A Place in the City: How the right to the city is fought today in Latin American cities
Earlier this year, UCL Urban Lab hosted a screening of the feature-length documentary ‘A Place in the City’ as part of its 20th anniversary series of events.
The feature-length documentary explores hope, resistance and collective action in Latin American cities. Written and directed by Dr Gabriel Silvestre (Newcastle University), the film delves into the enduring influence of philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s revolutionary ideas on the ‘right to the city’. Through the lens of communities in Santiago (Chile), Rosario (Argentina), and Belo Horizonte (Brazil), it reveals how ordinary people are reclaiming urban space – fighting for their rights while actively shaping more inclusive neighbourhoods.
This blog post was written by Dr Joe Penny and Professor Adriana Allen.
Centrality, autonomy and the state in the struggle for housing justice — Dr Joe Penny
A Place in the City is an inspiring and hopeful film about the collective power and potential of popular grassroots housing justice movements. Refusing ‘dystopian grammars of urban injustice’, Gabriel Silvestre captures the capacity of ordinary people acting in concert to overcome the gendered and racialising oppressions and injustices of capitalist urbanisation. Moving across struggles, he captures how precariously housed tenants collectively build alternatives to the ‘false choice urbanism’ of disinvestment, decline and abandonment, on the one hand, and speculative investment, displacement and dispossession, on the other.
Importantly, the film achieves this without romanticising the struggles, or trivialising the pain, loss and sacrifice, of its protagonists; the diverse working-class women fighting to house themselves, their families, and communities with dignity. As Charlene from Izidora, Brazil, puts it towards the end of the film, reflecting on her experiences of police brutality: “we lost lives, lost health, mental health, physical health… we lost the right to be with our children, dedicate to them, care for them”.
The film delves deep into three cases of housing justice movements in Argentina, Chile and Brazil. It is dense with situated insight and imagination drawn from the lived experiences of tenant activists. In between, the film dialogues with an international group of campaigners and, more broadly, academics. This combination of positionalities and expertise conveys a shared set of ideas, strategies and practices that resonate well beyond the southern reaches of the western hemisphere.
So what can those of us in London, or indeed anywhere else, learn from this triangular tour of Latin America? Three ideas resonated with me: centrality, autonomy and the state.
1. The right to centrality
A key insight I gleaned from this film is that fighting for our ‘place in the city’ is about so much more than struggling to access housing as shelter, as important as that is. More fundamentally, it is to demand and claim a ‘Right to Centrality’ as the socially produced wealth of the city. Early in the film Christian Schmid articulates this as the right not to be driven to the periphery; to not be displaced or banished from the very essence of the urban, or what Alvaro Seville-Buitrago defines as “the condition of simultaneity, density, and social complexity that results from the juxtaposition of activities and encounters in the process of spatial agglomeration”.
This does not simply imply the right to inhabit the historical or geospatial centres of cities, although it can be that. Rather, across contexts — be it in Rosario, Santiago or Belo Horizonte, or indeed Haringey in London — working-class populations produce multiple centralities as various urban commons: they elaborate complex and diverse places from which they build their own worlds, practice their own ways of being, and consolidate their political autonomy. This brings me to a second theme that runs through the film: the importance of autonomy as a collective process and achievement.
2. Autonomy as collective achievement
Autonomy as a collective process and achievement contrasts sharply with the shallow and attenuated, individualising and alienating, notions of ‘consumer choice’ that we get when we rent housing through real estate markets, or when it is provided for, or forced upon, us by neoliberalising welfare reforms. Instead, through the examples showcased in this film, we are presented with a richer autonomy that emerges collectively through practices of organising, defending, and demanding, as well as imagining, designing and building. Following James Scott, we might call these practices the calisthenics of autogestion.
Overtime, in the everyday struggles for housing, people incrementally build the confidence and capacities for self-governance and self-determination. They develop a deep sense of ownership over the places they have brought into being. Critically, this is not the possessive ownership of liberal property regimes, a colonial mode of ownership that yokes property to individual personhood and dispossesses the urban majority, but a form of what Ananya Roy has called possessive collectivism, a social and de-alienating mode of ownership that empowers urban inhabitants.
3. Learning to work with, against and beyond the State
Finally, I’ll end on what this film has to say about the State. The state looms large in all its contradictions in this film. At various points, the protagonists of the struggles in this film appeal to the state, demanding to be included in the existing city through the extension of basic services and infrastructures. In other moments, they are the beneficiaries of state funding, even as they seek to exceed the logics of state austerity and the impoverished designs of state social housing. At all times they are exposed to the violence of the state, both the slow violence of infrastructural neglect and the immediate violence of police brutality.
This suggests that whilst housing struggles can, at least for a time, liberate themselves from the market — carving out commons that provide shelter from commodification — they can only ever do so in relation to, and in complex entanglements with, the state. Learning to read the wind, as Gautam Bhan put it in the film, could more specifically be articulated as learning to read the state; learning when and how to work in, against, in spite of, and beyond the state where possible. Clearly there is no single blueprint to guide us on this question; the state is a contradictory, differentiated and variegated actor. Instead, we need stories of success, practices others have tested and refined, a diverse toolkit or playbook.
This film is an important and welcome addition to such a project.
Crafting pathways towards housing justice — Professor Adriana Allen
Gabriel Silvestre takes us through an insightful and sensitive exploration of how citizens challenge these choices by collectively claiming their right to housing across Argentina, Brazil and Chile, and in the process, crafting pathways to housing justice.
Over the years, I have had the privilege of working with and learning from many grassroots housing collectives in Latin America and elsewhere. Through these encounters, I found that their everyday city-making practices are inextricably linked to collective strategies deployed to challenge the politics of bare citizenship. As Teresa Caldeira argues, these strategies possess three key qualities, which are thoroughly explored in Gabriel’s film. Firstly, they are long-term, incremental, and constantly evolving; secondly, they interact across different domains with the dominant logics of State regulation, formal real estate finance, and commodity circulation; and last, but not least, through these processes, many city-makers become fluent in claiming and realising their right to the city, thereby expanding their collective political agency.
In conversation with the women and men who are the protagonists of these processes, as well as with activists and academics, Gabriel’s film offers many additional insights, which I would like to highlight in four critical takeaways.
1. The right to the city is made, not granted
The film redefines the right to the city from an abstract idea or intellectual construct to a tangible, shared process created by and for ordinary citizens that precedes and exceeds its academic theorisation. Silvestre reminds us that, for a large number of women and men across the so-called global south, the right to decent housing is neither facilitated by the State nor the market, but is instead realised through the social production of housing and habitat, that is, through prolonged processes of mobilisation and conscientisation through which ordinary citizens become a collective force with a shared imagination. Furthermore, the right to the city is not merely the right to a set of basic assets and services — such as housing, education, health, and others — but, as Schmid explains in the film, the right not to be pushed to the margins of society. Claiming the right to the city thus activates the claiming of multiple rights, and it does so with a pluriversal purpose. In other words, it involves a commitment to fostering, defending, and creating a world where many different worlds — diverse cultures, knowledge systems, and ways of being — can coexist and flourish.
2. Housing is a site of political struggle
Throughout the film, we are reminded that housing is a site of precarity, violence and exclusion, a site where speculative capitalism becomes entangled with patriarchy and racism, as interlocked drivers of inequality, marginalisation and othering that operate through deeply ingrained, structural, and institutionalised forms of dominance and oppression. The film powerfully shows why confronting housing struggles is therefore far more than seeking secure shelter, it is also a political act of resistance that builds popular power with the capacity to fight back against multiple forms of discrimination.
3. Women are at the forefront of city-making
The film depicts the role women play in the collective realisation of the right to the city. As Ana Sugranyes states: “the ideal city doesn’t exist, but we [women] as citizens want to be part of its construction.” Throughout the film, we meet many of these ‘constructoras’: Carmen, Maria Luisa, Lorena, Ayelen, Victoria, Anita, Cristina, Graciela, Vivian, Bella, Renata, Ana Maria, Leni, Charlene, Cheyene, and many more unnamed women who remind us that they don’t just want to build houses but homes and neighbourhoods fit for life. For them, claiming the right to the city means a commitment to a lifelong project, in which they often lose everything, only to start all over again — after each flood or eviction — carving political spaces to reclaim their right to meaningful participation.
4. Creating a new vocabulary for urban transformation
The film skilfully guides us through a vocabulary of transformative change; what society and the State often label as ‘slums’ or ‘informal settlements’ are dignified as ‘popular neighbourhoods’; the right to housing is defined not just as the right to ‘adequate’ housing but as the right to ‘decent and dignified’ housing; we are encouraged to reconsider who the true ‘expert’ is in everyday city-making. In a similar vein, the struggles depicted by the film’s protagonists are not merely about ‘access’ to housing but about seeking autonomy and collective control over their lives.
A place to be, belong and build a future
In a nutshell, the film argues that the call for A Place in the City is far more than a call for a roof; it’s a call for a place to be respected and feel safe in, a place to live free of violence and discrimination, a place to raise one’s children, a place to be and belong, a place to imagine and pursue a different future.
A call to break free from the structures that crystallise inequality, through the exercise of solidarity, mutual help, care and prefigurative politics, a process of everyday political action beyond party politics, a process of built autonomy and the capacity to work with, against and in spite of the State. In short, a process of democratisation of urban life.
