved without contributing to the project.
Nevertheless, a significant sum came from ‘unauthorized’ revenue layout residents.
Surveying 1,864 receipts from one ward in Bommanahalli, I found that on average,
residents contributed a one-time amount of over $260 per household (see Table 1). On
average, this translated into roughly one full month’s household income and at times as
high as one and a half times one month’s income. Such costly payments were made
despite the fact that other groundwater supply options existed. In many neighborhoods,
associations kept careful rosters of who paid how much and were able to furnish these on
demand. In brief, not only were significant payments made for water pipes relative to
incomes; these payments were also diligently recorded and monitored by grassroots
organizations.

How should we understand this outcome? Instrumentalist views espoused by
development agencies might claim that marginalized groups were ‘willing to pay’ for
improved services, especially when their current levels were so inadequate and
expensive. According to this prevailing perspective, this is precisely why the poor should
be charged more to connect to formal networks (e.g. World Bank, 2004). Along similar
lines, USAID’s best practice rhetoric insisted that people in Greater Bangalore paid for
the project because of their sense of ‘ownership’ in upgraded water infrastructure, a
reasoning that echoed the original ‘stakeholder’ justification in the information pamphlet
quoted above. Foucaultian theorists on the other hand might examine the numbers
in Table 1 and suggest that the conduct of peripheral dwellers was successfully
programmed or ‘responsibilized’ via the neoliberal governmental technology of
cost recovery (e.g. Rose, 1999; Lemke, 2001; Ong, 2006). As Aihwa Ong (2006: 172)
comments, the rules set by neoliberalism ‘enforces the internalization of ideals of
“self-responsibilization” ’ in realms that were previously subsidized by the state. This
claim would not be out of the question in Bangalore’s case: after all, the rationale
accompanying the cash contribution policy explicitly advocated that citizens ‘share’ the
financial responsibility of the state’s ‘very large capital expenditure’.

While tempting, I argue that both these positions neglect the micro-politics of the
periphery and, in particular, the meanings ascribed by peripheral dwellers to the act of
paying. Readings of neoliberal moral responsibilization do not always account for the
fact that human agency was not Foucault’s prime preoccupation. As Bevir (1999: 357)
points out, Foucault was interested in ‘the ways in which the social world makes the
subject, not the ways in which the subject makes the social world’. By contrast, Gramsci

Table 1 One-time cash contributions for water pipes by households in Greater Bangalore,
2005–7

Property dimensions (ft2)

Average Payment per
Household including

Penalty ($)
(n = 1,864)

Average Monthly
Household

Income* ($)
(n = 8,000)

Payment as a
Proportion
of Monthly

Income (%)

Less than 600 (n = 104) 120 150 80

601–1,200 (n = 193) 140 200 70

1,201–2,400 (n = 381) 270 220 120

More than 2,400 (n = 68) 440 280 160

Low-rise apartments (n = 1,118) 330 430 80

Average 260 260 100

*Reported in World Bank (2005).
Source: Calculated from author’s survey and World Bank (2005).

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was primarily interested in the ‘common material and meaningful framework’ subjects
construct for ‘living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized
by domination’ (Roseberry, 1994: 361). To get at the material and meaningful framework
attached to payment, then, I asked a series of questions about the fiscal and monetary
transactions peripheral residents have historically engaged in with the state. I discovered
that payment of various kinds, including property taxes and betterment charges (fees
levied by the local state for local public works), confer a certain degree of legitimacy and
respectability on residents — both in terms of their land tenure and their social standing
vis à vis the state. Holston (2008) finds in Sao Paulo that it is precisely because the land
titles of peripheral dwellers are in doubt that they want to pay property taxes as proof of
good citizenship. This propertied vision of rights, wherein residents advance claims ‘on
the basis of their contributions to the city itself’ (ibid.: 260), is the crux of what marks
insurgent citizenship.

Similarly, for the peripheralized middle class living under informal tenure in
Bangalore, a paying citizen is a good citizen. Historically, once residents moved to
‘unauthorized’ revenue layouts, they began to pay property taxes and other fees to the
local municipality because ‘once you start paying taxes, you can start demanding things’.
That is, for informal residents, tax payments provided a means through which to garner
symbolic recognition and material benefits from the state: ‘Don’t we pay taxes, aren’t we
important?’ one peripheral resident demanded in a 2005 newspaper article (The Times of
India, 2005).

Conversely, peripheral cash-strapped municipalities were only too happy to collect
taxes, despite the fact that the taxpayers’ properties were not ‘authorized’. In exchange,
municipalities installed some basic amenities (for instance, a community borewell) and
issued a temporary document proving property ownership [khata in Kannada] which
homeowners needed for obtaining bank loans. As several other studies have shown,
lower-level state functionaries play crucial roles in brokering services for informal
urban residents, often in return for various types of small payments (e.g. Benjamin,
2004; Chatterjee, 2004; Anand, 2011; Anjaria, 2011). These state actors constitute the
‘ordinary spaces of negotiation’ through which substantive citizenship arrangements are
made in practice for most people (Anjaria, 2011: 58). Payment in this case not only
allowed residents to form a paper trail of good citizenship practices, but also to forge
bonds with lower-level functionaries. Once payments are made, proof of payment is
often presented to officials as proof of residence, which can also be mobilized in times
of crisis as I show below. It is important to keep in mind, however, that such insurgent
forms of citizenship are fragile: with each spatial expansion in Bangalore in which fringe
municipalities and villages get swallowed by the city (as in 2007), forms of recognition
issued by local entities are invalidated overnight. Payment thus comprises an unstable,
volatile terrain of struggle at the heart of which lies the stakes of citizenship.

This historical set of state–society relations helps us to understand the cultural
inflections and situated meanings of payment in the context of the Greater Bangalore
water project. Contrary to USAID’s ‘best practice’ assertion, people paid not because
they were won over by the ‘stakeholder’ rhetoric. In fact, when the ‘beneficiary’ capital
contribution policy was first announced, most were highly skeptical of the project’s use
of the term. One member of an RWA (a retired advocate) had paid the capital contribution
for the project when it was first announced. But rather than internalizing his subjectivity
as a ‘stakeholder’ in the project, he contended adamantly:

There’s no meaning in the word stakeholder in this Greater Bangalore water project . . . We
cannot pay for the service and be a stakeholder! Simply they are putting a levy on a
fundamental right of the citizen which is the duty of the government to provide and for that
calling you as a stakeholder [sic]?!17

17 Interview, 9 July 2008.

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Nor did people agree with the project’s internal logics. For instance, I was repeatedly
asked: ‘Why only those in Greater Bangalore have to pay capital contributions and why
with penalty?’.18 To make matters worse, the actual delivery of water to the peripheries
was severely delayed on account of engineering hurdles, resulting in the grossly
inequitable situation of ‘beneficiaries’ having paid for a service that they did not, in fact,
‘benefit’ from (water was delivered to some areas in 2009, but most are still waiting for
new bulk supplies to come on line). Despite realizing their subjection to rule and the
contradictions within it, however, many paid up rather than resisting all together. Like
taxes and other fees, payment for water pipes provided an insurgent means to claim
citizenship and fight for respectability: ‘We paid because we are law-abiding people’
explained a resident, rather ironically, in an ‘unauthorized’ layout when I asked him why
he paid for the water project.

Crucially, the collection of payments is a practice that neighborhood RWAs organize
and take great pride in. ‘We are the best tax payers in this CMC!’ an association president
proudly declared to me after explaining how he personally knocks on people’s doors
every year to encourage them to pay. Much like taxes and miscellaneous fees,
associations were involved in organizing payment for water pipes and in creating a
meaningful framework for interpreting payment, thereby building legitimacy for the
project. A quantitative regression analysis of factors influencing willingness to pay for
piped water for 8,000 households in Bangalore reported that the presence of RWAs was
strongly positively correlated with higher willingness to pay and was statistically
significant (World Bank, 2005). Ethnographic findings support this result. Associations
distributed pamphlets and collected contributions for water pipes through door-to-door
visits. One association member described her role as follows: ‘We were involved in
raising awareness and in educating the members about the Cauvery water scheme. We
told everyone they must pay. See, if we all pay we can raise our voice in a better
manner!’19 Further, as a result of lobbying and petitions filed by associations, the water
board waived the requirement of showing formal, permanent proof of tenure for a water
connection and meter; proof of payment for the water pipes alone was considered
sufficient to demonstrate residence. In other words, as a result of RWAs’ political
maneuverings, formal tenure was successfully removed as an eligibility requirement for
actual service delivery.

My findings thus show that in reconfiguring the relationship between payment for
infrastructure and land tenure, consent for cost recovery was produced in the process.
The role of an ‘ensemble of organisms commonly called private’ — that is, ‘civil society’
(Gramsci, 2000: 306) — was pivotal in the creation of consent. Greater Bangalore’s
RWAs served the intellectual function of organizing, educating and persuading members
about the symbolic and material importance of paying, not because they were submissive
to an externally imposed neoliberal calculus, but to ‘raise their voice’ and be regarded as
‘law abiding’. If, as Gramsci (2000: 211) put it, ‘hegemony presupposes that account be
taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be
exercised’, then RWAs recognized that a strategic positioning within the rubrics of
hegemonic power allowed them to further their interests. As Donald Moore (2005: 11)
reminds us, hegemony implies that subaltern subjects are enlisted into projects of their
own rule not because they are duped, but because ‘emergent interests’ are produced
‘through compromises, consent, and coercion’. In this case, hegemony works by
enlisting ‘unauthorized’ residents to shoulder the financial burden of new water
infrastructure, while also enabling them to bargain for citizenship, belonging and
recognition in the process.

These bargains assumed high stakes when peripheral dwellers found their properties
threatened by punitive policies seeking to clamp down on unauthorized development

18 Interview, 30 July 2008.
19 Interview, 15 July 2008.

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between 2005 and 2007. In 2005, in a bid to prevent illegal settlement, the state
government banned the registration of residential sites on agricultural land, targeting all
revenue layouts at Bangalore’s peripheries. It also banned local government entities
from issuing property titles to revenue layout dwellers. A newspaper dubbed the move
as one that ‘badly hit many middle income families who have bought plots to construct
their dream house’ (Deccan Herald, 2005) and quoted one peripheral resident as
protesting:

I have paid development charges . . . for my property, paying property tax regularly, have a
khata issued by the CMC and paid beneficiary contribution for Cauvery water connection
[sic]. But how fair is it to say that the property is illegal?’ questions Mr Puttaswamy, who owns
a house on a revenue plot here (ibid., emphasis added).

Here, Mr Puttaswamy is making an insurgent claim to citizenship by leveraging his
payment of various fees, including the capital contribution under the water project,
to further his property-related interests. This quote vividly portrays that Bangalore’s
‘unauthorized’ property-owning peripheralized middle-class residents have situated
understandings of what payment for water pipes carries: in this case, payment carries the
right to not being considered illegal.

My own interviews in 2007–09 mirrored this situated cultural interpretation. Again, in
2007, shortly after the Greater Bangalore City Corporation was formed, an even more
punitive policy known as Akrama Sakrama [‘Make Right what is Wrong’ in Kannada]
mandated that revenue layout dwellers — the prime targets of the scheme — pay
exorbitantly high penalties to get their properties regularized. Without paying a one-time
penalty that amounted to as much as one year’s annual income on average, residents
risked eviction and demolition. A flurry of debate and critique erupted in citywide
meetings and the media over this policy. This became a key conjunctural moment marked
‘by the simultaneity of symbolic and material struggles’ (Moore, 1999: 674) in which
battles over the right to water and tenure legality were articulated together. Just as
multiple rationalities were cobbled together in the project’s payment policy, so too were
struggles surrounding governmental policies waged along the ‘multiple axes’ (Ekers
et al., 2009: 289) of access to services, land tenure, and urban citizenship. One of my
informants captured this entanglement when she, much like Mr Puttaswamy, argued with
respect to Akrama Sakrama:

We are always fined; we are always taxed. Property tax we pay. Betterment charges we pay . . .
all the connections are being paid — e.g. BESCOM [electricity] and Cauvery water charges —
so what’s so illegal about it? If you’re calling us illegal, how do you collect all these charges?20

As in the quote above, my informant reinterpreted the logic of state policies through her
own insurgent citizenship practices. It was clear that, to her, payment of various kinds
by residents — including for water pipes — should nullify the so-called illegality of
their settlements. At citywide meetings organized by a federation of peripheral RWAs
known as the Citizens Action Forum (CAF), citizens similarly demanded: ‘what about
the money that the government collects under various heads like water, electricity,
registration, etc? The state government has no right to declare layouts which are paying
these fees as “unauthorized” ’ (Citizen Matters, 2007). Moreover, at a time when the city
of Bangalore was attempting to maintain its grasp on footloose global capital, this
punitive regularization drive was seen as disproportionately harsh on the small violator
while it ‘catered to the needs of big businesses that have violated building laws by
constructing and occupying immense structures in residential areas’ (CAF, 2007: 6). In
an information booklet published by the CAF, the regularization drive was denounced as

20 Interview, 21 August 2009.

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egregious, particularly since small violators ‘have waited for over three years after
paying “beneficiary contribution” to BWSSB for water supply and have been given no
indication as to when they would get the supply’ (ibid.: 7, emphasis added). The booklet
goes on to complain:

It is indeed sad that governments . . . link the citizen’s right to the supply of a basic life-giving
necessity as water to adherence to . . . such devices [as the beneficiary contribution policy].
Don’t they understand that denying water is like passing a death sentence? Such callousness
coupled with the justification for Sakrama is rubbing salt into the citizen’s wounds (ibid.).

As a result of these and other intertwined criticisms and a public interest litigation
launched against the Akrama Sakrama policy, the harsh penalization of peripheral
properties was stayed in the High Court of Karnataka in late 2007 on the grounds that the
policy was fraught with inconsistencies and constitutionally untenable (Citizen Matters,
2007). Although still controversial, today Akrama Sakrama has been revised by state
legislators to decrease the financial burden on lower-income residents living in
unauthorized layouts. One of the main reasons cited for its revision was to ‘fill the
government’s coffers without causing much hardship to owners of illegal properties’
(Deccan Herald, 2009). It is thus that the more punitive, ‘eviscerating’ forms of urbanism
in India (Gidwani and Reddy, 2011) can sometimes be stalled through citizenship battles,
even if only partially and temporarily. Although citizen groups registered this temporary
victory, capital contributions for the Greater Bangalore water project have proceeded
unabated with no guarantee as to the delivery of water for the majority of peripheral
dwellers. Hence, while the insurgent discourses and practices of the peripheralized
middle classes cannot be thought of as counter-hegemonic in that they did not
successfully overturn cost recovery (nor did they primarily seek to), their agency
nevertheless opened up spaces of political possibility for advancing their interests within
a regime of rule to which they were subordinated.

To summarize, the analysis here shows that consent to cost recovery in the urban
waterscape was achieved by harnessing the interests of the peripheralized middle class,
particularly with respect to property. The failure of the hegemonic state to ultimately
deliver water in time, however, catalyzed a series of critical challenges and a reworking
of state policies. The central insight for Gramscian debates is that key to the creation
of consent and compromise were the situated meanings subaltern groups ascribed to
paying for water pipes. Insurgence is a relevant concept for understanding the nature of
meaning making and grassroots maneuverings within hegemony. Insurgent bargains
with hegemony allowed subaltern groups to make the best of a constraining situation —
in this case, to appropriate payment for pipes to fend off threats to their legality. For
those who are not winners in the new global economy and who inhabit unstable
peripheral spaces, consent to cost recovery in the water sector in an era of increasingly
exclusionary spatial policies might be one of the few ways left to fight for a foothold
in the city.

Conclusion: towards a philosophy of urban water praxis
Reality looks quite a bit different from the visions portrayed in the glossy briefs
proclaiming the Greater Bangalore water project as a ‘best practice’. It was a ‘best
practice’ only to the extent that it managed to successfully raise the cost of capital for a
water network on the backs of subaltern groups. Yet, several years after the collection
of cash contributions first begun, a majority of Bangalore’s outskirts (80%) still do
not have access to piped water via this project (The Times of India, 2010). Given how
popular cost-sharing participatory models have become for financing infrastructure,
it is imperative that we interrogate why such models win legitimacy despite their
contradictions.

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To do this, this article questioned the agency of marginalized groups recruited in and
subordinated by cost recovery regimes. It argued against a narrow view of political
agency as circumscribed by the project’s rationalities and micro-governing techniques —
those that ostensibly constituted a responsible, paying neoliberal ‘stakeholder’ subject.
Instead, it studied through a Gramscian framework the situated practices of peripheral
agents, including their forms of collective action, historical fiscal relations with the state,
and cultural interpretations of payment. Insurgence was found to be a useful grammar
here for characterizing a kind of subaltern agency that is at once collective, derives
from land relations, and is not always a politics of resistance. The article contended
that payment for pipes by insurgent, ‘unauthorized’ property-owning agents and their
associations — much like other types of fiscal transactions with the state — provided an
avenue to demand recognition and respectability. With the current spate of regularization
policies penalizing illegal dwellings at the periphery, the situated meanings ascribed to
paying for water pipes were leveraged as a means to bargain for tenure legality and
citizenship.

The analysis here supports the thesis that neoliberalism does not stand separate from
other political projects (e.g. Leitner et al., 2007; Peck et al., 2010). There is no simple
binary between neoliberalism and its ‘others’, between power and resistance. The case
study demonstrated how neoliberal and liberal rationalities were entangled in the
water-pricing agenda, and consequently, how struggles at the peripheries unfolded along
multiple axes: the demand for water and the right to legitimate property. Market-oriented
logics thus always operate ‘in environments of multiplex, heterogeneous and
contradictory governance’ (Peck et al., 2010: 104). At the same time, the particular
historical geography of Bangalore’s frontier — with its prevalence of ‘unauthorized’,
economically marginalized, property-owning agents — and the concrete realities of its
lived environment shaped the articulations of hegemony in specific ways.

To close, to what extent does a discussion of political agency help us to think through
a more viable ‘philosophy of praxis’ in urban water — what Gramsci (2000: 334) saw as
a tighter ‘unity between theory and practice’, a critical consciousness of socio-ecological
relations? It is difficult to envisage radical critique emanating from peripheral groups
in Bangalore given their localized and narrow interests. Still, there are a few seeds of
such a critical consciousness that stem from the everyday, lived experiences of nature and
society that are worth pointing out. First, even over the timeframe of this research, there
grew to be greater realization of the limits of a paradigm of centralized water pumped
from as far as the Cauvery River. Documentary filmmaker Swati Dandekar whom I
worked with while she was making Water and a city (2009), a film about Bangalore’s
water challenges, captures residents’ understandings of the troubling ecological
dimensions of the city’s hydrological cycle, as well as their more politicized views on
distributional justice, pricing and governance. The inherent contradictions of the Greater
Bangalore water project have triggered critiques by the peripheralized middle class
about the uneven geographies of money, power and water in the city — critiques that
were not possible even 5 years ago. Such critiques, as Gramsci reminds us, are immanent
within the materiality of practices and the very project of hegemony (Thomas, 2010;
Loftus, 2012). Second, while still embryonic, there is growing recognition about the
intersections between water and land tenure. Citizens and frontline bureaucrats are
acknowledging that a historically formed patchwork of land tenures in the city dictate ‘if
water, when water and why no water’ (Citizen Matters, 2008). While such observations
have not amounted to an explicit challenge of hegemonic policies, they nonetheless
expose that rulemaking surrounding water and land can never be solely about market
processes, and that water, in particular, is as much a symbol of citizenship, identity and
power as it is an economic resource.

Malini Ranganathan (malini@american.edu), Global Environmental Politics Program,
School of International Service, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, American University,
Washington, DC 20016, USA.

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2000; 15; 533 International Sociology

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Subaltern in the Global South

From `Dangerous Classes’ to `Quiet Rebels’: Politics of the Urban

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Insurgent Citizenship in an Era of
Global Urban Peripheries

JAMES HOLSTON
University of California, Berkeley

Abstractciso_1024 245..

267

The extraordinary urbanization of the 20th century has produced urban peripheries of
devastating poverty and inequality in cities worldwide. At the same time, the struggles
of their residents for the basic resources of daily life and shelter have also generated
new movements of insurgent citizenship based on their claims to have a right to the city
and a right to rights. The resulting contemporary metropolis is a site of collision
between forces of exploitation and dispossession and increasingly coherent, yet still
fragile and contradictory movements for new kinds of citizen power and social justice.
This essay examines the entanglements of these insurgent urban citizenships both with
entrenched systems of inequality and with new forms of destabilization and violence.
Using the case of Brazil, it argues that these clashes entail conflicts of alternative
formulations of citizenship and that sites of metropolitan innovation often emerge at
the very sites of metropolitan degradation.

We live in a time of unprecedented global urbanization. In a
matter of decades, countries that were mostly rural have
become mostly urban. At the same time, we live in an era of

unprecedented global democratization. Since 1970, the number of elec-
toral democracies has doubled, increasing in just thirty years from 33 to
63 percent of the world’s sovereign states. Urbanization and democra-
tization are deeply related transformations. Not only have their global
scope and speed been extraordinary but their combined developments
in particular places have also produced a remarkably similar condition
worldwide: most city people live in impoverished urban peripheries in
various conditions of illegal and irregular residence, around urban
centers that benefit from their services and their poverty. Yet this new
urbanism also generates a characteristic response: precisely in these
peripheries, residents organize movements of insurgent citizenship to
confront the entrenched regimes of citizen inequality that the urban
centers use to segregate them. Not all peripheries produce this kind of
insurgence, to be sure. But enough do to qualify this collision of citi-
zenships as a global category of conflict.

The results of these processes of urbanization and democratization
have been contradictory. If the latter would seem to hold special promise
for more egalitarian citizenships, and thus for greater citizen justice and
dignity, in practice most democracies experience tremendous conflict

City & Society, Vol. 21, Issue 2, pp. 245–267, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X.
© 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-744X.2009.01024.x.

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among citizens as principle collides with prejudice over the terms of
national membership and the distribution of rights. If cities have histori-
cally been the locus of citizenship’s expansion, contemporary peripheral
urbanization creates especially volatile conditions, as city regions become
crowded with marginalized citizens and noncitizens who contest their
exclusions. Thus the insurgence of urban democratic citizenships in
recent decades has disrupted established formulas of rule and privilege in
the most diverse societies worldwide. Yet the result is an

entanglement of

democracy with its counters, in which new kinds of urban

citizens arise to

expand democratic citizenships and new forms of urban

violence and

inequality erode them.

In this essay, I focus on conflicts specific to these entanglements of
citizenship. Foremost, I want to show that these insurgent citizenships
confront the entrenched with alternative formulations of citizenship; in
other words, that their conflicts are clashes of citizenship and not merely
idiosyncratic or instrumental protest and violence. In making this point,
my aim is also to show that although insurgent urban citizenships may
utilize central civic space and even overrun the center, they are funda-
mentally manifestations of peripheries. In so far as the urban civic square
embodies an idea of centrality and its sovereignties, its architectural
design, institutional organization, and use represents the hierarchies,
legalities, segregations, and inequalities of the entrenched regime of
citizenship that the insurgent contests. The forces of centrality are
entrenched in the civic square by design and that entrenchment estab-
lishes the terms of an official public sphere. Insurgent movements may
adopt these terms to frame their protests—property rights, urban infra-
structure, justice, even motherhood, for example. But whereas the center
uses the structuring of the public to segregate the urban poor in the
peripheries and to reduce them to a “bare life” of servility, the very same
structures of inequality incite these hinterland residents to demand a life
worthy of citizens.

My point is that it is not in the civic square that the urban poor
articulate this demand with greatest force and originality. It is rather in
the realm of everyday and domestic life taking shape in the remote urban
peripheries around the construction of residence. It is an insurgence that
begins with the struggle for the right to have a daily life in the city worthy
of a citizen’s dignity. Accordingly, its demands for a new formulation of
citizenship get conceived in terms of housing, property, plumbing,
daycare, security, and other aspects of residential life. Its leaders are the
“barely citizens” of the entrenched regime: women, manual laborers,
squatters, the functionally literate, and, above all, those in families with
a precarious stake in residential property, with a legal or illegal toehold to
a houselot somewhere far from elite centers. These are the citizens who,
in the process of building and defending their residential spaces, not only
construct a vast new city but, on that basis, also propose a city with a
different order of citizenship.

That citizenship and its rights have become both the medium and
the message of these struggles is a recent and still emerging transfor-

the result is an

entanglement of

democracy with its

counters, in which

new kinds of urban

citizens arise to

expand democratic

citizenships and

new forms of urban

violence and

inequality erode

them

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mation of urban conflict. It is especially an achievement of the poor in
cities of the global south who have posed their struggles of urban life
much more in terms of residence and basic everyday resources than in
terms of the kinds of conflicts of labor and factory discipline that char-
acterized working-class movements in Europe during the last century.
When, in Paris in the 1960s, Henri Lefebvre (1996) published his
incitement to change the world by renewing the right to urban life, he
imagined “the right to the city” as emerging from the struggles inherent
in the daily lives of poor residents. He predicted that the priorities of
this struggle would shift from “production to reproduction” as the
“urban revolution” overwhelmed the world. Although roundly criti-
cized from within the Marxist tradition in which he wrote for empha-
sizing this shift—by Castells (1977) and Harvey (1973) in their classic
works, for example—it seems clear today that he was correct.

However, the conflicts that consolidated this revolution as a question
of rights to the city occurred not in Paris but primarily in cities of the
metropolitan south, like São Paulo and Johannesburg. Moreover, in
moving south, so to speak, the foundations of this right developed in
ways that Lefebvre did not suppose, either conceptually or empirically.
Lefebvre understood the right to the city as a claim by the working classes
to a presence in the city that legitimated their appropriation of urban
spaces and their refusal to be excluded from them. Although one may
argue that Lefebvre’s understanding is ultimately based on a Marxist
notion of needs, his right to the city remains nevertheless unmoored to
any framework or formulation that would articulate it as a right. If a right
is a kind of social relation that distributes various sorts of powers and
liabilities between people, then in Lefebvre’s conceptualization it seems
free-floating and devoid of such relationality. Certainly, it arises as he
supposed in the conflicts of flesh-and-blood agents. However, Lefebvre
does not theorize it in terms of any articulation of social relatedness other
than conflict itself on the one hand and, on the other, a vanguard of
intellectuals (philosophers, artists, and planners) who give it the sense of
an oeuvre. So why call it “right” if it does not refer to any objective rule
that generates subjective power or does not articulate needs in terms of a
specific set of claims, powers, and obligations sanctioned in law?

If we follow the development of struggles over daily life among the
dispossessed of global urbanization since Lefebvre wrote, we discover that
indeed an insurgent notion of right to the city emerged among them in
circumstances of degradation and peripheralness. However, the right to
the city that was for Lefebvre (1996:158) “like a cry and a demand” in
1967 lost its metaphorical quality and became moored to a particular
articulation that he did not imagine—indeed, that Marxism has consis-
tently criticized if not rejected. For many of the urban poor, it became a
specific kind of demand: a claim of citizens, a citizen right, a right
articulated within the framework of citizenship and its legal, ethical, and
performative terms. In the last few decades, precisely people uprooted
and dispossessed by the 20th century’s unprecedented

urbanization

developed urban peripheries as their place in the city. They did so by

Insurgent
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Era of Global
Urban Peripheries

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building their own shelter and way of life, generally appropriating the
city’s soil through some from of illegal residence and demanding legal-
ization and legal access to resources. Especially in the global south, they
articulated this appropriation as rights of urban citizenship, the right to
inhabit the city becoming a right to rights that constituted an agenda of
citizenship. Such agendas are by no means necessarily just, good, or
egalitarian. They may be nativist, racist, communalist, and elitist, quali-
ties that Lefebvre did not anticipate. But they have made many auto-
constructed metropolises strategic arenas for the development of new
formulations of citizenship in large measure based on the struggles of
residents of the urban peripheries for rights to urban residence, for the
right to reside with dignity, security, and mobility.

Insurgent citizenship movements have now been described in many
regions of the global south. In most cases, they coalesce through orga-
nized movements of poor urban citizens confronting entrenched national
regimes of citizen inequality. To date, they have emerged most fully in a
number of Latin American countries and in South Africa, where the
transformations of urban citizenship have produced national ones as well.
The Brazilian case has been extensively studied in these terms beginning
in the 1980s (e.g., Abers 2000; Avritzer 2004; Baiocchi 2005; Caldeira
2000; Holston 2008), as has the Bolivian somewhat later (see Postero
2007). As Murray (2008), Beall et al. (2002), and others show, the South
African examples are like the Latin American in that new formulations
of urban citizenships and their distributions of rights unsettle national
citizenship while remaining dangerously unstable themselves. Cases from
Asia demonstrate similar developments. In Thailand, as in Brazil and
South Africa, squatter movements have organized nationally around
participatory urban planning initiatives based on new conceptions of
rights to the city (Somsook 2005). In India, Patel et al. (2002) and
Appadurai (2002) show how struggles for urban infrastructure ignite new
kinds of organizations and strategic thinking among squatters. These
organizations are able to form alliances with middle-class, non-
governmental, and international groups in terms that emphasize their
citizen rights, thereby providing alternatives to client patronage and
creating new modes of Indian democracy. Beijing’s “floating population”
of illegal residents redefines China’s official regime of urban citizenship
by claiming and exploiting new spaces in the city as successful entrepre-
neurs (Zhang 2001).1

The idea that this global peripheral urbanization

produces new kinds

of active citizens and citizenships contrasts sharply

with the predictions

of urban social and environmental catastrophe that

have never been in

short supply. Their 19th-century versions presented urban problems as
diseases of the social body and provided urban reformers justifications for
the “Haussmannization” of cities throughout Europe and the Americas.
These interpretations turned some urban populations into

“dangerous

classes” and targeted them for both scientific study and policing.2

Recently, a new round of books with alarming titles about city “slums”
and their “billions of slum dwellers” feed an evidently large professional

The idea that this

global peripheral

urbanization

produces new kinds

of active citizens

and citizenships

contrasts sharply

with the predictions

of urban social and

environmental

catastrophe that

have never been in

short supply

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and popular appetite for apocalyptic descriptions of planetary degrada-
tion due to current urbanization.3 I do not doubt that many people live
and work in miserable urban conditions, suffering brutally from segrega-
tion and pollution. My point is rather that the terms of this urban
catastrophe genre—especially the lead term slum—homogenize and stig-
matize a global urban population. It is not only that these terms imme-
diately identify “billions” of people with horrific urban conditions. It is
also that the stigma of slum leaves little space for their dignity and
vitality. It squashes people into totalizing characterizations and, in that
reductive way, reproduces an over-determination of urban poverty that
has difficulty recognizing emergent spaces of invention and agency.

The problem I raise here is not only one of confronting homog-
enization with anthropological difference, though that confrontation is
itself crucial both to undermine imperial regimes of knowledge and
policy and to detect potentials for different futures. It is not, in other
words, only an empirical question of demonstrating that processes of
urbanization are always multilayered, entangled, and contradictory.
Although such superimpositions create complex cityscapes, my argu-
ment is not only about inevitable anthropological complexity. It is also
and most importantly about showing that sites of metropolitan innovation
often emerge at the very sites of metropolitan degradation. My argument
is thus about developing concepts that can discern this kind of
insurgence.

To do so requires studying contemporary urban conditions through a
combination of ethnography and history generally antithetical to the
urban catastrophe genre, which thrives on the bird’s eye view of history
to aggrandize predictions. As it hovers outside and above, this view
cannot recognize “slums” as places in which residents use their ingenuity
to create daily a world of adaptations, connections, and strategies with
which to inhabit modern metropolises on better terms than those
imposed by the powerful local and international forces that would have
them segregated and servile. Such ingenuities regularly and predictably
coalesce into insurgent movements that redefine the nature of social
incorporation and the distribution of resources—movements, in short, of
new urban citizenships.

To focus on this creativity is not to neglect the impositions of global
forces of capitalism, neoliberalism, IMF-styled democratization, and the
like. Nor is it in any way to deny factors of class and race in structuring
urban life chances. Nor is it to wax romantic about the

difficulties of

putting new citizenships into practice. But it is to rub these forces,
factors, and difficulties against the grain of local vitalities, to show that
they do not preclude them, and that they are, often, reshaped by them.
In resisting their reductions, it emphasizes the capacity of “slum-
dwellers” to produce something new that cannot be readily assimilated
into established conceptual frameworks. To emphasize the creativity of
practice is also to bring to the surface that very possibility among the
many conditions that exist as potentials in the city. In that way, devel-
oping a paradigm of analysis of contemporary urbanization that reveals

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Urban Peripheries

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such insurgence is to produce critical research that is not totalizing,
reductive, or complacent.

Insurgent Performances

In what follows, I give several examples of insurgent citizenship from
my research in Brazil that begin in the peripheries and work their way
to the civic square. The first takes place in neighborhoods of the poor

peripheries of São Paulo where I have worked for over fifteen years.
These peripheries were settled by workers in the 1960s who built
their own homes—through a process called

autoconstruction

(autoconstrução)—on lots without any infrastructure that they purchased
on installment plans from private land speculators. Autoconstruction
continues today as a principal means of residence for the urban poor,
both in the neighborhoods in which I work which are now mostly settled,
and in new neighborhoods of the ever-expanding peripheries.4

One day, in 1972, an official from the São Paulo courts went to
Jardim das Camélias to notify residents that a writ of possession had been
issued against them, ordering their eviction. It was the first indication
residents had that their deed contracts were fraudulent and their tenure
in jeopardy. A crowd gathered in the streets as the news spread. When it
encountered the official delivering his orders from house to house, the
men assaulted him. They knocked him down, roughed him up, scattered
his papers, and chased him out of the neighborhood. He returned with
the police, who arrested several of the assailants. A group of residents
commandeered a truck and rode to the police station to spring them.
Several more were arrested. Over the next few weeks, residents gathered
into an association to fight the eviction—or, rather, were gathered by
local politicians who suddenly appear offering their services—and hired
one of the lawyers accompanying them. Soon afterward, however, the
lawyer was gunned down, murdered as he left one of the neighborhood
houses. As one resident told me, “at that time, it was a war, between us
and the land-scammers. The law didn’t exist. The only law was might; it
was violence. We didn’t know anything about rights. All we knew was to
beat up the court official.”

Thirty-one years later, in 2003, another official came to a different
but similar neighborhood in which I also work, Lar Nacional, to demand
the cancellation of a resident’s title to his houselot because of a discrep-
ancy in measurements. The courts had recently issued this title as an
original deed of ownership by virtue of adverse possession—a statutory
method of obtaining original title by demonstrating certain kinds of
possession over an uninterrupted period of time. Organized by their
neighborhood association, residents had spent more than ten years peti-
tioning the courts for such validation. This was the first case to return
from the justice system favorably judged, by which the resident received
a new title in his name with its own site plan and tax number. Now, an
official from the Municipal Treasury Department wanted it cancelled

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because the measurements recorded on the title did not match those on
file with the Department of Engineering. The residents knew why: The
area’s developers had superimposed so many subdivision plans over the
years in their efforts to usurp land and swindle buyers that none corre-
sponded to what had actually been built. As requested by the Associa-
tion’s attorney, however, the courts had appointed an official appraiser in
each case of adverse possession to create an accurate site plan that would
supersede all other plans by defining the actual conditions of occupation
as original for any title eventually issued.

Aguiar, an executive director of the Society of Friends of the Neigh-
borhood, has followed all cases of land conflict in the area for over three
decades. As a result, he told me, “we of the Society were prepared,
expecting that this [kind of contestation] would happen sooner or later.”
Hence, the Association had issued standing orders to all residents:
“Never enter into any polemic or fight with any official who appears at
your door; send him to the Society to talk.” When the Treasury official
claimed that the resident’s “house was wrong,” as Aguiar put it, “we knew
that it wasn’t because we had the [new] title, ratified by the judge; and the
judge only ratified it based on the official appraiser, who is the eye of the
law.” Armed with that knowledge, Aguiar confronted the Treasury offi-
cial by law talking him. He defied him to produce a better document than
the court-ratified title and site plan, one which would, he argued, have to
overturn the judge’s ruling. Moreover, he challenged the official “to look
for the law,” by which he meant to find out exactly what the law
stipulated in this case, what the courts had ruled, and to what effect.
Then, he meticulously explained to the official what he would find if he
went to all that trouble. He elucidated the purpose and consequences of
adverse possession, and he exhibited documents from the Society’s
archive to show that the earlier plans had been cancelled by court order
and superseded by the new title. In this manner, he rebutted the official’s
claim that the measurements were off because the resident had
encroached on someone else’s lot. After about an hour of this law talk,
the official left, conceding that his claim seemed indeed to have “no
merit.” Neither he nor anyone else from the Treasury returned to pursue
the matter.5

What happened to residents of the poor urban periphery during these
three decades that converted their violence into law talk, their belliger-
ent reactions into the proactions of citizens using rights strategically?
When I first went to Brazil in 1980, I noted that although people
certainly spoke about having particular rights, they seemed to consider
them conferred by statuses other than citizen, such as worker. When they
used “citizen,” it generally meant someone with whom they had no
relation of any significance, an anonymous other, a “nobody”—a person,
in fact, without rights, usually in an unfortunate circumstance. They said
it to make clear that the person was not family, friend, neighbor, acquain-
tance, competitor, or anyone else with a familiar identity; to establish, in
short, not only the absence of a personal relation but also the rejection of
a commensurable one that would entail social norms applied in common.

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“Citizen” indicated distance, anonymity, and uncommon ground. This
formulation considered, moreover, that what such others deserve is the
law—not law as rights but law as disadvantage and humiliation, a sense
perfectly expressed in the Brazilian maxim “for friends, everything; for
enemies, the law,” a sense enacted by the residents in 1972 who beat up
the court official. In 2003, however, the law talk of residents indicated an
inversion of the assumptions of this maxim about what is near and far in
the social order.

Let me give another example of everyday encounters that have been
transformed by a new paradigm of citizenship. I was standing in line at a
bank in downtown São Paulo in the mid 1990s. Like most other inter-
actions with bureaucracy in Brazil, bank lines are notorious for humili-
ating the poor and the unprivileged. Lines are long because all bills (from
utility charges to installment payments to state fees) are paid at banks
and because most people pay them in person. However, privileged cus-
tomers do not wait in line. Those who have so-called special accounts get
preferential treatment from bank managers. Others employ errand “boys”
to pay bills. A few other categories of people are privileged as well.
Pregnant women, seniors, and the physically challenged have the right to
cut the line or go to a special window. The rest wait. In my experience,
unfortunately extensive in this regard, people in line do not complain, at
least publicly. When I asked fellow-line sufferers to explain why the
preference, privilege, or right of some and on what basis, they would
shrug off the special treatment by saying “that’s the way it is for them”
(the rich), or “it’s the law,” or “the bank authorizes it” (for certain
people), pointing to a sign saying as much hung above a teller’s window.
Sometimes, they would explain that these kinds of people deserve special
treatment and the authorities recognize that. In other words, those I
asked raised issues of authority and the authorization of privilege, differ-
ent rights for different categories of persons, relative public standing and
worth, need and compensation, and resignation to the reinforcement of
social inequality in everyday public interactions. They did not raise issues
of fair treatment, accountability, or other aspects of equal worth.

These submissive responses to everyday negotiations of public stand-
ing occur when citizenship disempowers citizens, strange as that might
seem. Empowerment happens when a citizen’s sense of an objective
source of right in citizenship entails a corresponding sense of subjective
power—power to change existing arrangements (legal and other), exact
compliance, compel behavior. In turn, such citizen power establishes the
liability of others to it. However, when some people lack citizen power in
relation to other people, the latter benefit from an immunity, an absence
of liability. The one is powerless, the other immune. These relations of
powerlessness for most and immunity for some precisely characterize the
public realm of the entrenched regime of Brazilian citizenship dominant
for centuries.6

In the bank line, I recognized ahead of me a manicurist who works in
a beauty salon near my home. I imagined the occupations of others in
line: domestic workers, clerks, errand boys, drivers, store attendants,

“Citizen” indicated

distance,

anonymity, and

uncommon ground

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many of them people of color. Most, if not all, of them lived in the
peripheries in neighborhoods like Jardim das Camélias and Lar Nacional
and commuted to work in the center. Nearer the front was a decidedly
more middle-class-looking man, dressed in a tie and jacket. Suddenly, a
teenager cut the line in front of this man. He was dressed in a recogniz-
ably middle-class style for his age. Neither the man nor the teenager—
who would both have been called “white”—said a word to each other or
exchanged a glance that I could see. At that point, the manicurist
stepped forward and objected: “You can’t cut the line.” Others nodded,
and someone added: “You can’t; your place is at the back.” The teenager
said nothing and remained at the front. Then, the man in the tie and
jacket turned to the manicurist and announced: “I authorize it.” If the
man had said, “he’s my son,” “he’s my friend,” or even “he’s with me” that
would surely have been a satisfactory explanation. But regardless of
whether the two even knew each other, which was not clear, the man
had used the language, tone, and gesture of power and privilege. His was
a predictable response to achieve what he assumed would be the predict-
able outcome of this classic encounter of Brazilian social identities in
public space. Without retreating a step, however, the manicurist turned
this world of assumptions upside-down: “This is a public space,” she
asserted, “and I have my rights. Here, you don’t authorize anything. You
don’t rule [mandar]. You only rule in your kitchen and over your wife.”
She replied with such assurance that the man turned around without a
word, and the teenager went to the back of the line.

Leaving aside the issue of “kitchens and wives,” the manicurist’s
performance indicates the force of a new conviction about citizenship
among the working classes. Her demand for respect and equality, asser-
tion of rights in public and to the public, and realignment of class,
gender, and race in the calculations of public standing are evidence not
only of being fed up with the old formula of civic assumptions. They also
articulate essential premises of a new formulation of citizenship. They
establish a radically common measure among Brazilians who are anony-
mous to each other—neither friends nor enemies, but citizens who, for
some purposes, are equal.

This performance of a new civility has not, I stress, replaced the
historic one of citizen privilege for some and degradation for many—as
the higher-class man assumed and tried to enact. Rather, the two formu-
lations coexist, unhappily and dangerously, creating the mix of contra-
dictory elements that constitutes Brazilian public space today. Thus,
within a decade of the manicurist’s protest, banks massively installed
automated teller machines that offer equal access to most banking ser-
vices. This was a technological change driven not only by massive
increases in the number of poor Brazilians with bank accounts but also by
their insistence on more equitable treatment. Yet most Brazilian banks
also responded to the latter by building entire branches or separate
sections of existing branches that are exclusively reserved for their elite
customers. Now, the rich and the poor have no contact at banks, and the
proximity of different statuses that made social inequality palpable has

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been eliminated. Thus the demand for greater equality and dignity has
also produced new forms of separation and incivility in reaction. In fact,
the severity of this reaction is proof that the insurgence of a new formu-
lation of citizenship among the urban poor seriously threatens many
long-term and deeply entrenched assumptions about the compact of
Brazilian society.

Indeed, this insurgent citizenship finally marched out of the residen-
tial peripheries, out of the everyday institutions like bank lines that had
become battlefields in this conflict of citizenships, and overran the central
civic square itself. In 2002, I was in São Paulo for the victorious presiden-
tial campaign of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of the Workers’ Party (PT). It
was a massive, ecstatic victory that resignified the central spaces of São
Paulo with the red banners of “citizenship,” “democracy,” and “social
justice.” I realized that Brazilians voted for Lula not only to demand future
change but also to acclaim as emblematically theirs a life-story about what
has already changed: a story of industrialization, urban migration, city
transformation, and citizen struggle that has remade Brazil in the last fifty
years. It is a history that Lula personifies charismatically. Although he grew
up poor in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, the urban conditions of
poverty were not stagnant: he became both a factory worker and an urban
pioneer, as he and legions of other migrants powered São Paulo’s industrial
boom and transformed its hinterland by turning the shacks they had to
build for themselves into masonry homes and urbanizing their neighbor-
hoods. Through their labor, they became modern industrial workers in the
urban peripheries they constructed out of “bush.” By 1980, they had defied
military rule to mobilize factories and founded a political party of their
own, the PT, that organized the periphery’s neighborhoods through a mix
of left politics and popular Catholicism. After three failed presidential
bids, Lula and the PT won, with more than 60 percent of the national vote,
by pledging to forge a “social pact” for all citizens and a “social justice” for
the poor.

Lula represents this laboring Brazil precisely because he comes from
the autoconstructed peripheries in which a majority of Brazilians now
live and in which they build their own houses, neighborhoods, and urban
life. As my ethnographic examples of conflicts in everyday public spaces
show, they also construct a new realm of participation, rights, and citi-
zenship in their urban practices. Lula embodies, in other words, not only
the individual self-making of an immigrant and industrious São Paulo.
He also exemplifies the collective experience of the city-making of
peripheries and their citizenry throughout Brazil. That Lula’s adminis-
tration got sunk in profound corruption, having apparently traded its
project of social justice for one of mere power, is another if tragic matter
that I cannot consider here. On that October night in 2002, his election
affirmed the body and spirit of this complex autoconstruction, synthesiz-
ing the unprecedented national force the peripheries had become. In just
a few decades, the urban working classes had constructed a civic force
capable of striking hard at that still dominant Brazil in which the his-
torical norm of citizenship fosters exclusion, inequality, illegality, vio-

Thus the demand

for greater equality

and dignity has also

produced

new forms of

separation and

incivility in reaction

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lence, and the social logics of privilege and deference as the ground of
national belonging. The development of the autoconstructed urban
peripheries had thus engaged a confrontation between two citizenships,
one insurgent and the other entrenched. For a moment, at least, the
law-talking and rights-acting citizens of the peripheries had taken over
the central square.

Differentiated citizenship

To follow the emergence of this new urban citizenship, we need to
understand the existing conditions of working-class citizenship
within which alternatives developed. This is a complex historical

problem, as it is in the case of every city and its “slums.” The working-
class development of São Paulo is grounded in a reiteration of centuries-
old relations between land, labor, and law: in land policies designed to
anchor a certain kind of labor force and in illegalities that initiate
settlement and precipitate the legalization of property claims. The resi-
dential illegalities of today’s peripheries repeat these old patterns. But
they do so with an unexpected outcome that, ultimately, generates new
formulations of citizenship. Given the historical depth of these patterns
and the limitations of space in this essay, I can only give the briefest
sketch.7

To consolidate their rule of the new nation-state at the beginning of
the 19th century, Brazil’s landed elites formulated a regime of citizenship
using social differences that were not the basis of national membership—
differences of education, property, race, gender, and occupation—to dis-
tribute different treatment to different categories of citizens. It thereby
generated a gradation of rights among them, in which most rights are
available only to particular kinds of citizens and exercised as the privilege
of particular social categories. I describe it, therefore, as a differentiated
citizenship that uses these social qualifications to organize its political,
civil, and social dimensions and to regulate its distribution of inequali-
ties. The citizenship system thus created was universally inclusive in
membership but massively inegalitarian in distribution.

To maintain this differentiated citizenship in response to indepen-
dence in 1822 and the abolition of slavery in 1888, ruling elites devel-
oped a two-fold solution. To control political citizenship, they made
suffrage direct and voluntary but restricted it to the literate in 1881. This
restriction immediately reduced the electorate to a fraction of the popu-
lation (about 1 percent). Moreover, in the Republic’s founding consti-
tution (1891), they eliminated the right of citizens to a primary
education that would have given them the rudiments of literacy and that
had been enshrined (though not much realized) in the independence
charter (1824). Enacted with the stroke of a pen, the literacy restriction
denied most Brazilians their political citizenship for an entire century,
until it was repealed in 1985. To dominate civil and economic matters,
elites created a real estate market to legitimate the ownership of private

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property and finance the immigration of free labor. Adapting the English
theorist of colonialism E.G. Wakefield, they kept land prices high and
wages low to deny the working masses legal access to land and indepen-
dent production and to force them, as a result, to remain a source of
semi-servile cheap labor. Thus, political and civil citizenship developed
in step: both became more restrictive as Brazil changed from an imperial
nation based on slave labor to a republican nation based on wage labor
over the course of the 19th-century.

Subsequent regimes in the 20th century perpetuated this paradigm of
an inclusively inegalitarian citizenship by giving it modern urban indus-
trial form, incorporating the new urban workers into a public sphere of
labor law without equality or autonomy. As a result of the persistence of
this paradigm of differentiated citizenship, most Brazilians in 1972—
when the court official was beaten—had been denied political rights,
excluded from property ownership, estranged from law, incorporated into
the labor market as servile workers, and forced into segregated and often
illegal conditions of residence in hinterlands that lacked infrastructure.

However, the new densities of urban life in these peripheries created
a paradoxical possibility, that of developing a sphere of independence
precisely in the interior and—from the perspective of central authority—
remote spaces of neighborhoods in the peripheries. There, organized
around the social life and necessities of residence, beyond immediate
state, party, and employer sanction, a new space of civic participation,
rights, and collective imagination emerged.

Urban citizenship

The paradigm of differentiated citizenship remains contemporary,
having survived—indeed nourished—every political regime over
the last 200 years, thriving under monarchy, military dictatorship,

and electoral democracy. It perdures through its enabling conditions:
exclusion from property, denial of political rights, residential illegality,
misrule of law, servility. However, these conditions changed after the
1940s as the majority of Brazilians moved to cities and built the periph-
eries. In the autoconstructed city, these very same historical sites of
differentiation fueled the irruption of an insurgent citizenship that desta-
bilized the differentiated, as the urban poor gained political rights by
becoming functionally literate, established claims to property through
house building, established rights to urban infrastructure, made law an
asset through their struggles with eviction, became modern consumers,
and achieved personal competence through their experience of the city.
These achievements validated their standing as city-builders. Moreover,
they produced an unprecedented involvement in law that made their
leaders confident to confront justice officials with legal reasoning.

The sum of these experiences generated a new urban citizenship
among residents in the poor peripheries based on three core processes.
The first generated a new kind of participation in an alternative public

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sphere, one based on residents’ own grassroots organizations through
which they articulated their needs in terms of rights and in so doing
constituted an agenda of citizenship. The second gave them a new
understanding of the basis of these rights and of their dignity as bearers
of rights. The third transformed the relation between state and citizen,
generating new legal frameworks, participatory institutions, and policy-
making practices. I consider that these processes constitute an urban
citizenship when they develop under four conditions that all refer to the
city: when urban residence is the basis of mobilization; when the agenda
of mobilization is about “rights to the city”; when the city is the primary
political community of comparison for these developments; and when
residents legitimate this agenda of rights and participatory practices on
the basis of their contributions to the city itself.

Although I do not have space here to examine these three processes
in depth, I want to highlight the quality of new civic participation and
the change in conception of rights as fundamental in developing this
insurgent citizenship.8 Instead of domesticating the “dangerous classes,”
the material and legal difficulties of autoconstruction

politicized them,

becoming core issues of grassroots organizations and movements. In ways
that contradict Chatterjee’s (2004) arguments about politics among the
urban poor “in most of the world” (see Note 2), they formed into
voluntary associations to demand the regularization of their property and
the delivery of basic urban services as citizens who claim rights to the
city. Most of these organizations developed with considerable autonomy
from the established domains of citizenship officially available to the
working classes. In effect, the very conditions of remoteness in the
peripheries enabled an off-work and out-of-sight freedom to invent new
modes of association. Moreover, segregation motivated residents to
demand inclusion in the legal city, in its property, infrastructure, and
services.

These mobilizations politicized people around the redistributive
claims of rights to the city focused on the residential conditions of daily
life in the new autoconstructed peripheries. Residents demanded urban-
ization of their neighborhoods, forcing the state to provide infrastructure
and access to health services, schools, and child care. During the last
twenty years, for example, the residents of Lar Nacional have waged
protest campaigns for potable piped water, sewage lines, street paving,
public lighting, bus service, trash collection, a preschool, and a health
clinic. Remarkably, they achieved all of these objectives—the sole
exception being definitive title to their houselots.

In mobilizing these campaigns, women emerged as some of the most
effective leaders of this new civic chorus of organized residents, thus
achieving a doubly new and unsettling voice. They developed new strat-
egies of protests and politicized motherhood as a means of making
demands. Moreover, their engagements in the city yielded an unprec-
edented knowledge of bureaucracy and law.9 With some of the men, they
became researchers, investigating the requirements for each infrastruc-
ture they demanded, conducting extensive archival investigations at

Instead of

domesticating the

“dangerous

classes,” the

material and legal

difficulties of

autoconstruction

politicized them,

becoming core

issues of grassroots

organizations and

movements

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municipal departments, courts, and registries into land titles, subdivision
plans, surveyors’ records, and so forth, in an effort to unravel the tangled
history of titles in the area and substantiate their own claims as good-
faith buyers who had been swindled. In the process, they gained both a
legal education and an idiom for engaging the state and its elites. One of
the most active researchers and leaders in Lar Nacional, Arlete Silvestre,
told me how she learned about the courts.

To tell the truth, I couldn’t even tell one court from another; I
didn’t know what their names meant or anything about them. I
was a house-wife with a baby. I had only finished elementary
school . . . I didn’t know anything, but I kept learning things
after I joined the [neighborhood association].

In becoming knowledgeable and pressing their demands, residents
confronted the state with its negligence as provider of the well-being of
citizens. In this confrontation, a much more autonomous sphere of self-
interested and competent citizens emerged. It challenged a fundamen-
tal conception of Brazilian society inherent in the modernizing state
that has dominated Brazil, namely, that Brazil’s masses are ignorant
citizens who are incapable of making competent decisions on their own
and who therefore need to be led into modernity by an enlightened
elite. In the insurgent formulation, by contrast, the residents of the
peripheries imagine that their interests derive from their own experi-
ences, not from state plans, and that they are informed and competent
to make decisions.

The neighborhood associations also forged new horizontal confed-
erations of citizens concerned with housing, land conflicts, infrastructure,
human rights, and urban administration that became city-wide and even
national movements. The most significant was their massive participa-
tion in framing the 1988 Constitution at the end of military rule. This
movement turned the insurgent citizens of the urban peripheries into key
protagonists in a national struggle over the democratic imagination of a
new charter for Brazilian society. They fought not only to make the
constitution formally democratic. They insisted on participating directly
in its elaboration. Their objective was to insure that it embody their
experiences—those of modern urban working classes—as a basic source
of substantive rights and social justice.10

During the constitutional convention (1986–1988), combinations
of 288 plenary organizations, representing thousands of groups through-
out Brazil, submitted 122 popular amendments, backed by more than
12 million signatures. Some had more than 700,000 each. Many of
these initiatives concerned new forms of guaranteeing popular partici-
pation in the business of government and the management of citizen
affairs. For example, they require citizens to participate in developing
annual municipal budgets, mandate public debates for master urban
plans, and create advisory citizen councils. They are, without doubt,
innovations in participatory democracy. Other popular amendments

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that developed into constitutional principle and statutory law address
the urban conditions of the poor, especially those of housing, land
rights, and squatting. These are innovations in social justice. Both
types of innovation assume and require that the masses of Brazil, “silent
and backward” just forty years prior, have become an organized partici-
patory citizenry.11

This participatory citizenship so strongly marked the development
of a democratic imagination among residents in the peripheries that
almost ten years after the Constitutional Assembly (the Assembléia
Constituinte), I still noticed a striking lexical phenomenon in my inter-
views. One woman in Lar Nacional told me: “It’s beautiful to read, look,
I have this right. If you take the Constituinte to read—I have read
various parts—you look at it and say: Wow, can this be a fairy tale? Is
it true? But if I don’t use it, I won’t know if what is written really
works.” I first thought this use of Constituinte was an idiosyncratic error
in syntax. But after transcribing many interviews, I realized that this
switching of terms is consistent: When residents talk about the Consti-
tuição, they frequently use the word Constituinte instead. That is, they
often refer to the text of the national charter by the agency—their
insurgent agency—in making it.

Rights

Why do you think you have rights?

Well, one part is just what we were saying. I am an honest person,
thank God. I don’t steal from anyone. I am a worker. I fulfill my
obligations at home, with my family. I pay my taxes. But today I
think the following: I have rights because the Constituinte [i.e.,
Constitution] gives me these rights. But I have to run after my
rights. I have to look for them. Because if I don’t, they won’t fall
from the sky. Only rain falls from the sky. You can live here fifty
years. You can have your things. But if you don’t run after your
rights, how are you going make them happen? [Resident of
Jardim das Camélias since 1970, SAB member, retired textile
worker]

The public spheres of citizenship that emerged in Brazilian peripheries
forced the state to respond to their new urban conditions by recog-
nizing new kinds and sources of citizen rights. These rights con-

cerned issues of both substance and scope that the state’s existing laws
and institutions had generally neglected. In that sense, they developed
on the margins of the established assumptions of governance: they
addressed the new collective and personal spaces of daily life among the
poor in the urban peripheries; they concerned women and children as
well as men; they established duties to provide state services. Without
doubt, the greatest historical innovation of these rights is that they

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initiate a reconceptualization: their advocates began to conceive of them
as entitlements of general citizenship rather than of specifically differen-
tiated categories of citizens, such as registered worker. In these ways, the
emergence of new participatory publics in the peripheries not only
expanded substantive citizenship to new social bases. It also created new
understandings and practices of rights.

Yet, as the statement above suggests, this foundation of rights
remains a mix of new and old formulations. As one of the failures of
research on “urban slums” has been to neglect changing conceptions of
rights, I want to emphasize their importance. When I ask residents in the
neighborhoods why they think they have rights and on what basis, they
consistently invoke an amalgam of three conceptions. As the textile
work stated, they speak about rights as privileges of specific moral and
social categories (“I am an honest worker”), as deriving from their stakes
in the city (“I pay my taxes,” “I built my home and helped build this
neighborhood”), and as written in the Constitution (“the Constituinte
gives me rights”). In other words, they present a hybrid of what I call
special treatment rights, contributor rights, and text-based rights. This
typology has a temporal organization, following the strategies residents
deploy in their housing and land conflicts. For example, text-based rights
appears only after the Constitutional Assembly and remains mixed with
the other two in discussion. This is not to say that people never referred
to earlier constitutions and laws. But when a few occasionally did, it was
to complain that, with the exception of labor rights, these charters did
not apply to them.

In these three formulations, people use the same concept to
describe the realization of rights. They speak of “looking for your rights”
or “running after them.” However, doing so generally means something
different in each case, with a different outcome. The conceptualization
of rights as the privilege of certain kinds of citizens has grounded, in
various incarnations, the entrenched system of differentiated citizen-
ship. As long as it prevails, citizenship remains overwhelmingly a means
for distributing and legitimating inequality. In the post-Constitution
peripheries, however, this conception confronts an insurgent one of
generalized text-based rights. The latter proposes that citizens have an
unconditional worth in rights, not dependent on their personal social or
moral statuses. It therefore creates conditions for the realization of a
more equalitarian citizenship. Organized around home ownership, the
concept of contributor rights ambiguously propagates both systems of
citizenship. It does so because, although widespread, autoconstruction
excludes some residents (e.g., renters).12 But as it is universally recog-
nized as the generator of the peripheries, it emphasizes the self-
determination and accomplishment of residents, both individually and
collectively. It tends, therefore, to promote a citizenship of universal
“autoconstruction” and has a kind of egalitarian agency absent from the
differentiated paradigm. In the contemporary peripheries, all three con-
ceptualizations of rights remain vital and mixed in the development of
citizenship.

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Dangerous spaces of citizenship

Let me close by complicating this story of insurgent urban citizenship.
Its study shows that the insurgent perpetuates key features of the
entrenched. In Brazil, this means perpetuating the values of property

ownership, the practice of legalizing the illegal, and the norm of special
treatment rights because insurgent citizens continue to use these
attributes in their reformulations of citizenship. Yet it also shows that
rather than merely nourish new versions of the hegemonic, the insurgent
disrupts: it remains conjoined with the entrenched, but in an unstable
entanglement that corrodes both.

Under the political democracy that Brazilians achieved in 1985, this
corrosion became perverse: as the working classes democratized urban
space and its public, new kinds of violence, injustice, and impunity
increased dramatically. Brazilian cities experienced a generalized climate
of fear, criminalization of the poor, criminal violence, support for police
violence, abandonment of public space, and fortification of residence.
The judiciary and the police became even more discredited.

Thus, at the

moment that democracy took root, the entanglement of democracy and
its counters eroded some aspects of citizenship even as it expanded
others. This coincidence is the paradox of Brazil’s democratization.

Yet we would hardly expect insurgent citizenship to be stable in its
expansion. It too has holes into which it collapses. Exactly because the
old formulas of differentiated citizenship persist, new incivilities and
injustices arise with democratization. Hence the intertwining of the
differentiated and the insurgent has contradictory effect. It erodes the
coherence of taken-for-granted categories of domination that gave daily
life its sense of order and security. If it did not, it would be inconsequen-
tial. Democracy is not the only force of such destabilization, and it gets
tangled with others such as urbanization and privatization. But in itself,
democracy provokes violent reactions, some to restore old paradigms of
order and others to express outrage that their elements—now more
visible because disrupted—persist. Thus democracy brings its own kinds
of violence that irrupt where it destabilizes older formulations of order
and repression.

Emblematic of this unstable mix of old and new

formulations of

citizenship is the high levels of everyday violence by both criminals and
police. This mix finds a particularly perverse expression in Brazilian
society when both criminal drug cartels and police-based death squads
use the language of democratic rights and rule of law to justify their
especially brutal violence.13 As much has now been written about these
everyday and exceptional violences, I want to draw attention to other
expressions in the urban public of the sense of violation and outrage that
the unstable mix of insurgent and entrenched citizenships produces. I
refer to the in-your-face incivilities and aggressive aesthetics now
common in everyday public interactions in São Paulo. On the one hand,
I refer to elite practices of fortifying and privatizing the city in the name

Thus, at the

moment that

democracy took

root, the

entanglement of

democracy and its

counters eroded

some aspects of

citizenship even as

it expanded others

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Urban Peripheries

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of “security” that criminalize the poor; on the other, to a set of social and
artistic practices developed in the poor peripheries that are also aggres-
sive: the complex of hip-hop and funk that uses music, dancing, and
graffiti to homogenize and antagonize and that rejects the “made in
Brazil” culture of inclusion, race mixing, and consensus consolidated in
Brazilian popular music (MPB), carnaval, and capoeira for Americanized
idioms of racial and class polarization (see Caldeira 2006 for hip-hop in
São Paulo and Yúdice 1994 for funk in Rio); the affirmative action
campaign in higher education that biologizes “race” and assigns Brazil-
ians to bipolar categories (see Fry 2000; Htun 2004); the penetration by
the “servant classes” of residential spaces previously reserved for “masters
only” (see Holston 2008:275–284); the falsification and display of elite
commodities to assert knowledge of and access to globalized fashion
(ibid); everyday acts of transgression and “dissing” in public space (in
traffic, for example) that indulge and in that sense celebrate the norm
of impunity. To those who for centuries have expressed their rule
through the demonstration of privilege, all these practices replace expec-
tations of lower-class deference and accommodation with attitudes of
nonnegotiation.

As Caldeira (2006) analyzes it, the rap music in the hip-hop move-
ments of São Paulo is performed by young men who deliberately homog-
enize the peripheries they identify with into spaces of despair, into
emblems of the worst inequality and violence: “They position themselves
in the peripheries, identify themselves as poor and black, express an
explicit class and racial antagonism, and create a style of confrontation
that leaves very little space for tolerance and negotiation. Their raps and
literature establish a nonbridgeable and nonnegotiable distance between
rich and poor, white and black, center and periphery” (ibid:117). In a
different idiom, graffiti “taggers” mainly from the peripheries “go all city,”
to use the New York expression that characterized its graffiti movement
in the 1970s. Targeting especially surfaces that seem least accessible, they
leave no cityscape unmarked by their repetitive verticalized script. Their
objective is not only to assault by these means the security-driven priva-
tizations of São Paulo. It is also to create a new visual public of city
surfaces that people cannot avoid seeing, a new urban skin that taggers
know most residents condemn as ugly, unintelligible, and criminal, as
unequivocal proof of the deterioration of urban space and its public. The
point is that taggers celebrate that condemnation.

Can we view such incivilities as expressions of insurgent citizenship,
as forms of protest and civic actions, when they seem intended to disrupt
assumptions about the sorts of inclusions, deferences, and hierarchies
that have sustained differentiated citizenship? Indeed, elites predictably
view them not as new proximities but as intrusions into public and
domestic spaces they once ruled completely. Thus they respond by cre-
ating new kinds of distance. Motivated by fear, suspicion, and outrage,
elites withdraw from the sort of everyday personal contact that made
their style of rule—their regime of differentiated citizenship—famous for
its surface congenialities, ludic ambiguities, and apparent inclusions.

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Instead, they develop an array of new social and physical barriers. On the
one hand, they exhibit explicit disdain. This mindset culminates in racist
criminalizations of the lower classes, which oppose human rights and
support police violence. On the other, they wall themselves into
residential and commercial enclosures, guarded by private security and
high-tech surveillance, that make explicit the hard facts of the “know-
your-place” rule that used to be far more implicit.

It may be stretching credibility to call these “marginal” idioms of
tagging, rap, fashion, racial polarization, “dissing,” and defiance expres-
sions of insurgent citizenship. Yet they do disrupt the ideologies of uni-
versal inclusion that have sustained the ruling elite’s formulation of
differentiated citizenship. These ideologies effectively blur—in the sense
of making less appreciable—its massively and brutally inegalitarian dis-
tributions. Expressed in a variety of nationalist ideologies, cultural insti-
tutions, and social conventions (e.g., “racial democracy,” carnaval, and
play of race classifications), the civility of the entrenched regime thus
accentuates inclusion, accommodation, ambiguity, and heterogeneity as
idioms of social relation. These idioms of inclusion are further compli-
mented by cultural conventions of seduction that give personal relations
of gender, racial, and economic difference a gloss of complicit accommo-
dation, a sense of intimacy that obscures but maintains fundamental
inequalities: I refer to the seductive ambiguities produced through such
(untranslatable) artifices as jetinho, malícia, malandragem, jinga, jogo de
cintura, and mineirice, and universalized in the institutions of samba,
carnival, and capoeira—all celebrated in Brazilian culture but beyond my
purpose here to describe.

My point is that these ideologies and conventions of inclusion have
only recently become less convincing. As insurgent

citizenship disrupts

the differentiated, these dominant formulations of

inclusion wear thin

and the inequalities they cover become intolerable. Increasingly
exhausted, they get replaced in everyday relations by in-your-face inci-
vilities. The problem for contemporary Brazilian society is that although
the inequitable distributions remain, their blurrings have lost efficacy.
This exhaustion increasingly exposes the hard facts of inequality “for
Brazilians to see.” Hence, in claiming the city through their various
practices, those of both center and periphery view each other as speaking
through idioms of insult.

The undeniable exaggerations of violence, injustice, and corruption
in the current period of political democracy may thus be considered in
these terms: the gross inequalities continue but the political and cultural
pacts that have sustained them are worn out. This flaying of a social skin
transforms city and society. It produces rawness, outrage, and exaggera-
tion. In this sense we may say, perhaps, that the deep democratic changes
embodied in this process necessarily produce incivility as a public idiom
of resistance and insistence.

I conclude that although Brazil’s democratization has not been able
to overcome these problems, neither has the counter-configurations
of violence and injustice been able to prevent the development of

As insurgent

citizenship disrupts

the differentiated,

these dominant

formulations of

inclusion wear thin

and the inequalities

they cover become

intolerable

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Urban Peripheries

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significant measures of democratic innovation. Above all, it has not
prevented the widespread legitimation of an insurgent democratic citi-
zenship. For the time being in Brazil, as in so many places, neither
democracy nor its counters prevails. Rooted, they remain entangled,
unexpectedly surviving each other.

Notes

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Joshua Barker and Ato Quayson for their
invitation to participate in the conference “Street Life” at the University of Toronto
in 2007, for which I prepared this essay. Parts of it are drawn from my book Insurgent
Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (2008). An earlier
version appeared in a bilingual Catalan/English edition, published as a booklet by
the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

1In his study of politics among India’s urban poor, Chatterjee (2004) presents a
different analysis. Although overwhelmingly based on Calcutta and without refer-
ence to cases outside of India, he claims that his conclusions describe popular politics
“in most of the world.” He dichotomizes Indian society into two spheres: a “civil
society” that is the domain of “proper citizens” who are middle and upper-class elites,
in contrast to a “political society” that is the domain of the rest of Indians who are
“only tenuously rights-bearing citizens” and “not, therefore, proper members of civil
society” at all but rather a “population” for the state to govern (38). Based on this
dichotomy, he describes the politics of the former in terms of citizenship and the
urban conflicts of the latter in terms of governmentality and clientalistic patronage.
I find this scheme both conceptually and empirically mistaken. The empirical work
of other Indian researchers (see above) suggests a far more complex awareness of
rights among India’s urban poor. Furthermore, governmentality and citizenship are
not opposed as Chatterjee would have it but surely overlapping conditions. Citizens
are both simultaneously and disjunctively targets of policy and participants in sov-
ereignty, especially in contemporary cities where insurgent citizenship movements
turn those who are subject to government technologies into agents of rights as
well—as I analyze with a Brazilian example in the following sections.

2See Rabinow (1989) and Rose and Osborne (1999) for studies of the patholo-
gization of 19th-century European cities. During this period, both government and
medical science came to view rapid urbanization and the urban conditions for mass
populations it produced as the generator of multiple pathologies—of disease, crime,
revolution, and moral degeneracy—and therefore targeted them as legitimate
objects of intervention and regulation. See Coleman 1982 for a history of this
epidemiology. For industrial, modernist, and suburban planning responses, see
Rabinow (1989), Le Corbusier (1973), Holston (1989), and Nicolaides and Wiese
(2006).

3Examples include Davis (2006) and Neuwirth (2006). With the rise of new
pandemics (e.g., HIV/AIDS and SARS), cities are once again being viewed as
radiating nodes of infection. In the 21st century, however, the stakes are presented
as global. The prime targets for new systems of surveillance and response have shifted
to cities of the global south and their extraordinary rates of urbanization. The current
“urban catastrophe” literature views these cities as sites of emerging pathogens that
are especially lethal because they spread through the very global flows that constitute
contemporary urbanization. See Davis and Siu (2007) and Morse (1995). I thank
Lyle Fearnley for these references.

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4Let me emphasize a point often misunderstood by outsiders (Brazilian and
foreign): the majority of “slum dwellers” in most Brazilian cities, of those who live in
the poor peripheries, are good-faith purchasers of house lots in subdivisions (lotea-
mentos) who have been defrauded in one form or another. They are not squatters and
do not live in favelas. A favela is a land seizure without any payment and is only one
of several types of illegal land occupation in Brazil’s urban landscape. Thus, favela
residents have no claims to land ownership, although they own their houses—an
ownership that the state generally recognizes in various ways. In São Paulo, for
example, approximately 10 percent of the municipal population lives in favelas.
Although in a few neighborhoods in São Paulo and in some cities—notably Rio de
Janeiro—it is as high as 30 or 40 percent, these are exceptions. I do not want to
minimize the importance of favelas as home to poor Brazilians. After all, 10 percent
of São Paulo’s municipal population is more than one million people. But the more
important point is that dividing the Brazilian urban world into a dichotomy of favelas
for the poor and fortified enclaves for the rich is demographically and morphologi-
cally false. This world is infinitely more complex, tangled, contradictory, and vital.
For further discussion of differences and relations between poor lot owners and
squatters in São Paulo and of the significant but decreasing importance of this
distinction for citizen mobilization, see Holston (2008) and Caldeira and Holston
(2005).

5That it is generally only the most active members of neighborhood organiza-
tions who exhibit the competence of law talk is beside the point for my arguments
about new citizenship. Although the rank and file typically do not understand the
complex legal reasoning involved and are unable to produce it, they refer problems
to those who do—namely, their community leaders and attorneys—rather than
express their frustrations violently. Neighborhood leaders and archives constitute a
collective resource that residents as a group construct and utilize individually and
collectively when necessary. Thus, law talk among them is publicized, generalized,
and becomes public knowledge.

6I draw my use of power and liability here from Hohfeld’s (1978) correlative
scheme of socio-legal relations. Both the civil law tradition (descendant from
Roman law and dominant in Europe and Latin America) and the common (Anglo-
American) recognize these relations in somewhat different ways. The former holds
that objective law is the rule to which an individual must conform, and subjective
right is the power of an individual that derives from the rule. The latter uses the
notion of remedy, which entails empowerment, holding that where there is a right
there must be a remedy.

7A fuller account is found in Holston (2008).
8See my book Insurgent Citizenship, especially 203–267, for a detailed historical

and ethnographic examination of these processes of change.
9See also Caldeira’s (1990) analysis of the emergence of women leaders

in the residentially-based social movements of the peripheries of São
Paulo.

10The history of this organized popular participation in the Constitutional
Assembly is related in Michiles et al. (1989).

11On the new forms of democratic participation and association, see Avritzer
(2004) (for essays on São Paulo). For a discussion of participatory budgeting, see
Abers (2000) and Baiocchi 2005; and for new democratic initiatives in urban
planning, Caldeira and Holston (2005).

12The rates of home ownership in the peripheries of São Paulo are remarkably
high, between 70 percent and 90 percent according to various measures (see Holston
2008:183–84). These rates include squatters, who generally own their homes but not
the land. Thus, the identity of home owner is overwhelming though not quite
universal in the peripheral neighborhoods.

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13On violence, crime, and fortification during the contemporary period of politi-
cal democracy in São Paulo, the classic study is Caldeira (2000). On the use of the
language of democracy, rights, and justice by both gangs and police, see Caldeira
(2006) and Holston (2008:271–309).

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Instructions

In no more than 2 pages single spaced, respond to the prompt below:

Do practices of “commoning” constitute a form of resistance? Why/why not?

Make sure to draw on the content and materials associated with lesson 1.4 and provide examples/evidence to illustrate and support your argument.

The paper makes a clear, convincing argument.

The argument is well-supported by the effective mobilization of evidence drawing from the lesson materials.

The paper demonstrates a strong command of lesson content, including knowledge of the nuances between different theories of resistance.

Well-structured and organized.

Adheres to formatting requirements (no more than 2 pages single-spaced).

Clearly written, using appropriate professional language.

No spelling or grammatical errors.

An appropriate citation style used

Materials

· In this article, anti-racist and anti-caste urban geographer Malini Ranganathan

About

, examines the relationship between access to the city’s piped water network and urban citizenship. It provides a fascinating discussion of why people who live with tenuous tenure arrangements pay for water, and how they leverage this to claim particular rights.

Ranganathan, M. (2014). Paying for pipes, claiming citizenship: Political agency and water reforms at the urban periphery. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(2), 590-608

· Holston, J. (1998). Spaces of insurgent citizenship. Making the invisible visible: A multicultural planning history, 2, 37-56

· Asef Bayat is a prominent Iranian-American sociologist whose research has focused on understanding Arab revolutions. His work has contributed to the study of social movements and activism by looking at what Bayat calls “non-movements” and everyday forms of resistance and survival under conditions of authoritarian rule or weak democracy.

As you read this piece, pay close attention to how he defines “quiet encroachment” and describes its political opportunities and limits as a tactic of resistance.

Bayat, A. (2000). From ‘Dangerous Classes’ to ‘Quiet Rebels’ Politics of the Urban Subaltern in the Global South. International sociology, 15(3), 533-557.

Other sources can be used together with the class materials but make sure these are correctly cited.

Use APA style to cite your sources. Include a reference page.