Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

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PLANET OF SLUMS
Alphaville is a complete private city with a large office complex, an up­
scale mall, and walled residential areas - all defended by more than 800
private guards. In City f Walls (2000), her justly celebrated study of the
militarization of urban space in Brazil, Teresa Caldeira writes that
"security is one of the main elements in its advertising and an obsession
of all involved with it." In practice, this has meant vigilante justice
for criminal or vagrant intruders, while Alphaville's own gilded youth
are allowed to run amuck; one resident quoted by Caldeira affirms:
"there is a law for the mortal people, but not for Alphaville residents."79
The Johannesburg and Sao Paulo edge cities (as well as those in
Bangalore and Jakarta) are self-sufficient "off worlds" because they
incorporate large employment bases as well as most of the retail and
cultural apparatus of traditional urban cores. In the cases of more
purely residential enclaves, the construction of high-speed highways -
as in North America - has been the sine qua non for the suburbanization
of affluence. As the Latin Americanist Dennis Rodgers argues in the
case of Managua elites, "It is the interconnection of these privately
protected spaces that constitutes them as a viable 'system,' and it can
be contested that the most critical element that has permitted the emer­
gence of this 'fortified network' has been the development of a
strategic set of well-maintained, well-lit, and fast-moving roads in
Managua during the past half decade."so
Rodgers goes on to discuss the "Nueva Managua" project of conservative
mayor (and in 1996, president) Arnoldo Aleman who, in
addition to destroying revolutionary murals and harassing peddlers and
squatters, built the new road system with meticulous attention to the
security of wealthier drivers in their SUV s:
The proliferation of roundabouts ... can be linked to the fact that they
reduce the risk of carjacking (since cars do not have to stop), while the
primary purpose of the bypass seems to have been to allow drivers to
avoid a part of Managua reputed for its high levels of crime .... Not only
79 Teresa Caldeira, City ( Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citzenship in Sao Paulo,
Berkeley 2000, pp. 253, 262, 278.
. '
80 Dennis Rodgers, "'Disembeddillg' the City: Crime, Insecunty and Spatlal
Organization in Managua," Environment and Urbanization 16:2 (October 2004),
pp. 120-21.
HAUSSMANN IN THE TROPICS
do the road works seem predominantly to connect locations associated
with the lives of the urban elites, but there has been simultaneously an
almost complete neglect of roads in parts of the city that are unequivo­
cally not associated with the urban elites [read: pro-SandinistaJ.81
In a similar fashion, privately built motorways in Buenos Aires now
allow the rich to live full time in their "countries" (country club homes)
in distant Pilar and commute to their offices in the core. (Gran Buenos
Aires also has an ambitious edge city or megaempredimiento, called
Nordelta, whose financial viability is uncertain.)82 In Lagos, likewise, a
vast corridor was cleared through densely populated slums to create an
expressway for the managers and state officials who live in the wealthy
suburb of Ajah. Examples of such networks are numerous, and
Rodgers emphasizes that the "ripping out [ofj large swaths of the
metropolis for the sole use of the urban elites ... encroaches on the
public space of the city in a much more extensive way than fortified
enclaves do."83
It is important to grasp that we are dealing here with a fundamental
reorganization of metropolitan space, involving a drastic diminution of
the intersections between the lives of the rich and the poor, which transcends
traditional social segregation and urban fragmentation. Some
Brazilian writers have recently talked about "the return to the medieval
city," but the implications of middle-class secession from public space
- as well as from any vestige of a shared civic life with the poor - are
more radica1.84 Rodgers, following Anthony Giddens, conceptualizes
the core process as a "disembedding" of elite activities from local territorial
contexts, a quasi-utopian attempt to disengage from a
suffocating matrix of poverty and social violence.8s Laura Ruggeri (discussing
Hong Kong's Palm Springs) stresses as well the contemporary
81 Ibid.
82 Guy Thuillier, "Gated Communities in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos
Aires," pp. 258-59.
83 Rodgers, "'Dis embedding' the City," p. 123.
84 Amalia Geraiges de Lemos, Francisco Scarlato, and Reinaldo Machado, "0
Retorno a Cidade Medieval: 0 s Condominios Fechados da Metropole Paulistana," in
Luis Felipe Cabrales Barajas (ed.), Latinoamfrica: Paises Abierlos, Ciudades Cerradas,
Guadalajara 2000, pp. 217-36.
85 Rodgers, "'Dis embedding' the City," p. 123.
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