Caldeira, Teresa.

1. Caldeira, Teresa. 2000 City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paolo Bearkley: University of California Press. (Selections)

The circulation of discourses of fear and the proliferation of segragation are intertwined with processes of social transformation in the peripheries (as the return to democracy of Latin America and the end of the apartheid) as well as with the proliferation of violence. Neoliberalism segregation and spatial reconfiguration have generalized effects. Yet in Sao Paulo there is a particular configuration of crime, fear, violence and disrespect of citizenship, that combined with urban transformation has generated new patterns of segregation with the return to democracy. This patterns of exclusion have been generated through the proliferation of partitions, walls, distance, rules of avoidance, and movement restriction. What she calls the “talk of crime” propagates fear as much as it is a way of processing violence. Violence is related with criminal actions but cannot be separated with economic recession and neoliberal project. The discourse of crime produces social groups (and places) as dangerous and divides the social milieu. This discourse generates exclusion and generates two forms of discrimination: 1) the privatization of security, 2) the seclusion of social groups in fortified enclaves. For Caldeira the privatization of force challenges the basic definition of the state (following Weber), and of democracy, as private police does not recognize civil rights and generates a circle of violence. In this she is not discriminating between police and army, she avoids exploring police as a control of movement as much as defining criminality. The configuration of urban exclusion conform repertoires of spatial organization from which cities borrow. Democratization is then challenged in the sense of lack of defence to human rights and the lack of limit to intervene in the body of the criminal. One of them are fortified enclaves that separate groups form sites of social heterogeneity. Thus the space that emerges from the return to democracy is an undemocratic space organized by principles of inequality. This points to the entangled relation between political system and urban system, as well as how space is a dimension in which democratization is contested. She argues against post colonialism, as there is no fixed position of exteriority. To study segregation in the city there is a need to take a bigger scale perspective, take the city as a subject ad make a cross class analysis. Her work is an ethnography of violence and segregation, not of a neighbourhood. In regards to the body she argues that “the society that produces unbounded bodies is unlikely to have strong civil rights and vice versa” (374). The challenge is for her whether “can we conceive of a model that can leave a space for the promiscuity of bodies and sensuality of and yet enforce respect to privacy, individuality and human rights” But the notions of privacy, individuality and human rights remain without problematization.