Keywords

1 The Proposed Model as an Analytical Tool

As we tried to introduce and systematize as big a number of relevant issues as possible in our introductory chapter without losing sight of parsimony, Ana Fani Carlos dialogues with all of them content wise.

First comes the body , and then the family, the neighborhood, and the city . In an inter-scalarity based on the body, she parallels and completes the arguments of Fernandez and Brandão (2010) and Swyngedouw (2010) in the opposite (inner) direction, bridging the body and the global world. Given the “intertwining of scales”, there is no solution without questioning capitalism as a model for the world and the role states play in conceptualizing and perpetuating the model.

As the body engages in the dialectic of being passive and/or subversive, it can reject all “coercion exerted by private ownership” in a “practice that is sociospatial in nature”, bridging the socioeconomic , the sociocultural , and the socioenvironmental pillars of the city. Focusing on the relationship between the body and the city , Grosz (1992) highlights a worldwide modern phenomenon, the marginalization of some (chosen) bodies:

The question is […] to examine how different cities, different sociocultural environments actively produce the bodies of their inhabitants as […] bodies with particular physiologies, affective lives and concrete behaviors. […] The city orients and organizes family, sexual, and social relations insofar as the city divides cultural life into public and private domains, geographically dividing and defining the particular social positions and locations occupied by individuals and groups. […] These spaces, divisions, and interconnections are the roles and means by which bodies are individuated to become subjects. […T]he city’s form and structure provide the context in which social rules and expectations are internalized or habituated in order to ensure social conformity, or position social marginality at a safe or insulated and bounded distance. (Grosz 1992, p. 250)

This very sociocultural insulation provokes different responses, as have shown Carlos through the poor youths, Barbosa and Damasceno Pereira through the appearances of the different, and Torraca through the poor’s engagement in a circular violence.

The body that lives in a city divided into “areas of work , of private life, and of leisure”—where leisure, together with culture, is increasingly privatized (by the global capital) and commercialized as a commodity and where access to housing is limited—is differentiated by class and feels as if it was an alien. Here, the issues of mobility and porosity play a major socioeconomic , sociocultural, and socioenvironmental role, depriving the citizen from his or her rights. At this point, Carlos exceeds the model, for her argument goes beyond human rights, and embraces Lefèbvre’s right to the city (1991).

When Mike Davis’ cornerstone book, City of Quartz, came out, he already pointed that in “the valorized spaces of […] super-malls, […] public activity is sorted into strictly functional compartments, and circulation is internalized in corridors under the gaze of private police” (1990, p. 226), conforming what he called the “panopticon mall” (p. 240) in the city of Los Angeles. These shopping spaces were and are designed after behavioristic guidelines in order to format consumer habits, homogenize choices, and stigmatize the different. When discussing how the urban poor cope with homogenization and stigmatization, Carlos brings us the unexpected youth use of their bodies to affirm their right to be different in a consumerist society in São Paulo’s panopticon malls of the twenty-first century.

As she unveils the contemporary aspects of our consumer (modern) world, she calls attention to some very capitalist characteristics. She sees a society “under the sway of the financial world and sustained by the state”—in which people respond to market demands and identities get lost in the construction of an exacerbated individualism—as the main reason for the conflicts that search for “another society”, linking the exterior dimension (dominated by the global capital) to the socioeconomic dimension of local relations (where, according to Torres Ribeiro, the market replaced politics and economics replaced the state) and to the sociocultural dimension (where identities thrive to exist, get recognized, and sustain memory).

The limitations imposed on city inhabitants through what Habermas calls technical rationalities (political-administrative) reduce their creative powers and destabilize everyday life, but citizens have managed to reach public spaces , in the wave of the world protest movements , questioning “this life”, a life “subsumed under exchange value.” For Carlos, and here disagreeing with Torraca, the street demonstrations introduced democratic practices insofar as they were struggles for “another possible world” (in the way which conflicts should work and along the lines Irazábal discusses (2008).

The consumption world is, moreover, about stigmatizing the non-subject, and identifying the poor with everything that is backward, out of date, dirty, and violent, justifying the hygienist policies, as in Torraca’s walls. Even the new “Class C”, as Serpa also sees it, now precariously included in the consumption world and submitting itself to a capitalist program, has only changed status “from a peripheral population to a space-consuming population” that moves to newly and poorly built gated communities, mimicking the middle classes, and spend their free time in shopping malls or in the “domain of private life.”

This reproduction of patterns, guided by the capital need for expansion, brings deleterious consequences to both sociocultural, as Carlos discusses, and socioenvironmental dimensions, as investigated by Tângari. Insofar as commodities determine relations between people, humanity no longer finds fulfillment in “creative freedom”, but in consuming. And in showing it through spectacle.

Since global capitalism is the hegemonic force, the political-administration dimension only converges with it, removing the obstacles to its accumulation through changes in a “class-based planning” legislation and through “channeling and ranking investments in the city ”, what relates the external dimension to Tângari’s arguments concerning local planning in Rio. Back in 1990, Davis already denounced that urban redevelopments had “transformed public parks into temporary receptacles for the homeless and wretched” (1990, p. 226) in Los Angeles, very much like Capanema Alvares (2014) found in the 2010s Rio de Janeiro . Together these strategies not only reduce the meaning of public spaces as places of sociability (sociocultural), as Serpa also argues but create segregated spaces (in the socioeconomic realm). Segregation is the contradiction of the encounter; it is a “form of deprivation”, the “negative of the city.”

The encounter, in Carlos, is central to construct identities and collective histories (sociocultural dimension) in the public sphere—what dialogues with Barbosa and Damasceno Pereira—but this construction has been hindered by the surveillance powers of the state, as Torraca points out. In another point of agreement with Torraca, Carlos states that segregation can appear “in the discourse of exclusion, which suggests policies of inclusion […] or as a poverty trademark, which demands policies for its eradication.” By eliminating the encounter of the different, our model poses, the political-administrative dimension will prevent conflict and fear from surfacing as in Simmel (1903), Durkheim (1979) or Bauman (2007), and UPS will not serve as public sphere for the vita activa.

When introducing “The politics of oneself and politics with many others”, Barbosa and Damasceno Pereira discuss the inherent conflictual relations between the two scales (as in Carlos’ body inter-scalarity) and seem to elect the difference -unit dialectic as their focus of analyses, as Bauman (2007) and Heller (2004) do within the sociocultural dimension: “the ‘we’ of the differences in being and the unity for guaranteeing shared common rights.” For the authors, “to acknowledge the body […] is the exercise of ‘another politics,’ in which life itself is a political act”, echoing Carlos.

Like Barbosa and Damasceno Pereira, Epstein has noted a propos city fear, that “the subject’s identity cannot be constructed, materialized, or repeated without, at the very least, a psychical and spatial acknowledgement of an Other whose relationship to the subject will always be imbued with the power dynamic implied by the simple statement “You and I” (Epstein 1998, p. 216). Since “‘to be’ and ‘to appear’ are one”, when subjects elect their appearances in UPS, they are challenging the “common sense that makes them invisible to differences”, and are forcing their visibility, as well as the recognition of alterities and of all “individuals in their differences.” Differences that are not welcomed by our contemporary cities’ totalitarian ‘arch-semiotic’, as Davis (2006) has observed in downtown Los Angeles.

According to our focused authors, as subjects seek to “free themselves from the [hegemonic ] norm”, they construct ephemeral and individual practices as “style and aesthetics of existence”, present in the social movements and cultural expressions (as pictured by the authors and in Carlos’ rolezinhos), but may also embrace more collective and continuous practices, as pointed by Serpa (2013) when discussing strategies of cultural production that question the ruling classes hegemony, and in Duarte’s favelas. In Holston’s terms they are

insurgent forms […] found […] in everyday practices that, in different ways, empower, parody, derail, or subvert state agendas, […] engage the problematic nature of belonging to society, and [take place in] sites of insurgence because they introduce into the city new identities and practices that disturb established histories. (1998, pp. 47–49)

As a paradigmatic example of aesthetic collective and enduring practices within the sociocultural dimension, Woods (1998) describes the Blues Epistemology, “a self-referential system of social explanation” (p. 83) born out of the resistance to the US plantation regime implemented in the sixteenth century and crystallized in opposition to the Reconstruction governments of the late 1800s. A true “theory of African American aesthetics” developed in the 1920s and 1930s, this epistemology

became the channel through which [Southern] African Americans grasped reality […] and organized against it. […] The indigenously developed folk culture, its orature, its ethics, its tradition of social explanation, and its prescriptions were [their] basic representational grid”. (p. 83)

The tensions pointed out by Barbosa and Damasceno Pereira with the “quotidian standards—consumable and consumed” make reference not only to manifested conflicts, but also speak to Torraca’s “circularity of violence” engendered by political-administrative instances, her “autophagic” (self-destructive) nature of daily life, and to the stigma on young blacks from favelas, “subjects that repeal oppressive norms and perverse naturalizations established in the city ” also addressed by Torraca.

As much as the authors see external influences in hegemonic forces that “turned the city into machines of inequality reproduction”, they also envision “counter-hegemonic movements”, both in Foucault’s aesthetic of existence , regarding the subject’s quotidian practices in the city and in Arendt’s spaces of appearances, when citizens “constitute and maintain spaces of collective manifestations.” Despite the philosophers disagreements in a number of issues, Foucault’s subject conducts (2010, 2011)—“including the power relations that act upon the bodies” (again echoing Carlos)—seem in tune with Bourdieu’s (1987) habitus (strategic positioning according to expectations) as well as with Katz (1984), for whom, along Arendt’s lines (1991), the self is only realized politically in the appropriation of the public sphere. Altogether, they hit the bulk of the sociocultural dimension.

But “styles of existence” do more than daily constituting selves; they also “seek a life more creative, active and full of possibilities”, or “another type of life” (as in Carlos), when they exist in the presence of others and propose negotiations in the city, as Arendt (1991) established in our sociocultural dimension, and can be seen in Duarte’s favelas, the true polis conformed by citizens, or in the “reverse city”—a city of rights built out of the rejection of the hegemonic .

In the socioeconomic dimension, “the claim to the right to life shows up as a claim to the right to the city ”, once again associating human rights to Lefèbvre’s superior call (1991). Mediated by the socioenvironmental dimension, the “space of appearance”, or the “process of experimentation and creation that allows replacing the granted citizenship for a vita activa citizenship”, is the great potentiality envisioned by Queiroga for multifunctional spaces . This interdisciplinarity is well understood by the authors when they state that “in the public space , social, economic, and cultural issues engender the subject’s sensible experiences.” Altogether these authors incidentally respond to Holston’s call: “What planners need to look for are the emergent sources of citizenship—and their repression—that indicates […] a continual reinvention of the social, the present, and the modern and their modes of narrative and communication” (1998, p. 49) or in Miraftab’s words, “their own terms of engagement” (2009, p. 41).

Torraca sees Rio as a divided city since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, but stresses the recent external forces and ideologies that have made it yet more segregated. The “cornered democracy ” concept is a representation of the public spaces division “between the democratic asphalt and the permanent state of exception imposed on the slum” made true by oligarchic elites within the political-administrative instances. Reflecting the self-destructive character of the consumer society, this “autophagic democracy” perpetuates an aesthetic of violence or what she calls the “circularity of violence.” A democracy based on material goods consumption leads to the “self-consumption of democracy in the process of constructing reality, […] opening space for dealing with democracy destruction.” The aesthetic that emerges from this autophagic democracy in socio-spaces is one of segregation , memory annihilation, inequalities, and divisions, affecting the socioeconomic , the sociocultural, and the socioenvironmental dimensions of the city.

When Planet of Slums came out in 2006, Davis asked us if the great slums of the world were not volcanoes waiting to erupt. The author then envisioned that “the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism” (p. 201). In different forms, according to Davis, the urban poor would be bound to respond with violence to their criminalization, in a circular movement toward more and more violence. Similarly to other US cities, he also noted in Los Angeles (Davis 1992) a “security offensive, [a] middle-class demand for increased spatial and social insulation” (p. 227) and—contrary to the Eastern Europe falling walls—a growing social apartheid that had been materialized, through the adoption of a “deliberate socio-spatial strategy” (p. 229), in the construction of walls all over the city . Later, Balko (2013) drafted the recent US history of police militarization, stressing that gross funding was channeled to the “War on Terror” as a response to September 11, not unlike Rio’s militarization using the ‘war on drugs’ discourse.

Torraca now denounces how social movements and unrests coming from the slums endure both semantic and concrete apartheid processes through walls that separate them from the city and through what Davis called MOUT, “Military operations on Urbanized Terrain” (2006, p. 203), forging a circularity of violence. As Rousseau has stated, “violence is justified against anyone who is excluded from the social contract because he threatens the perpetuation of sovereign power that is assumed as the defender of order, peace and stability” (Vardoulakis 2013, p. 153). According to Ford, and reminding René Girard’s ‘Violence and Sacrifice’, “Violence must be answered with more violence. [V]iolent intensity suggests that the only response to violence is more violence, a circularity of violence that does not allow its victims to be released from its burden” (2010, p. 84). In that sense, Rio slums seem to have ‘evolved’ towards the “distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century” (Davis 2006, p. 205), placing the political-administrative dimension in diametrical opposition to the sociocultural and socioeconomic dimensions.

Having as one of her main objectives evidencing the horizontal sociocultural movements vis-a-vis the vertical corporate-state movements, Torraca moves on to analyze the 2013 Brazilian riots and recognizes that the reduction of social inequalities and of social violence in the popular governments of Lula and Dilma (2002–2016), had seemed to bring the country’s political-administrative institutions to a mature democracy . However, as middle classes complaints in the virtual world made viral, the consequent conflicts manifested in UPS shook the country and the traditional media, all taken by surprise. Concerning social movements in UPS, Douzinas (2013) reminds us that “[u]rban space offers ample opportunity for political action” as has been demonstrated by “iconic cases [of early modernity] urban riots: American Civil Rights movement, May 1968, [Athens] 1973, Prague, Bucharest, Tehran and Cairo uprisings, to name a few, [in which] the ‘street’ has confronted and unsettled urban legality” (p. 139). Paving Torraca’s line of reasoning, he also noted it was “strange that the widespread uprising that took place in Greece in December 2008 surprised and shocked politicians and mainstream commentators” (p. 139).

In Rio, the violent police reactions to the general public followed its training in the slums , and the sociocultural grammar of public spaces went upside down: “the social division lived daily by the inhabitants of the city made itself present in the riots” when the “democracy of the asphalt” was treated as the “bare life of the slum.” The population response was immediate: more and more people wanted to join the spectacle, until the hegemonic media regained control over the after-truth, and re-imposed the corporate entrepreneur city, ready for FIFA and COI mega-events and for the coup d’état that impeached the left-wing elected president. Most 2010s manifestations around the world (from the Arab Spring to the numerous Occupy movements) have presented a number of resemblances and many inspired the 2013 Rio riots (Benayon, Capanema Alvares and Souza 2014), but the June 2013 protests in Istambul were some of the most similar to the Rio riots, with the absence of a centralized leadership, the mainstream media downplaying it at the beginning, the crucial role played by the alternative media in the Web, the engagement of both leftist and right-wing citizens and the excessive use of police force. Unlike the Brazilian case, the Turkish rallies were not co-opted by the mainstream media and the corporate interests to guide the masses through a rally process that led to a coup d’état, showing how UPS ‘making history’ (Irazábal 2008) events can be of inter-scalar importance in the political-administrative realm.

In and of itself, the media globally fuels the circularity of violence. On the one hand, and very much like in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Mirzoeff’s (2011) “military-visual complex” technologies have been used to broadcast surreal images of UPPs and military troops invading slums, creating an idea of a desirable efficiency in chasing outlaws amidst poor people houses. On the other hand, “rioting, [in] its own aesthetic” (Douzinas 2013, p. 139), is transformed in spectacle by the mainstream media, argues Torraca, echoing Douzinas (2013) and Balibar (2007), when the latter discusses the riots in French urban peripheries:

An implicit understanding with photographers and mainstream media offers publicity to the insurgents and dazzling photos and stirring stories to the press. As Etienne Balibar put it, the mass media have become ‘passive organizers’ of the riots because of their news value. But there is a price to pay. The ‘virtual violence’ they display ‘transforms real endemic social violence, to which it responds, into spectacle, thereby at once making it visible in its intensity and invisible and its everydayness’. (Douzinas 2013, p. 140)

Torraca goes on to denounce that these inter-scalar interests, together with a long history of police violence inherited from the military, sought much more than hygienist policies; they aimed at imposing an “oligarchic rule of law” in Rancière’s words (2014), a “permanent state of exception”, as in Agamben (2004), on the poorer parts of the divided city , “producing and reproducing violence uninterruptedly to attend exclusively to private [real estate] interests” while making sure it constituted a “spectacle of the real” that reassured its own circularity, having as excuses a “war on drugs” and the mega-events to come. As such, external ‘examples’ were used as a means to eliminate the encounter between the different, proposed by Arendt (1991), Habermas (1981), and Bauman (2007) and explored by the previous chapters. Contrary to the possibilities of self-expression and advocacy presented by Barbosa and Damasceno Pereira, and along the lines of Carlos’ urban deprivation and stigmatization, for Torraca “public spaces have been demarcated as spaces of exclusion, [...] preventing the construction of a subjectivity of the economically colonized”, and further reproducing the roots of prejudice in a “spectacle of empty bodies controlled by terror”, as Barbosa and Damasceno Pereira’s invisible bodies also recalled.

This state of exception paradigm serves the entrepreneurial city —global interests included—but goes far beyond an administrative issue, impeding not only the encounter that gives life to the sociocultural dimension of a city, but also the development of all that is, in socioeconomic terms, close to the right to the city . But that also gives rise to an aesthetic of resistance, as Barbosa and Damasceno Pereira, and also Carlos, have pointed out. Through UPS appropriations, artistic events and activities in favelas “rescue political practices [from a] consumerist kidnapping of lives and dreams”, and offer, as in Duarte, a “resistance to the circularity of violence imposed by the state.”

Serpa’s chapter explores how the sociocultural dimension touches the other dimensions at different scales, since leisure has changed globally and locally for different reasons. He starts by assuming leisure spaces and work spaces form a “dialectical and inseparable pair”; thus, the socioeconomic dimension is herein tied to the sociocultural dimension: as the “logics of productive work” have changed towards freeing people “from labor for reproductive work” (for better or for worse), there will be changes in the demands for UPS, as well as for different housing and transportation systems. As much as the author sees the new Class C self-employment changing the use of and the demand for urban public spaces , Roy (2005) views informality as “a mode of urbanization, […] a system of norms that governs the process of urban transformation itself” (p. 148), contradicting De Soto’s (2000) “heroic entrepreneurship ” ideal, which is at the very basis of neoliberalism: by ‘freeing’ the poor to be entrepreneurs rather than the old-fashioned proletariat (Roy 2006) the new rules “obscure the role of the state and even render it unnecessary” (Roy 2005, p. 148). Again, Roy’s observations point to the inter-scalarity and the external dimension influences in planning.

Serpa sees a number of reasons why, despite all time-saving technologies (in Harvey’s (2014) words), human beings are still subsumed to the intensified time given by machinery: as labor and consumption became two sides of the same coin, the more the person works, the greedier he or she becomes, as stated by Arendt (1991). Class attachment and consumerism lead to one another. Since consumption and its derived satisfaction are ephemeral in nature, society has become a composition of “episodes and fragments”, therefore focused on short-term objectives; no “narratives of identity and life history” make sense anymore. This little attachment to places, to groups, to belonging, not only hinders personal experiences of sociability—leaving only abstraction to a long-term fulfillment—but represents a form of deprivation of urban life, as perceived by Carlos. In other words, the local sociocultural dimension has not been advanced by the changes in external capitalism factors concerning changes in work-leisure relations.

This global phenomenon realizes itself in two fairly different ways, certainly more acutely diverse in the Global South: while the upper classes may enjoy more leisure based on consumption, “many workers set themselves as individual entrepreneurs” in order to guarantee some cash flow stability. Brazil, in particular, witnessed a sizeable increase in the so-called Class C in the twenty-first century, which meant a number of low wage workers being able to open their own small businesses. In any case, and according to De Masi (2000), free time still cannot be much appreciated in our current society, for people are not used to value it, are not used to “entertain themselves”; the socioenvironmental dimension therefore tends to be more or less disregarded in those settings. On the contrary, this external phenomenon may bring a number of socioeconomic consequences with the increase of telework: transportation, commerce, and services will have to respond to different demands, both location and time wise, affecting land use value, housing standards, health-related issues, and the like.

But if and when the time for “creative idleness ” comes, UPS, together with private places of encounter, will be core spaces, as cities will have to answer the demands of those “who rest and have fun” (in De Masi (2000) words), local or incoming tourists. The socioenvironment dimension will be most affected in all of its aspects (it is worth noting that Queiroga found an increasing demand for UPS in twenty-first century Brazil, though the cited study did not discuss class or income cohorts).

By means of two case studies, Serpa found out that among the mid-low income classes in Brazil, “ascension in the social structure implies the indebtedness and impoverishment of the social capital available” to those who become individual or family entrepreneurs, and “ascension takes place more from the insertion in consumption” than from living the public sphere. As already stated in Carlos, this class fraction mimics the middle classes and spends its free time in shopping malls or in the “domain of private life.” Worse yet, by switching the television it turns itself into easy prey to the mainstream media twisted construction of reality, as Torraca warns us. According to Serpa’s assessment, the Brazilian new Class C, as shaped by late capitalism and the neoliberal canons of flexibilization and self-entrepreneurship , “is far from reaching the ‘idleness’ envisioned by De Masi: […] it does not engage in cultural enlightening activities; [in fact,] there has been a good deal of impoverishment of the[ir] social capital” (in this volume). Not unlike the contemporary western self-employed low and middle classes, Brazilians tend to spend their free time consuming marketed goods and TV shows. In other words, in order to climb the socioeconomic ladder, this group not only lowers its sociocultural possibilities, lowering, as a consequence, its recognition and demand for UPS, but also relinquish its basic human rights concerning work hours and its right to the city . They become “super-exploited [workers], with no tradition of class solidarity”, i.e., citizens deprived of an urban life.

While emptying public spaces of meaning, this phenomenon has also been partly supporting some dynamism in Third World and Eastern economies. In China, where it plays a substantive role, leisure studies call for civilized, healthy and rational use of free time in order to foster a competitive society (Rolandsen 2011); in Taiwan, leisure also seems to be seen as a resource, but a resource to be shared and put to the best community interest (Liu and Zhang 2006). In both cases, the demand for socioenvironmental amenities tends to increase.

If there is no clear demand for UPS, the political-administrative dimension may as well not provide or care for them, what would mean a scenario of socioeconomic interests, fueled by external factors, ruling alone socioenvironmental and sociocultural possibilities, as Tângari fears. But Serpa optimistically reminds us that, on the other hand, “more people working at home and sparing the fatigue” of long journeys to work, “can release new energies […] at the neighborhood scale”, generating greater citizen participation and interest in UPS. Then again (in Torraca words, which Carlos seems to agree), while “leisure has become a possibility of seizing gains, the ludic and art can help subvert relationships from their current stablished forms”; that would call for a “new form of social and spatial organization of society and cities” as stated by Serpa.

Potential is the guiding concept in Queiroga’s chapter. While acknowledging that both theories and practices from the Global North have influenced Brazilian UPS readings and projects towards gated communities and indoor private activities, he points out that, coming from a different socioeconomic and sociocultural reality, there has been a concrete demand for leisure and civic areas for public use in the country.

Reminding us that while in Arendt’s terms “work and labor are activities proper to the private sphere” (agreeing with Serpa on the leisure conceptualization), political action, in a broad sense, can only take place in a general public sphere (in Habermas’ terms 1981)—the locus of vita activa. In his conceptual system concerning the public sphere and public spaces , the category “public space” highly converges to our UPS concept; while he conceives the term focusing on land use, we do it focusing on access, meaning that Queiroga’s public spaces, different from UPS, encompass public owned spaces that preclude public access and appropriation, while excluding private property with free access to people. These nuances will have some importance in sociocultural and socioenvironmental aspects. Most important, however, are the notions of temporary and hybrid public spaces, meaning that through appropriations, spaces may change in character and use in real life, developing socioeconomic, sociocultural and socioenvironmental roles to different degrees in time. A number of authors have stressed the socioenvironmental potential of multifunctional spaces in the developed world, as they offer recreational areas that can play crucial environmental roles, like mitigating floods (see for example, Siekmann et al. 2012), while others have pointed to the sociocultural relevance of such spaces, as their

amenities often appeal to diverse community members, including activists, artists, academics and social entrepreneurs, allowing them to act as incubators for new ideas, knowledge exchange, shared experience and experimentation. This connection of diverse communities can inspire innovative thinking and provide opportunities for collaboration and partnerships across traditional boundaries”. (Multi-functional Spaces 2017)

Moreover, Brandt and Vejre (2004) have pointed to the multidisciplinary character of such spaces, as they see, among other functional classifications , the one based on their economic, ecological and cultural functions. Some of the most recognized multifunctional spaces are the trendy High Line, built in 2009 on top of an old rail line in New York, and the Granville Island in Vancouver.

In large and mid-size Brazilian cities, the long external influence toward the road mode of transportation resulted in open spaces for public use dominated by the road system, with more than double the areas dedicated to “squares, parks and the like”, showing a socioeconomic dimension predominance. While a number of pedestrian streets have been implemented, mobility is still the driving force behind new pedestrian lanes and bikeways.

Housing needs, as Tângari also discusses, have been politically situated opposite to dedicated leisure spaces and environmental protection areas, as if they were in necessary struggle and not complementary parts of human rights in the city . Queiroga sees that we have to avoid “the tendency to treat social and environmental issues in isolation”, but as “public policies in general fail to recognize it”, there has been few attempts at promoting socioeconomic aspects together with conservation and fruition; lately, the political-administrative dimension has bended toward environmental aspects, as other studies have shown how urban landscapes can contribute to city entrepreneurship and city marketing.

While in Brazilian poor neighborhoods the streets have always played multifunctional roles (mostly serving commercial and leisure activities, as Duarte shows) in central areas the ‘appropriation of squares, streets, and avenues has undergone decades of decline.” For Queiroga, however, multifunctional spaces “reveal an excellent strategy for exploiting available resources.” Both genuine and policy-driven appropriations are taking place in a number of ways, to the advancement of the sociocultural dimension: through providing leisure activities as a necessary complement to work , through turning leisure into consumption, through staging spectacles for city marketing, through conflictual demonstrations, and/or as “potential tools for organizing social and cultural events ‘towards another kind of globalization’”, in tune with all previous authors hopes and visions.

In his final statements, Queiroga argues that lived open spaces are under constant transformation, no matter the plans initially made for them. More than questioning planning we ought to recognize that “structural relations between State, capital and work are not fixed, they become established within a dialectical process”. In other words, the local dimensions are not only intertwined, but also and altogether, are open to change.

It is very clear for Tângari that “the organization of Brazilian society” (encompassing both socioeconomic and sociocultural dimensions) is expressed “in the configuration of open spaces”, whether they may be public or private, and serve economic, cultural or environmental ends. Dialectically, open spaces are responsible for creating identities and collective memories. Her main question, thus, focuses on how space is manifested in society.

Unfortunately, she sees the political-administrative dimension as a dominant force in the production of public spaces , ignoring class struggles when imposing the capitalist logic based on vehicle circulation, to the detriment of “sociability and encounters.” Another aspect of this domination is reflected in the “tensions and conflicts between the process of occupation and the environmental substrate”, in which housing needs and environmental protection are made to clash.

Unveiling external and corporate capital influences over city planning, she argues that, since the 1980s, the real estate market, through the “standardization of landscapes, [the] adoption of imported models [and the assignment of] value to new localities” has been structuring the current levels of spatial segregation in Brazil. With the proliferation of gated communities for high-income sectors in the urban fringes, the poorer either joined them in the surrounding undeveloped areas, settled in the “outer peripheries without infrastructure, or the environmentally fragile areas not yet occupied.” In any case, those occupations configured environmental social injustices, creating zones “contrary to the idea of the constitution of a democratic public space , a space of social participation, [generating] individualization, spatial segregation and high environmental costs.” Not surprisingly, the “induced”, the “spontaneous”, and the “controlled” growth, all inductive of socioeconomic conflicts of interests, are “embedded in the legal instruments that regulate urban occupation.” Along with the political-administrative dimension, the market and the mainstream media make believe that the real struggle is between low-income settlements and protected areas.

Taking Rio as an emblematic example of Brazilian cities, Tângari shows that when the geo-biophysical substrate is more valuable as a socioeconomic asset, the pressures on the socioenvironmental dimension will cause unequal distribution of UPS and will forge, again, environmental social injustices. Her research project aimed at exploring the “relationship between landscape construction, [...] the geo-biophysical substrate” and the socioeconomic dimension (considering the influences of both capital and the different fractions of labor); it also aimed at understanding how recurrent the spatial segregation patterns have been, “irrespective of the size of the city [or] the population” and of planning instruments and political-administrative structures. Her results, backed by other studies concerning the whole country, show that six similar patterns (like high concentration of land or low supply of public transportation, for example) have been systematically adopted, regardless of the substrate and the sociocultural characteristics, in order to ensure unequal cities. In Rio’s real estate market, in particular, (except for newly developed fringes where there are vast non-occupied green areas), high-income settlements and quantity and quality of UPS go hand in hand and vice versa. In a quali-quantitative approach and taking historical, social, and political aspects into consideration, Tângari demonstrates how the poorer urban areas are historically bound to lack quality public spaces that could enhance their inhabitants’ citizenship, demonstrating in Rio de Janeiro what Fernández-Álvarez (2017) has recently found in Mexico City regarding green public spaces. While Fernández-Álvarez’s results show that green public spaces distribution is biased against young populations with low levels of education and high levels of poverty living in densely populated areas, Tângari found that throughout the twentieth century public policies have shaped the metropolitan area so that a low number of squares, parks, and soccer pitches, and the predominance of a dense road and railway network are positively related to high densities of housing and medium to low-income populations in the urban fringes. That is how, echoing our previous authors, the common citizen is deprived of an urban life, how he or she is seen as bare life, how the circularity of violence is linked to the real estate market, the entrepreneur city , and their external allies.

Despite different roots and inspirations, the socioenvironmental injustice that might be a trademark of modern urbanization history in the Global South has reached worldly attention and has been a major focus of academic research since the 1990s, as Bolin et al. (2000), Turner and Wu (2002) and Carruthers (2008) have demonstrated. Turner and Wu (2002) argue, moreover, that a growing body of literature places “the sources of environmental injustice in a complex process through which structural factors such as capitalism, policies and regulations, and social stratification” interact with private and governmental decisions that shape public policies throughout the world (Turner and Wu 2002, p. 18), warranting our multidimensional analyses. We, in this volume, are thus trying to break the chains of localized discourses and tactics, as Carruthers has called for (2008).

Notwithstanding her findings, Tângari also hopes that planning will be able to “assist in the proposal of projects designed to regenerate and manage public space ” toward a more egalitarian society.

Despite and against all odds, favela “populations find in their self-built homes, entirely paid with their own and scarce financial means, a feasible surviving strategy.” With this statement Duarte opens the last and most cheering chapter, finally giving the reader some concrete hope in the city. As much as these populations’ position in the city is near the bottom, their history is based on political-administrative and socioeconomic segregation translated into the territory, as Tângari has shown. Their sociocultural appropriation of space and resources, and their sociabilities have, however, made a difference . Amidst a historical “mix of tolerance and indifference”, where no human rights are considered, “favelas resist, expand and consolidate”, mingling in. They are here to stay. As Miraftab reminds us, “the deep informality of third world cities is not their failure, but as Simone (2004) suggests, a triumphant sign of their success in resisting the Western models of planning and urban development” (2009, p. 45).

In the “Carioca” (Rio’s) specific case, the alleged city’s proneness to be a “first class” international destiny led administrators to “import and technocratic(ally) replicat(e) urban governance models” (showing the external influence), which only concentrated income in the hands of a few and deepened the socioeconomic and sociocultural segregation in the last decades. More recently, international tourism and the mega-events industry brought a badly planned legacy and excused a real state project based on the “military occupation of favelas through the ‘Pacifying Police Units’ (UPPs)”, also denounced by Torraca.

Duarte wonders, interested “in debating [the factors] associated with the power of resistance [and the favelas’] leading role in the production and reproduction of spaces for the poor”, why their inhabitants resist evictions and how they manage to keep a vibrant environment while their regular and formal neighbors have become dull and fragmented. The answer starts with land appropriation based on use value and not on exchange value, which becomes solidary, contiguous, and cohesive, leading to likewise sociocultural relations; their low standards of living are mostly due the political-administrative dimension with its entrepreneurial ties that do not extend public services and facilities to these areas, and not to high densities. Another dominant factor is their solidary spending and investing structure: together they build their homes, their businesses, and by extension their public space , which become commonly appropriated. Their right to work is exercised in their own houses or out in the public space, whereas their rights to housing and to the city constitute a tough struggle, from land ownership to mobility, and to education and health services. The absence of expertise (political-administrative) planning opens the way to a “sociospatial dialectic” process involving “the inside and the outside, the individual and the collective, the private and the public” (as in Mauss 1904–1905 and in Vernant 1990), and the construction of public space “arises from eminently collective demands.”

The dichotomies we, as outsiders, create between favelas and “the asphalt” (to employ Torraca’s terminology) are mostly located in the difference between having or not political-administrative regulations and provisions, between what we are used to and the different. Coming from different socioeconomic and sociocultural dynamics, we see the violence of the militia, but we do not see the violence of “car users (and their) environmental pollution” or “the violence represented by the spaces for fast traffic flows, defined by the hegemony of motorizes vehicles [...] in a more and more hostile, threatening and technicized environment”. In favelas, on the contrary, “streets are spaces for festivities, leisure, affective encounters, for work, for play” (Silva and Barbosa 2005 apud Duarte), despite the danger and fear imposed by the state police and the criminals.

Within the sociocultural dimension, the symbolic appropriation of UPS in favelas permits a rather different “production of presence”, less violent to its inhabitants (as Carlos and Torraca wish) and “of visibility”, accounting for those that are invisible in the asphalt (as Barbosa and Damasceno Pereira have argued), as opposed to the “abstract, cold, and rationalized spaces” of the regular city.

In a world “reduced to a rampant consumerism and to the pursuit of selfish fulfillment” (as in Heller 2004, and in Carlos), “perhaps favelas have something valuable to teach us”, says Duarte. Some of the lessons he amassed include “the creation of channels for active popular participation”, “the universalization of citizenship rights”, “the production of bonds of identity”, and “the political sharing of existences built in common by the social use of public space.”

As for our proposed model, we argue that it faired reasonably well as an analytic tool, knitting together the texts herein presented and a number of authors and cases from around the world, thus offering a comprehensive enough perspective, though in need of incorporating more variables and blurring its dimensions rigidity, as our contemporary time demands. Above all, it missed to clearly address, more than human rights, Lefèbvre’s right to the city (1991).