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.