City of Walls: Summary Chapter 8. VIOLENCE, THE UNBOUNDED BODY, AND THE DISREGARD OF RIGHTS IN BRAZILIAN DEMOCRACY

The increase of violence during the process of democratization is by Caldeira seen as, what see calls “disjunctive”. Brazil is a political democracy, ‘the civil aspects of citizenship are continuously violated,’ as she expresses in the last chapter of the book. This chapter focuses on “the body,’ as Caldeira approaches this theme from the disrespect for human rights and the campaign for the introduction of death penalty.
The disrespect for human rights comes clear when we look at how the discussion about the rights of prisoners. A very common attitude is than to say that human rights is the same as giving rights to bandits, something that is really not done according to a lot of people. To give an impression of the way the media speaks about human rights, I give the example of the daily radio program of Afanasio Jazadji who is a popular radio star in São Paulo. In April 1984 , the day the National Congress decided to deny the population right to vote the president he said:

‘Some should take all those irredeemable prisoners, put them against the wall and fry them with a blow torch. Or instead throw a bomb in the middle of them: boom!, end of the problem. They have no family, they don’t have anything, they don’t have anything to worry about, they only think about doing evil, and why should we worry about them? …

Those bastards, they consume everything, millions and millions a month. Let us get this money and transform it into hospitals, nurseries, orphanages, asylums, and provide a respectable life for those who really deserve to have this dignity. Now, for those type of people … people? To treat them as people! We’re offending humankind!’

Comparable reactions are made regarding death penalty, and some of the ones Caldeira gives are rather shocking. However, we have to be careful not to judge Brazil as a whole on these populist statements, and we have to keep in mind the violence most people experienced themselves or on their relatives.
When it comes to punishment a lot of people think of ‘punishment as inflicting suffering of the body,’ as a form of ‘physical revenge,’ as Caldeira calls it. ‘The dominant discourse is that of private revenge, as system that uses pain and interventions on the body as a means of creating order.’ [So the problem with public space stands not on its own; it goes much broader in a much wider incline of the border between public and private. JvB]
Something very important Caldeira makes clear deals about child beating: ‘Unable to understand language, children nevertheless are clearly believed to understand pain. Since fear of pain generates obedience, provoking such fear is considered good pedagogy. The marking of the body by pain is perceived as a more forceful statement that mere words can make, and it should be used especially when language and rational arguments would not be understood. In general, the people I interviewed think that children, adolescents, and women are not totally rational (or not always rational), in same way that the poor and obviously, criminals are not. Towards such people the use of violence is necessary; it is a language anyone can understand, which has the power to enforce moral principles and correct social behavior. Pain is understood as a path to knowledge (especially moral knowledge) and reform. Violence is considered to be a language closer to truth.’

Body and rights
‘Clearly, the body is conceived of as the locus of punishment, justice, and example in Brazil. It is conseived by most as a proper site for authority to be asserted through the infliction of pain.’
Caldeira starts to speak about “the unbounded body,” which mean that it ‘has no clear barriers of separation or avoidance; it is a permeable body, open to intervention, on which manipulations by others are not considered problematic. On the other hand, the unbounded body is unprotected by individual rights.’ The main reason for the appearance of the unbounded body is the openly discredited judicial system.
Caldeira gives also different examples of unbounded body that are outside realm of violence. In the fist place the high percentages of cesarean births and sterilizations of women in Brazil. This is seen as a alternative way of birth control, and especially the poor use it. Another medical intervention is the plastic surgery that is very common among Brazilian women in order to become the stereotype Brazilian women. Nonmedical thing Caldeira mentions is the carnival, the ‘occasion for displaying the body and playing with transformations of the body. (…) During Carnival performances people expect to touch and be touched: it is considered in bad taste to repel such interventions because one is out there to play, and the mingling of bodies is the essence of the play. Not only is Carnival a realm for the merging of bodies, their manipulation, and display, but it is also one where the threat of violence and actual violence are always present.’
Having this said, Caldeira derives from Michel Foucault’s theories the standpoint the emerge of a liberal-democracy moves away from bodily punishment to the punishment of the mind. But the progressive abandonment come always simultaneously with a process of democratization. What appears is a “disjunctive democracy” where, as in Brazil’s case, we have very highly developed social rights [think for example about the social movements] but civil rights that are not protected. Important is the relation between the body and civic rights. ‘In Brazilian society, what dominates is the unbounded notion of the body and the individual.’
Caldeira ends the book with a few questions, one of them, maybe even the most important one, about the future of public space. ‘Is there a model that protects people’s bodies and enforces individual rights while maintaining the indeterminacy [Dutch: onbepaaldheid, JvB] of borders that constitutes the democratic public space.’ The task no is, according to Caldeira, to ‘find new ways to democratize public space, renegotiate borders, and respect civil rights.’ Very interesting in my opinion is that Caldeira looks for more flexible borders, because she thinks that flexible borders combined with great inequality, ‘works only in one direction, from dominant to dominated, without any institutional restraints or boundaries. Caldeira gives a hint here in what direction see does think: ‘I advocate more rather than less boundedness for the body, especially when it involves relationships between unequals.’

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 8. THE IMPLOSION OF MODERN PUBLIC LIFE

Caldeira rings in this chapter the alarm bell when it comes to public space: ‘People feel restricted in their movements, afraid, and controlled; they go out less at night, walk less on the street, and avoid the “forbidden zones” that loom larger and larger in every resident’s mental map of the city, especially among the elite. Encounters in the public space become increasingly tense, even violent, because discrimination, and suspicion are the new hallmarks of public life.’ The most important question in this chapter is: ‘how to conceive of the relationships between urban form, politics, and everyday life. These relationships are very complex and usually disjunctive: simultaneous processes with opposite meaning may take place in the same public sphere. São Paulo offers a compelling example of disjunction: its walling process has coincided with the organization of urban social movements, the expansion of citizenship rights for the working classes, and political democratization. (…) Nonetheless, the build environment is not a neutral stage for the unfolding of social relations. The quality of the build environment inevitably influences the quality of the social interaction that take place there. It does not determine them completely; there is always room for diverse and sometimes dubversive appropriations of space and for the organization of siacila actions that counter those shaoed by spatial practices. However, the material space that constitute the stage for public life influence the types of social relations possible on it. (…) Usually it takes organized political action to resist walls or to dismantle patterns of segregation.’

The modern ideal of public space and the city life
[Caldeira takes a few social theorist and philosophers to explain her idea of public space. What strikes me is the fact that Caldeira uses only very western European or north American scholars. In this part of the chapter there are no south American scholars. What does this mean for the conception of public space in the Latin American city? JvB]
About Jane Jacobs: ‘When public life is absent, the alternative to sharing too much may be sharing nothing, and suspicion and fear of neighbor are the expected outcomes.’
About Iris Marion Young: she ‘defines city life as “the being together of strangers,” whose ideal is “an openness to unassimilated otherness.” Young tries to sketch an ideal image of the city containing in four main virtues: ‘(1) social differentiation without exclusion; (2) multi-use differentiation of social space; (3) eroticism, understood broadly as “an attraction to the other, the pleasure and excitement of being drawn out of one’s secure routine to encounter the novel, strange, and surprising”; and (4) publicity, which refers to public space as being by definition a place open and accessible to anyone and where one always risks encountering those who are different.’ [Interesting writer… JvB]
Caldeira distinguishes two types of social movement: the fist that emphasizes the sameness of the discriminated group (blacks, gay, women) and second, the fact that “universalism” is often the basis for exclusion and that we should focus on, what Young calls, “difference without exclusion.” This second notion is also comparable with the writings of theorist like Claude Leford, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Étienne Balibar. The modern city forces confrontation among strangers. ‘Such spaces [public spaces, JvB] promote interactions among people who are forced to confront each other’s anonymity on the basis of citizenship and therefore to acknowledge and respect each other’s rights.’

Garden city and modernism: the lineage of the fortified enclave
According to Caldeira the rise of the condominium in Brazil and United States has its origin in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City model. This because it had the same idea of living in a green area and it has the principle separated functions. The condominium can also be seen as a variation on Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, that he himself once described as a “vertical garden city”. The condominium follows naturally from modernistic planning, except the walling of the space. [It think this is not true. JvB] What Caldeira is arguing is that in São Paulo the city is build by the bad aspect of modernism, and the good aspects are left aside. This results in a public space that ‘expresses the new intolerance. (…) In the ideal modern city life, “borders are open and undecidable,” suggest Young. Fixed boundaries create nonmodern spaces, an undemocratic space.’ [I do not agree on this. JvB]
The strange relation between democratization and the walls in the city Caldeira reacts as follows: ‘While the political system opened up, the streets were closed, and fear of crime became the talk of the city.’

Street life: Incivility and aggression
Both the rich and the poor neighborhoods are not accessible: Morumbi is a neighborhood for a car, the pavement is bad; the favela has only a few entrances and is not surveyable. Other people privatized their streets by closing them of with gates or other objects.
The systems of security are not only for safety reason but also to ‘discipline’ and to ‘discriminate’. ‘The image of the suspect is made up of stereotypes, and therefore systems of screening discriminate especially against the poor and black people. The entrance guards do not bother people with the right class signs, but they give a hard time to everyone else. (…) In a city in which systems of identification and strategies of security are spreading everywhere, the experience of urban life becomes one of social differences, separations, exclusions, and reminders of the limitations of one’s possibilities in the public space. It is, in reality, a city of walls, the opposite of the boundless public space of the modern ideal city. The rich and the middle classes, more and more try to avoid the street and start to do their shopping in enclosed shopping centers and hypermarkets. The street is also very dangerous because of the traffic. Nobody obeys the traffic regulation.

Experiencing the public
Another interesting disjunction in the process of democratization is has to do with the occupation of former elite space (for example the movie theater) by the poor. ‘With fewer obvious signs of differentiation at hand and with more difficulty in asserting their privileges and codes of behavior in the public space, the upper classes turn instead to systems of indentification. Thus, spaces of controlled circulation (such as shopping centers) come to assure that distinction and separation are still possible in public. Signs of social distance are replaced with material walls.’
In this chapter Caldeira names only two public space that are, in her opinion, exceptional in terms that they have a plural public space. The first one is Ibirapuera Park and Praça da Sé.

Praça da Sé
This central square is extensively discussed because it is a very important public space in São Paulo. It contains tree important landmarks, namely the cathedral, the central subway and the “zero mark” of the city, indicated by a stone on top of a compass engraved on the ground. Teresa Caldeira thinks that the space has become more and more a place for the poor people, because of the homeless people, beggars, street vendors, ect. However, still today we see a lot of business man in suits, but also preachers of different kind of Christian movements, musicians and policeman. According to Caldeira the rich start to avoid Praça da Sé, because of its dominance by the poor. 

But Praça da Sé has also a very political component. During the military dictatorship this was the only place were demonstrations were held, such as on 25 January 1984 when three hundred thousand congregated in Praça da Sé to demand free elections. ‘Demonstrations were moved to Vale do Anhangabaú on only two occasions, when the square was too small for the expected crowd of one million: the last rally for direct elections in April 1984, and the demonstration for the impeachment of President Collor in September 1992. (…) On the one hand, Praça da Sé symbolizes the political reappropriation of public space by the citizens in the transition to democracy. On the other hand, it represents the detoriation of public space, danger, crime, anxieties about downward mobility, and impoverishment of the workers who continue to commuting, working in the informal market, and consuming its cheap products. It symbolizes both the strength and the deterioration of public space and, therefore, the disjunctive character of Brazilian democracy. [Caldeira refers here to a text she wrote together with James Holston called ‘Democracy, Law, and Violence: Disjunctions of Brazilian Citizenship’, published in “Fault Lines of Democracy in Post-transition Latin America”. Zie literatuurlijst voor beschikbaarheid. JvB]


Contradictory public space
Something very interesting in my opinion is the argument Charles Jencks uses. He thinks that we simply should deal with the process of walling the city, architects should find an aesthetic solution for it, referring to Frank O. Gehry. The fences are good because they prevent conflict. A totally different approach towards this problem has Mike Davis, who sees the fencing as a “destruction of public space,” and also as a consequence of postliberal politics (Reagan – Bush). However, Caldeira is more carefull making the link between politics and the ‘implosion of modern public live’, referring to the process of democratization.
Caldeira sees certain similarities between São Paulo and Los Angeles, such as ‘the garden city model, modernist design and city planning, (…) the fortified enclaves and theme parks (…) the intense fear of crime and the production of stereotypes of dangerous others (...) high rates of crime.’
The last part of this chapter is very strong so I quote is completely: 

‘The new urban morphologies of fear give new forms to inequality, keeps groups apart, and inscribe a new sociablity that runs against the ideals of the modern public and democratic freedoms. When some people are denied access to certain areas and when different groups do not interact in public space, then reference to ideals of openness, equality, and freedom as organizing principles for social life are no longer possible, even as fiction. The consequence of the new separateness and restriction of public life are serious: contrary to what Jencks (1993) thinks, defensible architecture and planning may promote confict instead of preventing it, by making explicit the social inequalities and the lack of common ground. In fact, we may argue that the Los Angeles uprising was caused by social segregation rather than by the lack of separation and defenses. If the experiences of separateness expressed in the urban environment become dominant in their societies, people will distance themselves from democracy.’

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 297-355.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 7. FORTIFIED ENCLAVES: BUILDING UP WALLS AND CREATING A NEW PRIVATE ORDER

Brazil is not the only country with a lot of condominiums, in the USA it is also a quit common phenomenon. Nevertheless, there are some differences. In the USA the condominiums are not so often gated compared to Brazil, only twenty percent of them. In São Paulo the condominium are still more urban than suburban. [A tendency that is probably changing right know. I don’t have hard proof for it but when I see all these parcels on google earth it is plausible that the suburban condominium becomes more popular. I have to look at it. JvB] Another aspect that is different from the USA is that the houses are not patterned because the elite sees patterned houses as something for the working class. The house is a expression of you personality and needs a ‘individualized appearance.’ ‘Condominiums are never called “communities,” and they are never advertised as a type of housing that could enhance the value of doing things together. In fact, residents seem to resent deeply this idea of community.’
The famous condominium Alphaville ‘covered an urbanized area of 13 square kilometer and had a fixed population of around twenty thousand inhabitants. Its office center housed 360 enterprises, and commercial area had 600 enterprises. On average, 75,000 non residents passed through it daily. In 1989, 55.4 percent of the tax revenues of the city of Barueri came from Alphaville. Security is one of the main elements in its advertising and an obsession of all involved with it. Each residential area, office center, and commercial center hires its own security force to maintain internal order, and there is a common security force to take care of the public spaces (the avenues and even the highway connecting to São Paulo).
The condominiums provide all possible services you can image, like nannies, hairdresser, gardening, libraries, shops, ect. These services are done by poor people who often live in favelas close by. ‘The upper class fear contact and contamination by the poor, but they conitinue to depend on their low-class servants.
A lot of problems inside the condominium are caused by the children of the people who live there. They vandalize collective equipment, use drugs and drive without license. Especially the car accidents are a problem. Between March 1989 and January 1991, the police registered 646 car accidents occurred inside the residential areas, that is, inside the walls and on the private streets to which only residents and their visitors have access. The majority of accidents were caused by teenagers, the majority of victims were either children or teenagers playing in the streets (only one of the people who died was over eighteen).’
The problems with children in Alphaville is thought to be solved by ‘more love and attention, stronger families, and more controle. (…) To discuss the question in terms of public order or public responsibility is unheard-of. [This reminds me of what Hannah Arendt argues about the household and the political. JvB]
Teresa Caldeira sees the privatization of the public space as a new phenomenon. Brazilian society has always been unequal but the creation of private islands has grown stronger. Very interesting is that see things that the retreat of the elite from the public sphere is actually a retreat form the process of democratization. The reason for this is because the working classes, ‘through their social movements, were for the first time participating effectively in political life. There is a parallel to make with the US where the ‘flight to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s and to gated communities in the 1990s may be related to the expansion of citizenship rights of the black population and the incorporation into American society of an increased number of immigrants. In Europe, the increase of racism and of new patterns of segregation seem to be similarly associated with the expansion of citizenship rights to immigrants.
By giving a lot of examples of advertisement Caldeira shows that the concept of the condominium and the feeling of being unsafe is really something that is exploited by the real estate market.
People living in a closed and secured place do not see this as a negative thing. They also see their way of living as a form of ‘freedom’. [I think this is a very strange contradictory thing. JvB] ‘Interestingly, the people (…) never use arguments of privacy, individuality, or intimacy to justify their preferences. Morumbi residents seem to fear the spread of evil more than they value individualism.’ However, for the people who live in houses in Moóca this seems to be different. ‘The transformation of the house in a prison adds to the feeling of restriction and loss associated with the economic crisis and anguish about the social decay. The closed door is a strong metaphor.
But, the walls, fences, bars have also another function: “aesthetics of security”, as Caldeira calls it. The elements of security have become symbols of status. Security has also become part of the design of the house. ‘By the early 1990s the new “architecture of security” was making its way into the newspaper articles. This architecture creates explicit means of keeping away undesirables, especially the homeless.’

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 256-296.

About Gated Communities and Inequality: Santana do Parnaíba

Santana do Parnaíba is a suburban neighborhood in the northwest of São Paulo. It has a fast growing population and the highest average income of the whole metropolitan region: 9.8MS.
Theresa Caldeira writes as follows about it:
‘Santana do Parnaíba exemplifies what one might call a new suburbanization of São Paulo. Its growth has been neither the traditional expansion of the poor and industrial areas nor the American suburban outgrowth of the 1950s and 1960s, but a new type of suburbanization of the 1980s and 1990s that brings together residence and tertiary activities. Santana do Parnaíba has not had the same economic performance as its adjacent municipalities, Barueri and Cajamar, but it shows more clearly how the area is becoming a new middle- and upper-class enclave. It was the municipality with the highest annual rate of population growth in the 1980s (12.79 percent) and the highest income. Ninety percent of the population increase during the 1980s was due to migration, and it had the highest percentage of growth due to migreation in the metropolitan region: 245 percent. The immigrants were mainly wealthy residents. As the rich settle into areas that have been rural and extremely poor, they create situations of dramatic social inequality, attested to by the fact that the GINI coefficient in Santana do Parnaíba is 0.7102, the highest if the metropolitan region.’ [1]
Caldeira adds in a footnote:
‘In 1980, only 1.5 percent of the economically active population of Santana do Parnaíba made more than 20 MS, whereas 53.7 percent made less than 2 MS. (…) The GINI coefficient for the city of São Paulo is 0.5857 and for the metropolitan region 0.5748.’ [2]

[1] Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 253.
[2] Ibid., p. 409, 410.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 6. SAO PAULO, THREE PATTERNS OF SPATIAL SEGREGATION

Caldeira distinguishes three different types of urban segregation: 1. -1940, ‘different social groups packed into a small urban area and segregated by type of housing. 2. 1940-1980, segregation by ‘great distances: the middle and upper classes concentrated in central and well-equipped neighborhoods and the poor exiled into the hinterland. 3. Since 1980, poor and rich are living closer again in terms of distance, however, now they ‘are separated by walls and technologies of security, and they tend not to circulate or interact in common areas. Caldeira see the fortification of the city as a threat for the modern city, undermining the principles of the modern city such as free circulation and openness.
Important statement Caldeira makes is that in São Paulo the ‘public space no longer relates to the modern ideals of commonality and universality. Instead, it promotes separateness and the idea that social groups should live in homogeneous enclaves, isolated from those who are perceived as different. Consequently, the new pattern of spatial segregation grounds a new type of public sphere that accentuates class differences and strategies of separation.’

The concentrated city of early industrialization 1890-1940
During this period of time the rich and the poor originally lived together, however, to rich more and more started to move to more homogeneous areas such as Campos Elísios and Avenida Paulista. The main reason for this was the fear for epidemics, comparable with the fear for crime nowadays. There were all kind of initiatives to ‘open the city’ as Hausmann had done in Paris, to provide free circulation, wide streets, hygiene and social control. ‘The first laws on construction and zoning were passed in the mid-1910s, and the most important pieces of urban legislation and intervention come in the late 1920s. The execution of the so-called Plano Avenidas (plan of avenues) that started in the beginning of the 20th century was one of the first originators of spatial segregation: the prices of rents started to increase and the working classes were driven out of the center to the periphery. Another reason why the poor working class started to move to the periphery was because of the lack of affordable houses to rent. The rapid process of urbanization caused a high rents, a simple consequence of supply and demand. The government of Vargas tried to stop the rising rental prices by freezing the rents at the level of December 1941. Initially this had to last only for two years, however it was renewed unit 1964. ‘In São Paulo the immediate consequence was a tightening of the rental market, as fewer residence were build. This trend accelerated the departure of the working classes to the periphery, where the could find cheap (and irregular) land on which to build their own houses. (…) In the new arrangement, poor and rich lived apart: distance, economic growth, and political repression allowed a peculiar inattention to one another.’

Center-Periphery: The dispersed city
‘The new model of urbanization is usually called the center-periphery model, and it dominated São Paulo’s development since the 1940s. It has four principal characteristics.
1.) Lower population density: form 110 inhabitants per hectare to 53 in 1963.
2.) segregation of social classes: Rich live in legal, well-equipped neighborhoods, poor in autoconstructed, precarious, mostly illegal periphery.
3.) Home ownership became the general rule for both rich and poor.
4.) Transportation depends on roads, busses for the working classes and automobiles for the middle and upper classes.
The major cause of the rapid urbanization of the periphery was the launching of a public bus system at the end of the 1930s to make the area accessible for the working classes. Many of these bus systems were owned by private investors who also where selling the parcels in the periphery. ‘Speculators developed a multitude of illegal and irregular practices aimed at maximizing profits, from outright fraud to failure to provide basic urban services or minimum lot dimensions required by law.’ Another aspect is that many workers build their houses without registrating them, this results in an illegal construction on a legal parcel. The result is that now 65% of the population of the city lives in houses that are illegal. Autoconstruction has become the main form of working-class housing.
Caldeira continues to explain the immense vertical orientation of São Paulo, something that started especially after the 1960s when the apartment building became the main type of residence for the middle and upper classes. ‘Until the late 1950s, the construction of high-rise was relatively incontrolled by the city. From 1957 on, however, municipal laws aimed at controlling the expansion of construction in the city affected, in particular, the building of high-rises. The laws had two main effects.’ They excluded the poor from buying an apartment, and it directed the high-rise out of downtown, where the prices of the lots where cheaper. Another reason for the middle-class to move in these apartment buildings is because they were financed by the BNH and SFH, [see book for meaning, JvB] - systems that were originally meant to finance houses for the poor – were now only used to finance the apartment buildings of middle-classes.

Proximity and walls in the 1980s and 1990s
Caldeira see three basic factors for the tranquility between center and periphery in the way it emerged in the 70s. In the first place because the rich only encountered only a few central areas. Second, between the 50s and 70s there was the believe that economic growth would change the differences. And third, the repression of the military government that ‘banished political organization and public dissent.’ It was because of the reorganization of trade unions that the people in the periphery started to reorganize themselves; contrary to what the political elite expected. They thought that their house ownership would keep them outside the political arena, however, the opposite happened. They started to organize themselves in order to improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods.
On page 231 and 232 Caldeira gives one of the most important descriptions of the city saying:

‘São Paulo today is a more complex metropolitan region that cannot be mapped out by simple opposition of center-rich versus periphery-poor. It is no longer a city providing conditions for inattention to class differences, but rather a city of walls, with a population obsessed by security and social discrimination.’

This process started in the 80s and 90s, a moment when the way of living of both rich and poor started to change. This had various reasons. In the first place there was a growing tendency among the rich to leave the center and settle in gated communities in the northwest and southern part of the city, where first only the poor lived. ‘At the same time autoconstruction on the periphery has become a less viable alternative for the working poor because of the impoverishment caused by the economic crisis of the 1980s, the improvements in the urban infrastructure in the periphery, and the legalization of land resulting from the pressure of social movements and action by local governments. In other words, while the incomes went down, the periphery improved and became more expensive.’ This is the moment when the cortiços started to appear, and when the favelas start to grow. The process of walling the city because of the increase of violent crime exacerbated the process of segregation and suspicion.
The improved situation of the periphery had enormous consequences for the quality of live. A good indicator is infant mortality: ‘it dropped from 50.62 per 1,000 live births in 1980 to 26.03 in 1991. In São Miguel Paulista, one of its poorest districts, where Jardim das Camélias is located, the infant mortality dropped from 134 in 1975 to 80.46 in 1980 and 27.29 in 1994.’
‘The social movements influenced the action of the local administration not only in creating public services and urban infrastructure but also in transforming the legal status of the periphery. One of the main demands of the social movements was the legalization of properties on the periphery. Social movements forced the municipal governments to offers amnesties to illegal developers, making it possible to regularize their lots and bring them into the formal property market. The Lehman Law in 1979 made it easier to prosecute real estate developers selling land without the infrastructure required by law.’ The negative aspect of this was that the prices of the lots started to rise because of two reasons: first the lots were legal now, which made them more valuable on the market. The second reason for the price-rice was because of the improved infrastructure. The consequence of this was that the poor people had to move to the fringes of the city and start to build new neighborhoods again. Another option is to move in a cortiços, with the advantage of living more close to the city center.
Something else happened to the market of apartment buildings. In 1986 the BNH ended and the inflation started to rise again. Without the BNH financing and the high inflation it was for the middle classes very difficult to buy one of these apartments. What happened with the production of appartement buildings is what ‘some analysts call an “elitization”’ of the apartment market. This changes after the successful control of the inflation after Plano Real, and the possibilities for lifelong financing. It is at this period of time that the closed condominium starts to become a popular place to live in for the middle and upper-classes.

In Morumbi you need a car for everything: to buy bread, to bring your children to school, to go to the supermarket. In many place there even no sidewalks. The rest of the infrastructure is also very bad. However, the inhabitants of Morumbi want to pay this price in order to feel save.
The reason why many closed condominiums start to appear in the originally poor southeastern border of this city is because the land is cheap over there, so investors can make their investments more profitable.
[I made a separated post about the gated communities in Santana do Parnaíba, because if found it that much bizarre that it needed a special post. To read more about it click here. JvB]
According to Caldeira the urban transformations as occurred in contemporary São Paulo are caused by several processes at the same time. She mentions them as follows: ‘the reversal in demographic growth; the economic recession, deindustrialization, and expansion of tertiary activities; the improverishment of the working classes; the displacement of part of the middle and upper classes from the center; and the widespread fear of crime (…).’ The GINI coefficient ‘increased from 0.516 in 1981 to 0.586 in 1991.’

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 213-255.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 5: POLICE VIOLENCE UNDER DEMOCRACY

[Chapter 5 focuses on police violence. Something I don’t understand is the issue that the Brazilian people on the one hand support the ‘tough’ police and sometimes even want to have a stronger police, on the other hand they consider the police as being corrupt, cowardly, dangerous and even stupid. The attitude seems to be ambivalent. The following interview comes from a men (22) from Jardim das Camélias, (Poor working-class periphery).]

‘Many times, when there is a robbery, the neighbors say. “it was that one, that one.”But the police say, “We haven’t caught him in the act, so we don’t arrest him,” and they go away. And what happens? The guy wants vengeance and goes around killing a lot of people, as it happens today. When a crime happens on the street, the population doesn’t collaborate with the police because of that… It’s the fear of vengeance (…). If I see a robber killing someone, I won’t want to know anything about it. I’ll pretend I haven’t seen anything. If the police ask me, I’ll say, “I haven’t seen anything.”

‘They [the workers, JvB] are paralyzed between the fear of the police, fear of criminal’s vengeance and, (..) a belief that the justice system is unable to provide justice.

SECURITY AS PRIVATE MATTER
The rise of private security is seen as one of the basics of urban segregation, that in Brazil started during the military dictatorship. Security was privatized in order to drive back the large amount of bank robberies. Caldeira distinguishes three different types of guards active in the city.
First the official guards. To become an official guard in you have to finish a 120 hour course, provide by a private enterprise. After that the private guards are allowed to ‘carry .32- or .38-caliber guns, but only while they are at their posts. The guns are owned by the companies and not by the guards. (…) The owners of private enterprises realize the increasing desirability of their services and the potential for expansion in a deeply unequal society afraid of high crime rates and unable to count on its police forces.’ In Brazil there is a rising tendency to see the private security sector as something for the rich and the middle-classes, and the public sector as something for the poor. José Luiz Fernandes, president of the national association of private security enterprises (Abrevis) has said: “Leave the civil and the military police for the less favored, according to the law – which does not work!”
The second segment in the security market is the so called ‘organic security’. The people that work in this industry have formal labor contracts but are registered under other occupational categories. A lot of shopping centers, offices complexes, condominiums, ect, rely on this type of security. ‘Approximately 50 percent of private security services in the state of São Paulo are provided by organic security.
The third type is the illegal ‘clandestine security’ market, most of the people that work there are either policeman or ex-policeman. Despite the fact that it is forbidden by law a lot of policeman do combine the ‘private’ and ‘public’ job, in many cases they use their police weapons. Some of the enterprises closed by the federal police were run by ex-policeman involved with the Esquadrão da Morte or other vigilante groups. The costs to hire these kind of security guards are lower than the guards from the formal market. Also in this segment is used by condominiums.

The phenomenon of the justiceiros is a typical example of the vague border between public and private and the relativity of the sovereignty of the state when it comes to law and justice. The justiceiros ‘literally “justice makers,” are groups of men who kill people they consider to be criminals, especially on the periphery.’ In many cases this is the only access the poor have, when it comes to justice. Also for example shopkeepers use the power of the justiceiros in order to keep the neighborhood save from criminals.
‘With the spread of private security, the discrimination against the poor by “security” forces becomes twofold. On the one hand, the poor continue to live, work, and shop in fortified enclaves, using private security services to keep the poor and all “undesirables” away, the poor will be victims of new forms of surveillance, control, disrespect, and humiliation.’
Caldeira is convinced that the role of private security is a reason for the increase of violence because crime is removed from the judiciary system. Especially the judiciary system is very effective because it makes ‘vengeance from a private into a public matter. She uses the arguments given by the French social scientist René Girard quoting him from his book Violence and the Sacred (1977): “Our judicial system (…) serves to deflect the menace of vengeance. The system does not suppress vengeance; rather, it effectibely limits it to a single act of reprisal, enacted by a sovereign specializing in this particular function. The decisions of the judiciary are invariably presented as the final word on vengeance.” It is the judiciaries lack of authority, and therefore also a lack of credibility that the cycle of violence still exists. The violent police makes a this even worse.
Caldeira doesn’t want to make the easy conclusion that the cycle of violence has a direct relation to poverty. Although she states that ‘most of the elements that have generated the current cycle of violence have a socioeconomic basis,’ and that ‘poverty and inequality (…) are crusial to explaining some of the inequalities’ and ‘the spread of violence,’ to Caldeira it is in the first place the incapacity of the institutions that are the main raison for the cycle of violence.

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 158-210.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 4. THE POLICE - A LONG HISTORY OF ABUSES

This chapter deals about the history of the Brazilian police and its dark history. Caldeira writes about the many bad things that the police did. To illustrate the police violence I give some numbers: ‘in 1991 the military police killed 1140 people in the state São Paulo during “confrontations with criminals”; in 1992, that number was 1470. This includes 111 prisoners massacred inside the Casa de Dentação, São Paulo’s largest prison.’ 87.5 percent of these killings occurred in the city of São Paulo and its metropolitan region. To compare: in 1992 the Los Angeles police killed 25 civillians in confrontation, New York police killed 24 civilians. Respectively 2.1 percent of the number of deaths in LA and 1.2 percent of the deaths in NY. [For my projects the extensive details Caldeira gives about this subject are not so interesting. JvB]

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p138-157.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 3. THE INCREASE OF VIOLENT CRIME

‘The increase of violent crime is the result of a complex cycle that involves such factors as the violent pattern of reaction of the police; disbelieve in the justice system as a public and legitimate mediator of conflict and provider of just reprisal; private and violent responses to crime; resistance to democratization; and the population’s feeble perception of individual rights and its support for violent forms of chastisement [Dutch: tuchtiging, JvB].’
‘The majority of occurrences of larceny [Dutch: diefstal, JvB], robbery, and physical abuse, then, are not reported to the police. People either do not trust the police to deal with conflicts and crime, or they fear them because of their well-known brutality. Similarly, the justice system is perceived as ineffective by the majority of the population.’ In the southeast region of Brazil, 50.71 percent did not used the justice system after they were involved in a conflict.
Torture is something that is applied very often by the civil policemen, especially for the poorer suspects. The rich sometimes pay the police to find the people who robbed them, contrary to the poor who are neglected when they are being robbed. The upper-class also sometimes pay the police to torture the suspects.
Caldeira want to make clear that the statistics reporting crime are not so reliable. This because of the corrupt police, but also because the people do not report all of the things that happen to them. Another reason why the statistics are not accurate is because of the different branches in the organization of the police apparatus.
‘Increases in violence have been lower in the center, where the wealthier population lives, than in the outskirts, where the majority of the population is poor. (…) the rates of crimes against property are highest in the upper- and middle-class neighborhoods, whereas the rates of homicide are highest in the poorest districts of the city.’ (…) A recent study (…) showed that the districts with the highest incidence of homicide had a bad quality of life and a predominance of low-income families. (…) the districts with the highest murder rates were mostly very poor’ or lived in deteriorating central districts of the town. ‘The lowest rates were among middle- or upper-class districts in central areas.’ However, the districts with the highest robbery rates where also the wealthy and central districts. The increasing amount people that is in possession of a gun (legal and illegal) is significantly increasing. Caldeira sees this a sign that people ‘increasingly taking the task of defense in their own hands. Also the increasing trade in drugs is followed by more violence, ‘however, such claims are difficult to confirm because of the lack of concrete information.’
In order to understand they way crime works in a city like São Paulo Caldeira uses the following explanations:

1.) ‘crime is related to factors such as urbanization, migration, poverty, industrialization, and illiteracy.’
2.) ‘it is connected to the performance and characteristics of the institutions in charge of order: primarily the police, but also courts, prisons, and legislation.’
3.) ‘cultural elements such as the dominant conceptions about the spread of evil and the role of authority, and the conceptions about the manipulable body.’
4.) ‘the widespread adoption of illegal and private measures to combat criminality.’
5.) ‘policies concerning public security and patterns of police performance: the violent action of the state’ makes the situation only worse instead of controlling it.

The problems with criminality are not easily solvable with more investment in public security. The expansion of investment that started in 1984 did not effect the increase of crime and violence. We should also take in consideration that the ‘delegitimating of the judiciary system as a mediator of conflicts and [the] privatizing the process of vengeance’ only makes violence and crime worse.
Caldeira about the relation between poverty and crime: ‘The association of poverty and crime is always the first to come to people’s minds in discussion about violence. Moreover, all data indicate that violent crime is unevenly distributed and affects the poor especially. However, inequality and poverty have always marked Brazilian society, and it is hard to argue that they alone explain recent increases in violent criminality. Further, this argument often misrepresents violent criminality by allowing the view that poverty and inequality lead to poor people’s criminality. In reality, if inequality is an important factor it is not because poverty correlates directly with criminality, but rather because it reproduces the victimization and criminalization of the poor, the disregard of their rights, and their lack of access to justice.’ (p. 137) Also the behavior of the police is one of the reasons according to Caldeira, not so much their number of officers or their equipment. [My own experience close to the school was also very frightening. JvB]

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, 105-137.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 2. CRISIS, CRIMINALS, AND THE SPREAD OF EVIL

The Paulistanos interviewed by Caldeira, think that the spaces of crime are marginal, often related to favelas and cortiços. The solution to solve these problems are strong institutions and strong authorities.
Plano Collor was a plan that was developed to make the inflation decrease. However, it didn’t help, it even make the inequality bigger. Especially the middle-class was hit by the increasing inflation, their savings where frozen by the government and after a couple of months the value had decreased enormously. This caused among many people the distrust of the government. For other people it was a reason to stick to a hope for a strong government that could change all this, or even to look back with nostalgia towards Getúlio Vargas or the military dictatorship.
The interviews Caldeira took with three poor working-class men reveal the pessimism of these people. To the question about what kind of rights people have one of them answers:

‘What rights? None. Only the right to go to work, to come back home and sleep in order to go to work the next morning. The poor man spends four hours in the traffic to get to work, two hours to go two to come back’.

They are very negative about the politics of Collor.
A very telling expression related to public space is the next one:

‘My salary is only enough for eating. It’s not even enough to go the amusement park to take Maria [his wife, JvB] to play on the Ferris wheel. If I spend in transportation to the park, then I won’t have money to go to work the day after. So I stay home, it’s better, I stay home…’

[This quote really shows the depressing consequences of poverty, these people are really excluded from the economically determined spaces. ‘You have to pay for the public life’ the architect Charles W. Moore in an article with the same name. JvB]

Another very good point Caldeira makes is about aestatics and appearance. The middle-classes often refer to the poor as being more lucky than they are because they are only in the realm of necessity and therefore they don’t have to care for their appearance. Caldeira sees this as one of the many prejudices the middle-class has about the poor. (I think she is totally right in that.) She refers to the dialogues at 2.9 about the fashion. [I think we can also stress this argument to the realm of architecture. To create a real city the public buildings should be more than just products of necessity; they need to become human artifices to speak in Arendtian terminology. Arendt writes: ‘Nowhere else does the sheer durability of the world of things appear in such purity and clarity, nowhere else therefore does this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal beings.’]
When it comes to social distance there are several ways of creating borders: The most obvious one is to create a physical border, by making a fence. Another way is ‘derogatory conceptions’ [Dutch: geringschattende opvattingen, JvB] about the poor, for example to emphasize that they are not part of the consumer society.
The fact that the poor have television is often seen as wrong but the richer part of the society. They say they can better spent it on a refrigerator, something that is more neccecary but also a lot more expensive. However, in many cases the television is the only form of leisure the poor have, and it is their connection with the outside world.
[The following interview shows the vulnerability of democracy in Brazil:]

‘We used to think that the lack of freedom and the censorship [during the military regime, JvB] were bad. Today I think that the military regime should come back. For example the case of kidnapping. It’s absurd the lack of security that one feels. I’m nobody, I don’t have many assets [Dutch: heeft iets met geld te maken, JvB], but Iám afraid that suddenly some guy gets my son in order to ask a ransom of five million. I’m scared to death… Anyone may be kidnapped, because now kidnapping has become the fashion. Why? Because of impunity [Dutch: straffeloosheid, JvB]. We were talking about the military regime: when the Al-5 was introduced do you remember? [Al-5 whas the most repressive period of the military regime.] Bank robbery ended… It is impunity which makes us feel insecure.’

Kidnapping is the biggest fear people have in higher social classes.

Very interessting conception about the walls comes forward in an interview Caldeira did with three women from Morumbi. A fragment:

‘[Interviewer:] Why do you prefer to live in a house instead of in one of the condominiums?
O: Freedom. To me, freedom first of all, and then the contact of too many children that I would be unable to prevent [in order to] control the friendships of my children. (…) The famous fear of drugs. My sister-in-law lives in a condominium: all day long you have children from here, there, everywhere. You don’t know who the children belong to…
M: Because the houses are not enclosed, the house doesn’t have walls… Only the condominium’s wall, but the house has only the grass, and in a while it is already another house. American-style.
O: All open, and you don’t know the contact your child has. How are you going to keep them separate? You don’t have a wall, how are you going to say , “No, my son, you receive the friends at home that I think are better, I am going to select these friends”? (…) There are cases of a child robbing another child’s house in order to steal dollar to buy marijuana. I won’t name names, but there are cases… in a condominium.’

[What this interview makes clear is the walling of the houses do not only function as barriers to prevent people from the outside to enter your domain, but also to lock the children in. The wall makes it possible to control the friendships of your children. It is the housekeeper who decides what the best company is for the children. The most ironic thing about this is that person ‘O’ her argument to live in a house is because of freedom it offers. The expression ‘How are you going to keep them separate?’ also gives the impression that children need this kind of wall in order to protect them from the temptations in the outside world. The house has become a space of preventative rehab. JvB]

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p53-101.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 1. TALKING OF CRIME AND ORDERING THE WORLD

Caldeira explains that in São Paulo the talking about crime and violence started to change the urban landscape and the public space. This kind of talking has a simplistic characteristics, ‘relying on the creation of clear-cut oppositional categories, the most important of which are good and evil.’ She explains that the experience of violence can change your entire vision about society and the city, the fear is something that can stay the rest of your life. The world becomes divided in a ‘before’ and a ‘after’ the crime where the ‘before’ is strongly romantisised and the ‘after’ is ‘life like hell’.
‘Crime offers a language for expressing the feeling related to changes in the neighborhood, the city an Brazilian society.’
The thinking in categories and stereotypes is in many cases simply not correct. However, the people use it in order to symbolically reorder the world they live in. People don’t understand anymore the situations they have to deal with, and because of that they use simplifications of criminals such as ‘nordestino’, ‘people from cortiços’ or ‘favela’s’. Maybe this ‘talk of crime’ ‘generates order, it is no a democratic, tolerant egalitarian order but its exact opposite. Democracy is about openness and the indeterminacy of boundaries, not about enclosures, rigid boundaries or dichotomies. In the field of crime, barriers are embedded not only in the discourses but also, materially, in the city’s walls, in the residences of people from all social classes, and in technologies of security. Prejudices and derogations not only are verbal but also reproduce themselves in rituals of suspicion and investigation at the entrances of public and private buildings.’ The building of walls in São Paulo has the strongest connection toward the process of democratization after the military dictatorship.
‘From the 1940s to the end of the 1970s … Brazil became a modern country through a paradoxical combination of rapid capitalist development, increased inequality, and lack of political freedom and respect for citizenship rights. São Paulo epitomizes [Dutch: belichamen, JvB] these paradoxes. … São Paulo has become a symbol of a poor but modern industrial consumer society, heterogeneous and deeply unequal.
The drop in fertility rates, that already started in the 1970s effected also the growth of the population in the city. Growth rates dropped from 4.5% in 1940s, 3.8% in 1970s, 2.0% in 1980s, between 1991-1996 0.4%. [We can say that SP is a consolidating metropolis in matters of growth.] One of the possible explanations for this is the accessibility to mass media that exposes the ‘model of a modern middle-class family with a working wife and a few children’.
[For interesting data about the distribution of wealth see p47,48.]
Caldeira merciless breaks the image of Brazil as a ‘racial democracy’ into pieces: ‘the income of people of color is only around 65 percent of that of the white population’, ’68 percent of the urban households below the indigent line had either a black or a prado head of household, while black or prado households represent only 41% of all urban households’.
‘The increase in violence, the failure of the institiutions of order (especially the police and the justice system), the privatization of security and justice, and the continuous walling and segregation of cities’ shows that the process of democratization after the end of military dictatorship is ambiguous in its outcome. One the one hand there are free elections, freedom of expression, end of media censorship, ect, but on the other hand violence had increased. ‘This increase in crime and violence is associated with the failure of the justice system, the privatization of justice, police abuses, the walling of the cities, and the deconstruction of public spaces. Caldeira is convinced that it is violence and the talk of violence ‘counteracts democratic tendencies and helps sustain one of the most unequal societies in the world’.

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p19-52.

City of Walls: Summary Introduction. ANTHROPOLOGY WITH AN ACCENT

Het omniversum van angst en criminaliteit had basaal gezien twee manieren van discriminatie tot gevolg: de privatisering van veiligheid en de ‘seclusion’ van sommige sociale groepen in gefortifiseerde enclaves. Beide processen veranderde het idee van de publieke ruimte en van het publiek.
Over de enclaves: ‘the new model of segregation separates social groups with an explicitness that transforms the quality of public space. … The new urban environment that enforces and values inequalities and separations is an undemocratic and nonmodern public space.’
Het onderzoek van Caldeira strekt zich uit van 1988 tot 2000. Ze deed onderzoek naar drie verschillende gebieden in de stad:
1. Poor working-class periphery, created through ‘autoconstruction’. Most of her research was conducted in Jardim das Camélias, in the eastern part of São Miguel Paulista.
2. Lower-middle-class neighborhood close to downtown: Moόca, an deindustrialised area with a lot of cortiços.
3. upper-middle-class neighborhoods: Morumbi and Alto de Pinheiros. Closed condominiums.

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p1-16.