doi:10.1111/sjtg.

12156

Participatory slum upgrading as a disjunctive

process in Recife, Brazil: Urban coproduction
and the absent ground of the city
Pieter de Vries
Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University, Gelderland, the Netherlands

Correspondence: Pieter de Vries (email: pieter.devries@wur.nl)

This article engages with the coproduction of urban space by focusing on a slum upgrading pro-
ject in Recife, Brazil. It argues that the urban situation is essentially inconsistent, unpredictable
and unstable. It documents the history of urban planning in Recife, paying special attention to
the coexistence of two different planning traditions, one aimed at what city planners call the in-
formal city, which is participatory, bottom up and democratic, yet susceptible to be corrupted by
political clientelism, and another aimed at the formal city, which is ‘strategic’, top down, techno-
cratic and neoliberal. It argues that the informal/formal binary operates as a disjunctive synthesis
that separates social actors rather than connecting them and provides the coordinates within
which processes of coproduction take place. The disjunctive synthesis renders possible all sorts
of fantastic imaginations that both disavow and reveal the missing ground of the city. Commu-
nity leaders play a central role in the coproduction of urban space and function as the symptom
of this absent ground. The article concludes that participatory urban development interventions
aiming to curtail the role of community leaders end up as veritable tyrannies of participation,
which should be seen as evidence of the disjointed character of planning rather than as forms
of effective governmentality.

Keywords: urban planning, Recife, (in)formality, community leaders, coproduction, Badiou

Introduction
This article focuses on urban coproduction through a slum upgrading project in Recife,
Brazil, and argues that the urban situation is fundamentally inconsistent. It documents
the history of urban planning in Recife and pays special attention to the coexistence of
two different planning approaches typically posited in a dichotomous way. On the one
hand there is the participatory approach geared to what city planners call the ‘informal
city’, which is bottom up, participatory and democratic, aimed at expanding the rights
of slum dwellers, but susceptible to be corrupted by the informalized nature of patron-
client politics in the Brazilian Northeast. On the other hand, there is the strategic ap-
proach for the modern, or ‘formal city’, which is top down, technocratic and neoliberal,
geared to beautifying the city.
The article critiques the modernist view that equates planning with the formal and
the informal with improvised (and hence unplanned) forms of urban auto-construction
(Holston, 2009). It engages with the duality of the informal/formal, not as a contradic-
tion to be overcome, nor as a binary to be deconstructed, but as a disjunctive synthesis
that provides the coordinates within which urban space is coproduced. A synthesis is
disjunctive when instead of connecting it separates. In Diken’s definition (2009: 107):

two opposite tendencies juxtaposed to each other in the same social space, connected and dis-
connected at once, paradoxically united in a non-dialectical ‘synthesis’ whose binary poles are
mutually exclusive but nevertheless presuppose, feed upon each other and are interlocked
within the same classificatory scheme.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 37 (2016) 295–309

© 2016 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
296 Pieter de Vries

This approach resonates with recent critical views on the informal/formal binary. If as
authors such as Roy (2009) and McFarlane (2012) argue, the formal is about the fixing
of value and the informal about the constant negotiability of value, then we can see the
binary as constituting the rules of the game that determine the way social actors navigate
through the city. In Roy’s felicitous phrase, ‘the splintering of urbanism does not take
place at the fissure between formality and informality but rather, in fractal fashion,
within the informalized production of space’ (Roy, 2009: 82, emphasis in the original).
The informal, in this view, rather than a remnant of the past to be surpassed through
modernization, constitutes an assemblage of social practices that empowers certain actors
and excludes others. The destabilization, or unfixing of value, then, should be seen as
part of wider programmes of governing, rather than as a result of a lack of formal plan-
ning, or as perverse effects of it.
Here I expand on these views to argue that practices of informalization are borne out
of the informal/formal binary as a disjunctive synthesis that reverberates through differ-
ent spatial levels and institutional domains. And the deleuzian contribution relies on the
insight that this terrain is shaped by the production of fantastic, virtual imaginaries about
a prosperous world-class city that contrasts with the stigmatization of the poor and their
informal habitus.
I take the notion of inconsistency from Badiou (2007) whose ontology of multiplicity
holds that reality (or as he calls it ‘the situation’) is by definition inconsistent and that ev-
ery effort to create consistency leads to a ‘state of the situation’ that excludes particular
groups or individuals.1 In urban planning terms this means that participatory urban de-
velopment interventions can be seen as (failed) attempts to deal with, and if possible to
overcome, urban inconsistency. The urban situation, though inconsistent, provides the
terrain in which disjunctive processes of coproduction occur. However, and this is the
central point of the article, the inconsistency of the urban situation signifies that there
is no common ground where the actors come to an agreement. When the absence of
such ground is exposed, the divide between the formal and the informal breaks down
and the existence of social antagonism is revealed. In participatory urban slum upgrading
projects, as shown in the case of Recife, social antagonism manifests itself in veritable tyr-
annies of participation, which should be seen as evidence of the disjointed character of
planning rather than as forms of effective governmentality.
The article is divided in two parts. The first part documents the recent history of urban
planning in Recife, paying special attention to the history of the Plano de Regularizaçao
das ZEIS (PREZEIS), a form of participatory slum governance that provides tenure
security to residents of the ‘informal city’. The second section focuses on a World
Bank-funded urban upgrading project (the PROMETRÓPOLE project) as a case study
of disjunctive coproduction in an inconsistent urban situation. The ethnographic
argument, in short, runs as follows. Urban planners and policy makers develop strategies
for dealing with the informal city. In doing so, they fashion harmonious images of the
city, thus disavowing its contradictions. Social workers, operating as street-level bureau-
crats, are engaged with the day-to-day work of enacting urban consistency through
strategies of social control. Community leaders, in turn, stand for the inconsistency of
the city. They are political brokers, urban specialists (Hansen & Verkaaik, 2009) who
combine activities as community leaders and political campaigners and play a pivotal role
in coproducing urban space.
The article drew upon longitudinal research among politicians, planners, non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) representatives, street-level bureaucrats (mostly
social workers) and community leaders in Recife, from 2001 onwards. From 2007
Participatory slum upgrading in Recife 297

through 2014 a series of in-depth interviews were held with the planning staff and
the director of the PROMETRÓPOLE project. Participant observation was conducted
in meetings of the PREZEIS Forum, where community leaders, NGO representatives
and municipal staff meet. I conducted individual and group interviews with commu-
nity leaders, sometimes in the company of project planners and social workers, so
as to elicit views about practices of coproduction. I drew upon research conducted
by colleagues (see Koster, 2012; Nuijten et al., 2012; Nuijten, 2013) who studied
in depth particular aspects of the urban interventions discussed (in particular the
Jacarezinho case). My contribution has been to shed light on the diverse ways in
which politicians, planners and policy makers problematize the city and imagine solu-
tions for dealing with informality.

The history of urban planning in Recife

Recife is the capital city of the northeastern state of Pernambuco and has a long history of
popular mobilizations. The struggle for democratization in the 1980s went together with
intense waves of land invasions in the city, strongly supported by Catholic Church
leaders under the leadership of Archbishop Dom Helder Camara (Assies, 1994; Donovan,
2007). Community leaders together with political activists played an important role in
the establishment of grassroots organizations.
In the last years of the dictatorship, under the administration of Mayor Gustavo
Krause (1979–82), incipient forms of participation were initiated as a response to
the popular mobilizations for the right to the city. The first democratically elected
mayor, Jarbas Vasconcelos (1986–89), introduced a far more ambitious programme
in informal settlements, named prefeitura nos bairros or ‘the City Hall in the
neighbourhoods’. This programme was the start of a form of participatory planning
in which the communities were invited to provide proposals for investments in infra-
structure and services. It resulted in a system of tenure protection that enabled com-
munities to register as Zonas Especiais de Interesse Social (Special Zones of Social
Purpose or ZEIS). These experiences were institutionalized in 1987 in the ZEIS
Regulation Plan, the PREZEIS. The PREZEIS both legalized favelas and transferred
power to joint community-government councils named Commissões de Urbanizaçao
e Legalizaçao (Commissions of Upgrading and Legalization or COMULs). The COMULs
receive municipal funding for running local projects and for contracting specialized
NGOs. Every COMUL is represented by two members at the PREZEIS forum, a delibera-
tive organ that operates as the interlocutor of the municipality in matters of slum gover-
nance and receives support from civil society organizations and engaged academics
(Donovan, 2007: 15–16).
The PREZEIS has been the subject of many academic analyses. Donovan (2007) pre-
sents it as a citizen activist model and argues that its accomplishments in terms of cover-
age and provision of tenure protection are impressive. Some (Fernandes, 2004; de Souza,
2004) laud the PREZEIS as an unprecedented case of successful participatory governance
with an unusual record of continuity. In this view the PREZEIS has been an incubator
of citizenship values, bringing together various sets of actors (civil society representa-
tives, government agencies and politicians). Yet, others (Leal, 2003; Leite, 2007) are
sceptical about the accomplishments of the PREZEIS and argue that, in spite of its pro-
gressive and emancipatory aims and its success in defending the land tenure rights of
the poor, it was captured by elite interests. Participatory governance was corrupted by
the political system and degenerated into a game of manipulation, a fetish—or a game
298 Pieter de Vries

of appearances—that concealed the interests of populist politicians. In this view the in-
formality of personalized clientelist relations undermined the (formal) achievements of
the popular movement.
A similar reiteration of the disjunctive synthesis between the informal and the formal
can be found in the views of urban investors and the pro-business media who see the
PREZEIS as an impediment for economic development.2 ZEIS areas, in impairing the de-
velopment of a sound land market real estate, keep prices artificially low. The argument
is not so much against giving tenure security and providing services to slum residents,
but against the preservation of ZEIS areas for political reasons. The PREZEIS, in this view,
is essentially a political instrument in the service of populist parties that use the ZEIS as
vote banks, where so-called community leaders opportunistically offer their services to
politicians. Adherents of this analysis portray the informal city as a grey space (Yiftachel,
2009) epitomizing corruption, lawlessness and resistance to citizenship. This view, as we
will see, provides a rationale to the strategic urban planning approach, which aims to
convert Recife into a prosperous consumer space for the elite and the middle classes,
in short a world-class city.
Ironically, both advocates and opponents of the PREZEIS share the view that the
presence of an external factor, i.e., informalized clientelist politics, distorts the correct
functioning of the participatory system and the market, thus providing a mirror image
of the same problem, but from different political perspectives. Advocates and opponents
of the PREZEIS find it difficult to consider the possibility that both participation and the
market always already necessitate forms of (informalized) mediation in order to be effec-
tive, thus reiterating a monotonous critique of the contamination of a formal, intended
goal (i.e., true participation and transparent markets) by an external factor (i.e., informal
politics).
The case of the PREZEIS provides us with a good example of how the disjunctive
synthesis reproduces the informal/formal binary by retroactively positing as an effect,
that which is, in fact, its own cause. The point not to be lost is that the informal/formal
binary both conceals and reveals the inconsistent nature of the urban situation. In fact,
‘democratic participation’ and ‘transparent markets’ are imaginary constructions that
render possible imaginations of the urban as a consistent whole, thus disavowing its con-
tradictory and antagonistic nature (see Žižek,1989, on fetishistic disavowal). Or, to put it
differently, they fill an ontological lack, rendering it possible to imagine a common
ground where the informal can be identified as the rhizomatic (that which disrupts)
and the formal with the arboreal (the construction of order).
In sum, the PREZEIS started as a highly innovative participatory urban planning ap-
proach in the 1980s, propelled by intense political mobilizations by political activists and
slum dwellers with the support of the Catholic Church. By the 1990s, however, the
PREZEIS became entangled in ‘politics as usual’, featuring forms of clientelist politics
so typical for the Brazilian Northeast. Clientelist or patron-client relations are character-
ized by personal ties between politicians and (slum) residents, in which the former offer
services and goods in return for votes. Community leaders are sought by politicians to
represent their interests in the slums (e.g., through campaigning and providing all sorts
of support ranging from food distribution to facilitating identity cards) in return for
financial support, thus operating as political brokers. In fact, the COMULs and PREZEIS
forum became arenas of such clientelist politics (see Koster, 2012 for a good analysis of
clientelist politics in Recife).
Next I will show how the disjunctive synthesis expresses itself through another
duality, that of bottom-up participatory versus top-down strategic planning.
Participatory slum upgrading in Recife 299

Current political developments and the neoliberalization of participatory

democracy

Since the past decade Recife has been undergoing dramatic urban transformations with
growth rates above the national average. A policy of growth poles has been pursued in
the automotive, chemical and pharmaceutical, and tourism industries. A new harbour
has been built with an oil refinery (the port of Suape), attracting huge sums of private
and public investment. Urban infrastructure has been expanded in order to facilitate
transport circulation. New high-rises have been built for the rich. Typically, private in-
vestment has been concentrated in the ‘planned’ city. Slums in central areas have be-
come vulnerable to urban speculation by private developers. These economic
developments were actively supported by the municipal administration of the Partido
dos Trabalhadores (PT), which came to power with a strong participatory programme.
Like in many other parts of the world (Olds et al., 2002), thousands of families have been
relocated in order to make way for city roads, shopping malls and other mega-projects
such as the Cidade da Copa (Cup City), which was built to host a couple of football
matches during the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
Immediately after winning the municipal elections in 2001, the PT introduced its bat-
tle horse, Participatory Budgeting (PB), in Recife. This is not the place to discuss the PB
(see Baiocchi, 2003 for a good analysis of the PB programme), but it should be noted that
its scope and scale of operation was wider than those of the PREZEIS and COMULs. The
PB programme dealt with health, education, sports and cultural issues besides urban de-
velopment. It also had more funds at its disposal than the COMULs and the PREZEIS. The
PT in Recife saw itself as the inheritor of the strong popular movement of the 1980s,
which in the party’s view had been derailed by populist clientelistic strategies fomented
by the populist right. Thus the introduction of the PB by the PT administrations
(2001–12) at the detriment of the PREZEIS and COMULs was presented as part of a
process of democratization and citizenship construction.
The twinning of neoliberal growth with popular participation has not been uncon-
tested (Nuijten et al., 2012). Urban planners and civil society organizations in Recife
complained that the transformation of the city is taking place in an ad hoc and un-
planned way, which is evidenced by the absence of a master plan. According to Ana
Maria Melo’s (2010) analysis of the growing polarization of the city, the PT government
followed a dual planning approach. While in public it committed itself to a participatory
planning approach by adopting the PB model of Porto Alegre, in practice, it continued
the strategic planning approach of previous governments (of the center-left and the
right). The latter approach set out to revitalize degraded parts of the old city, making
them attractive to investors, marketing the Recife Carnival as the most multicultural
event of the country, etc. In short, the strategy was to brand the city to make it compet-
itive at a global level. The PT, in fact, was caught in the paradox noted by Baiocchi of
‘being a governing socialist party in capitalist cities’ (Baiocchi, 2003 in Melo, 2010:58).
The question she poses is how a commitment to participation could coexist with such
a neoliberal strategic planning approach, in a city with strong popular movements, with
a known leftist tradition and under governance by the PT.
In order to answer this question, we have to go back to the strategic planning ap-
proach that was set in place by Gustavo Krause (1979–82), the last mayor appointed
by the military dictatorship. Krause established privileged contacts with international fi-
nancial agencies such as the World Bank. At the same time he was able to convince the
military government that it was not viable to evict slum dwellers from core areas of the
300 Pieter de Vries

Recife city given the strength of the popular movements. Further, Krause introduced
forms of consultation at the local level that empowered community leaders (largely
appointed by him) to negotiate urban improvements (roads, transport infrastructure,
community services) built by the municipality in slum areas. In this way community
leaders came to play a central role in the coproduction of urban space as local represen-
tatives and political brokers.
When interviewed Krause argued that he played an important role in the democra-
tization process in Recife by bringing together the interests of the poor and those of
the urban elite. He contended that he was using the same methods as the left to em-
power community activists, while avoiding the disruptive effects of radical politics. As
he put it:
The history of Recife is that of a symbiotic relationship between the poor and the elite. You can-
not understand the city if you don’t take into account the creativity of the people, their vitality.
The poor are the source of alegría [happiness] in Recife, the popular carnival, the music. I saw it
always as my responsibility to create a form of city planning that would build upon this creativ-
ity (pers. comm., Recife, July 2002).

Though a polemic elite politician compromised by the military dictatorship, Krause

proved his political skills in combining a populist style of top-down participation for
the slums with a modernist approach to urban planning for the formal city. This
combined approach benefited the elite, thus creating a situated assemblage of modernist
aesthetics and popular culture. Here we see another version of the disjunctive synthesis:
private investments in the formal city and forms of participatory planning in the informal
city. This synthesis goes together with fantastic imaginations of a consistent city where
poor and rich can coexist harmoniously. In terms of social subjectivities the formal city
produces neoliberal citizens, who identify as consumers, whereas the informal city
fosters creative populations, which give the city its special character.
The point not to be missed is that the positing of this duality between the informal
and the formal city renders possible the coexistence of two planning approaches, which
operate side by side independently from each other and aim at two entirely different re-
alities. Through this disjunctive synthesis ZEIS residents can capitalize on the arboreal
and to some extent lignified conquests of past struggles, while policy makers and inves-
tors can engage in rhizomatic experiments catering to the consumerist fantasies of the
middle classes and (global) elite. The latter are seduced with fantastic images of a
world-class city, while the poor are promised social justice through participation.
The assumption of power by the PT signified both continuity and change: continuity
in the sense that the divide between participatory and strategic planning was upheld, but
change in the sense that it set out to dismantle the informalized clientelist system
through the introduction of the PB programme. The party held to a discourse of demo-
cratic participation and social inclusion, while continuing existing policies aimed at mak-
ing the city attractive for investors. The PT, from being an oppositional party with a large
mobilization capacity among the poor, moved to the centre aiming at creating a broad al-
liance between the elites and popular sectors. The difference with past administrations
was that the party targeted community leaders in order to end the perverse (clientelist)
effects of urban informality. This, in fact, was a postpolitical strategy that denied the in-
consistent and antagonistic nature of the urban situation (Swyngedouw, 2011). As we
will see, this ideological fantasy promising to construct a harmonious city by doing away
with community leaders led to forms of participatory planning that evolved as veritable
tyrannies of participation.
Participatory slum upgrading in Recife 301

In the next section I discuss how the dual planning approach evolved during the past
decade by focusing on an urban renewal project, the PROMETRÓPOLE project. This and
the Capibaribe Melhor project were the most important urban renovation projects initi-
ated since 2000. Both projects, along the Beberibe and the Capibaribe Rivers respec-
tively, are infrastructural projects aimed at canalizing the rivers, ending flooding and
improving transport circulation. PROMETRÓPOLE presents us with an interesting case
of urban coproduction as a disjunctive process whose disconnection manifests itself in
a continuous fear of community leaders.

The planning of the PROMETRÓPOLE project

The planning of the PROMETRÓPOLE project was very much influenced by the pro-
poor, participatory, poverty-alleviation agenda of the PREZEIS slum governance system.
Negotiations between Brazilian authorities and the World Bank started in 1996. The
Beberibe watershed area was chosen on account of its negative human development in-
dices (endemic water-borne diseases, high poverty levels, low school attendance, high
rates of urban violence). Between 1996 and 1998 the government of the state of Per-
nambuco, with the support of the municipality of Recife, organized a series of meetings
and participatory seminars in the ZEIS of Campo Grande to prepare for the project. Dis-
cussions were started about the provision of microcredit to waste recyclers and small
businesses. Various NGOs that supported the COMUL participated in these preparatory
meetings. Also a participatory pilot project was envisaged in one of the canals inhabited
by stilt dwellers, that of Jacarezinho.
The project design started in 1999 and lasted until 2003, and a large-scale census was
conducted. Residents did not understand why it took so long for the project to start and
why they had to respond to so many questions. Gradually, it became clear that the initial
plans had changed. To begin with, one of the core components of the project, that of pov-
erty alleviation through microcredit provision, was eliminated, because of the devalua-
tion of the US dollar vis-à-vis the Brazilian real. The removal of the poverty alleviation
component became a moot point in all meetings in the communities, as community
leaders accused the project team to have embezzled money that had been earmarked
for the communities. Slum dwellers felt that the high expectations created were being
betrayed, and this betrayal epitomized what Ramakrishnan (2014) names the spatio-
temporal disruption occasioned by the uncertainty and feelings of arbitrariness that the
act of waiting in resettlement projects brings about.
Since PROMETRÓPOLE was meant to become the hallmark of the PT participa-
tory slum upgrading approach, the PB programme was used as the only forum of
participatory decision making. It was made clear to community leaders that they
could only play a political role as chosen PB delegates. Community leaders
interpreted this as an outright attack on their independence and became increasingly
critical of the PROMETRÓPOLE project. In the course of time, some aligned them-
selves with the PT after being offered side jobs. Yet, their support for the project
remained lukewarm.
In order to understand the shift in project approach from the preparatory to the de-
sign phase, it is important to take into account the changing planning context at the fed-
eral and state level. From 1996 through 1999 a research project was commissioned by
the state government to establish a system of water quality control in the river basins that
compose the Recife Metropolitan Area (PROMETRÓPOLE, n.d.). This study concluded
that river basin pollution was caused by sewage effluence in the rivers mainly due to lack
302 Pieter de Vries

of sanitation facilities in low-income areas. The project divided the metropolitan area
into a number of sanitation units that were henceforth used as intervention units for ur-
ban development projects. Accordingly, PROMETRÓPOLE was redesigned following the
recommendations of the water quality study. The shift from a community-based to a
river-basin strategic planning approach signified a ‘shifting scalar configuration’ (Molle,
2008) that promised to be more comprehensive, objective and less prone to clientelist
politics.
While in the participatory preparation phase PROMETRÓPOLE had been intended to
be a poverty-alleviation, slum-renovation project, now it was redefined as an infrastruc-
tural programme for low-income areas along the Beberibe river basin that ‘would
contribute to poverty alleviation and the improvement of environmental conditions’
(PROMETRÓPOLE, n.d.). While the project included the building of roads, parks,
community centres, market structures and compensatory housing for families to be
relocated, the bulk of the investments was targeted at the canalization of the water
courses, microdrainage and sewage.
The redesign of the project, however, did not mean that participation ceased to play a
role in project planning. On the contrary, as we will see, participatory planning was
heralded as the solution for the perversities of urban informality. The PROMETRÓPOLE
project, hence, became a hybrid project conjoining strategic and participatory planning in
ways that revealed the existence of social antagonism and the absence of a common
ground.

The disjunctive synthesis redefined

The river basin approach, in the view of the project planners, provided opportunities for
combining the democratic legitimacy of popular participation (the PB) with the compre-
hensiveness of a strategic approach that made possible effective, multiscalar forms of
institutional articulation (between the state government and City Hall, including the
level of the communities). While in previous approaches a clear divide existed between
the informal and the formal city, now the aim was to transcend the informal/formal
divide. The spatial division of labour, in which participatory planning through the
PREZEIS system was reserved for the informal city and strategic planning for the formal
city, was broken down. The river basin approach, in fact, signified a spatial redefinition of
the disjunctive synthesis reverberating through different spatial and institutional levels.
While previously strategic planning could be identified with the formal and the PREZEIS
with the informal, within the new scheme strategic planning became the vehicle for the
‘unfixing of value’: the transformation of the city through the informalized production of
space (Roy, 2009: 82).
The merits of the river basin approach were outlined to me by the PROMETRÓPOLE
urban project manager:

River basins provide an ideal spatial scale for socio-technical interventions. Sub-watershed
areas can be demarcated and priority areas selected for interventions in contexts that can be
socially highly heterogeneous. Yet, the shared perception of socio-environmental problems
provides legitimacy to these areas as operative units. The socio-technical focus of the river ba-
sin approach makes possible the development of methodologies for targeting communities and
localities in an equitable way, by preventing the clientelism that permeates urban politics in a
city such as Recife. Stratified samples of slum residents can be conducted, thus ensuring the
reliability of data. Participation can be promoted through the identification of legitimate forms
of social representation at the level of river basin subunits (pers. comm., email message to
author, August 2013).
Participatory slum upgrading in Recife 303

Indeed, as the project manager suggested:

The river basin approach provides the possibility to combine the strengths of a strategic
approach oriented to the improvement of the competitiveness of the city and the democratic
legitimacy of the participatory system. The combination of participatory planning and private
entrepreneurship facilitates the establishment of public-private partnerships, as both the
popular and the private sector see that their interests are well represented (pers. comm., email
message to author, August 2013).

One problem from the planners’ perspective was a lack of legitimate social representa-
tion on the part of marginais (literally people living at the margins of society), who ac-
cordingly were prone to become the victims of opportunistic community leaders. Poor
and marginal groups, therefore, had to be included within effective and democratic
structures of participation. This, in fact, was the role assigned to the PB. In sum, the chal-
lenge was to harness popular participation to construct a prosperous and inclusive city,
and the choice for a higher planning scale was an important step in creating a new
‘geometry of power’ (Swyngedouw, 2004) that strengthens the authority of particular
actors while disempowering others.
The project operated in a politically highly unstable environment, the details of which
cannot be exposed here for lack of space. Yet, politically it was very important to avoid
any manifestation of disagreement within the team to the outside world. There was a
lot of ‘impression management’3 vis-à-vis the media, in particular during election times
when PROMETRÓPOLE was presented by the PT administration as a good example of
inclusive and participatory slum upgrading.4 Any demonstration of resistance by the
local populations had to be averted. In this context, community leaders, in particular
those who were able to mobilize the poorest sections of the communities, were seen as
potentially disruptive.
The unstable and inconsistent nature of the urban situation manifested in the plan-
ning process itself. The pressure on project implementation from politicians and slum
dwellers (generally represented by community leaders) impelled the team to redesign
the project continuously. The indistinction between planning design and implementa-
tion, in fact, led to a process of continuous improvisation. As the project director put it:

In principle all aspects of the project that did not deal with basic technical decisions could be ne-
gotiated. We went to the communities to present and discuss the design. There were always
groups and individuals who objected to it. Some were politically motivated; others did it because
they felt disadvantaged. After such plenary meetings we would prepare a new design and there-
after go back to the communities. We aimed at the support of a majority and avoided putting the
decision to a vote. In one community it was not possible to find a consensus, and we had to deal
with all individual cases one for one. This was extremely time intensive (pers. comm., Recife,
February 2014).

But it was not only in plenary meetings that pressure was exerted to redesign the project.
Community leaders used their influence with politicians (mostly aldermen) and inter-
ceded with them, thus building up political support within the community. Neither
was the process always as democratic and participatory as portrayed above. Decisions
concerning how and where to intervene were politically motivated. Thus the resettle-
ment of the poorest sections of the population, those living on stilt houses on the river,
was put off to the last, as this was considered politically the most difficult step. In the
meantime the social work unit battled against community leaders who threatened to
mobilize these groups and damage the participatory image of the PT.
304 Pieter de Vries

Next I inquire into how this hybrid project worked out on the ground. Efforts to deal
with inconsistency by conjoining participation with a strategic approach led to what has
been denominated a ‘tyranny of participation’ that, as we will see, was more unsettling
for the planners than for the beneficiaries.

The Jacarezinho pilot project

The PROMETRÓPOLE project envisaged the resettlement of about 3000 families for
which compensation had to be provided either in cash or through the delivery of new
houses. Jacarezinho, a favela consisting of precarious houses (many of them on stilts)
along one of the waterways of the Beberibe River, was chosen as a pilot site, in order
to develop an intervention methodology suited to the river basin approach.
Jacarezinho has a long history of demolitions. It was the target of 3 resettlement pro-
jects over the past 30 years. Each time compensatory houses were provided to resettled
families who lived along the canal. However, after each resettlement community leaders
orchestrated the canal to be reinvaded, and new (stilt) houses were constructed.
Jacarezinho consisted of 397 families and was characterized by the project’s social
workers as a problematic area, with a high number of marginais: drug dealers, prostitutes
and thieves. However, some segments of the canal were considered to be ‘more mal-
adapted’ than others. With the help of the census and a social diagnosis, the social
workers distinguished four segments with different levels of social adaptation. City plan-
ners proposed an appropriate resettlement strategy for each segment and drew up the
participatory resettlement plan (i.e., using conventional participatory methodologies)
with a scheduled removal of families, ‘taking into account the wishes and needs of each
social group’ (project manager, pers. comm., email message to author, August 2013).
One important proposal, in line with the outcomes of the social survey and the nego-
tiations with the target group, was that neighbourhood relations and kinship ties within
the different social segments would be respected during the allocation of houses in the
estate. This proposal, however, was not carried out. The municipality decided that the al-
location of houses should take place by drawing of lots, as it feared that the planner’s
proposal would give rise to accusations of political favouritism by the opposition. The
planners resented this political interference, since in their view the refusal to follow
the proposed procedure (taking into consideration kinship ties and vicinity relations in
the distribution of houses) was the cause of myriad social problems during the resettle-
ment process and thereafter.
In effect, the inability of planners to enforce their plan was symptomatic of the unsta-
ble context of planning. They were frustrated that the political system impeded them in
forestalling the kinds of problems that plagued redevelopment projects in informal
settlements.

Local responses and unexpected consequences of the project

Koster and Nuijten (2012) present us with a detailed analysis of the Jacarezinho project,
pointing to the perverse effects of what they see as a high-modernist kind of urban inter-
vention. Participatory commissions led by social workers were created by the
subcontracting company, in what amounted to a privatization of project participation.
In collaboration with the participatory unit of PROMETRÓPOLE, the social workers
established a truly authoritarian system of social control epitomizing what Cooke and
Kothari (2001) denominate ‘a tyranny of participation’.
Participatory slum upgrading in Recife 305

They wonder why, in spite of all rhetoric, and even of the best intentions, participation
so often evolves into forms of manipulation and social control that can best be described as
a tyranny, and see a correlation between these effects and the embracement of participa-
tory methodologies by development agencies worldwide. In the scholars’ view participa-
tion has become highly instrumental in disciplining those who are supposed to benefit
into new structures of power. It has become part and parcel of the workings of an institu-
tional apparatus, a form of power-knowledge that silences the voices of the subaltern and
expands the capacities of intervention of development agencies (Kothari, 2005).
In the case of Jacarezinho it would be wrong, however, to describe this tyranny as a
successful example of the use of disciplinary power to transform unruly populations into
deserving citizens. As I show next, rather than a successful form of social control, the
tyranny shows the incapacity of the planners to design an approach that could deal with
the inconsistent nature of the urban situation.
The social workers were very much aware of the socio-economic reasons for the ex-
treme poverty in which many slum dwellers lived. However, reaching the targets of the
project implied instilling into slum dwellers notions of hygiene and public social middle-
class behaviour. Much time was spent on matters such as the use of toilets, the payment
of electricity and water bills, becoming a good neighbour, etc. It was common knowledge
that the project initially involved a poverty alleviation component, whose elimination
was very difficult to explain to the slum residents. Why spend so much money on infra-
structure if the largest problem was the lack of employment-generating opportunities?
The slum dwellers never asked for the project. Living in stilt houses on the water stream
was not their biggest problem. Community leaders pointed to this fact again and again,
which undermined the legitimacy of the social workers.
In effect, the atmosphere was replete with rumors about invasions of the canal. The
social workers’ worst nightmare was that slum dwellers would invade the canal after
the removal of the houses. Their day-to-day work consisted of ‘normalizing’ maladapted
elements and averting small insurrections. Thus, when faced with recalcitrant and un-
ruly slum residents, the social workers responded by creating stigmatizing images of slum
dwellers as uncivilized and opportunistic. As McFarlane (2012:104) puts it, such partici-
patory projects operate as ‘sutured forms of bricolage that fail to embed: they are
top-down in practice, they tend to exclude more radical positions and groups, and they
essentially perform a softer version of neoliberalism’.
The tyranny of participation also had a political rationale. The social workers com-
bined their professional work with partisan support of the PT. In fact, politics permeated
the project, and over time the lines between PT membership and officialdom became in-
creasingly blurred. During the elections social workers donned T-shirts of the PT and
publicly engaged in campaigning, hence operating as political brokers and competing
with the community leaders.
How did the beneficiaries respond to the situation? Nuijten (2013) points to the par-
adoxical fact that many residents were highly positive about the results of the project.
They were particularly proud of the modernist aesthetics of the renovated canal, the
roads and the estate. Moreover, as she argues, the slum dwellers established affective ties
with the social workers, hence undermining the disciplinary intent of their practices. The
project had been traumatic, but slum residents did not contest the results. Rather than
resisting it, they appropriated the project and its history as an achievement for the com-
munity. In this way the disjunctive synthesis of the informal and the formal was rein-
stated through the establishment of affective ties between social workers and slum
dwellers.
306 Pieter de Vries

The attempt to introduce a hybrid planning approach—which would succeed in cre-

ating a true synthesis that transcends the duality between the informal and the formal,
and would thus find a model for dealing with urban inconsistency— failed. The tyranny
of participation, in fact, was a defense mechanism for dealing with the breakdown of
forms of coproduction that owed their effectiveness to their disjunctive character. At
the same time, the tyranny of participation was an unintended effect that subverted
the planners’ fantasies about a harmonious city, exposing the existence of social antago-
nism. Meanwhile, community leaders took a wait-and-see attitude, while negotiating
with the project manager for all kinds of small benefits in return for social peace. This
is the topic we turn to next.

Community leaders as symptoms of urban inconsistency

The inconsistency of the situation also manifested itself in a different way, through a con-
tinuous struggle between the project and people who felt excluded or harmed by it, in
particular the case of relatives of resettled families who had been declared ineligible to
receive a house on the basis of the census. Community leaders played a key role in voic-
ing the complaints of these families. One such community leader is Degenildo, one of the
most experienced of the five community leaders active in the area and definitely the one
most feared by the PROMETRÓPOLE project.
Degenildo comes from a very poor family, favelados from the poorest part of the
community, also called miserables, and draws his power from that sector of the popula-
tion. A big and imposing man, he is very straightforward about his way of working
and intentions. He is remarkably well organized and very eloquent in his interventions.
He has a large network among community leaders and in political circles and can
frequently be found at the City Hall, always with his cell phone in hand. As he put it,
he does not represent a political party, only the interests of the community. He is ready
to canvass for a candidate who agrees with his views. Degenildo was a member of the
implementation commission of the PROMETRÓPOLE project, and in this position he
was extremely critical, always voicing failures in the implementation process and the
claims of those who felt excluded. From the onset he was identified as a political menace
by the participatory director of the project. As Degenildo put it:

I never stopped criticizing the project for the promises it made and never delivered. I was at
all the meetings and voiced the complaints of the community. That is my role as a commu-
nity leader. But I also have a family to sustain and I do need an income. I approached the
mayor and asked him for a job at the municipality, which I obtained. I have my differences
with the PT, but I do recognize the merits of the past 12 years. At the level of the city much
has been achieved, but we as community leaders contributed much to it and that should be
admitted. The PT does not like to give credit to past administrations for other achievements,
such as Jarbas for introducing the PREZEIS, but also Krause, whose contribution should not
be underestimated. As long as there is poverty in the comunidades [slums], people like us
will be needed. The PT thinks that it can employ people from outside the comunidades to
do the work of representation. That is a wrong thought (pers. comm., Recife, February
2013).

When mentioning ‘outsiders doing the work of representation’, Degenildo meant the
social workers who combined their job with political campaigning for the PT. His opinion
concerning the indispensability of community leaders was shared by the
PROMETRÓPOLE urban project manager:
Participatory slum upgrading in Recife 307

Whether we like it or not, we always have to negotiate with community leaders. It is in their
benefit and ours. Their reputation depends on their capacity to represent the interests of the
poorest segments of the population. We are always aware of their enormous capacity of mobi-
lization, of social disruption. On the other hand they depend on us to show tangible results to
their constituencies, as much as for politicians to survive. A project such as PROMETRÓPOLE
has a time horizon of five years. Community leaders know that they will survive any project
(pers. comm., Recife, January 2013).

At this point it is interesting to look at the political consequences of the PT’s efforts to
blend neoliberalism with participatory democracy in Recife. In 2012 the PT lost the mu-
nicipal elections in Recife to the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB). The PT leadership in
Brasília had chosen to support a different candidate rather than the mayor, who wanted
to be re-elected. In view of the division within the party, many PT cadres decided not to
campaign for the official candidate, silently hoping for the success of the rival candidate
of the PSB. Community leaders in the city took this opportunity to take revenge by with-
drawing their support for the PT. This election, in effect, was the end of 12 years of PT
hegemony.

Conclusion

Sapana Doshi (2012) in her study of clearances and redevelopment in Mumbai slums ar-
gues that redevelopment entails a process of accumulation by differentiated displacement
associated with differentiated processes of subject formation. She also argues that redevel-
opment projects rarely unfold in a simple top-down fashion. In a similar vein, Desai
(2012) contends that slum upgrading projects in India traverse a tortuous social terrain
and demand flexible forms of governing in order to show positive results. In this article
I set out to shed light on these processes, drawing on Badiou’s ontology of inconsistency.
Rather than looking at planning as a governmental(ity) process aimed at the shaping of
the conduct of subjects, I inquired at the points of rupture in which antagonism is re-
vealed. Thus, I argued that the urban situation is inconsistent and that coproduction as
a disjunctive process manifests itself through the absence of a common ground. The mo-
ment that this absence is exposed, the existence of social antagonism is revealed.
The PROMETRÓPOLE project is a case in point. It was meant to create a format for
dealing with the inconsistency of the urban situation, by producing a hybrid form of
planning that would incorporate the benefits of both the strategic and the participatory
planning approaches. The result, instead, was a tyranny of participation, an unintended
perverse effect that rather than giving proof of governmental skills attested to the limits
of planning itself, its disjointed character. While the tyranny has often been presented as
a form of disciplinary power that normalizes certain individuals while producing resis-
tance, in this case it operated as a defense mechanism for dealing with the disruption
caused by the efforts of planners to overcome the informal/formal divide. For the slum
residents the project was a traumatic event. However, rather than resisting or subverting
it, they appropriated the new infrastructures within their collective memory as an
achievement for the community. Furthermore, they established affective ties with the
social workers, hence undermining the disciplinary intent of their practices.
How does this case study reflect on the discussion between the informal and the for-
mal, the arboreal and the rhizome as posited by the editors (Koster & Nuijten, 2016)?
Roy (2009) incisively contends that the concept of informality is part of the language
of urbanization and thus should be seen as an instrument of power and governance in
India and elsewhere. Following on this insight from a different theoretical perspective,
308 Pieter de Vries

I argued that the divide between the formal and the informal city operates as a disjunc-
tive synthesis through which different antagonistic social worlds can be brought together
in undiluted forms. That, in short, is the difference between a dialectical, or connective,
synthesis and a disjunctive synthesis. We saw that the divide reverberates into all sorts of
dualities: the informal and the formal city, the citizen and the non-citizen, participatory
planning for the poor and strategic planning for the elites, and commitments to popular
participation and fantasies of creating a world-class city.
PROMETRÓPOLE presents us with a good case of how urban interventions that are
experienced as spontaneous and episodic encounter arboreal notions of belonging, thus
shaping a context in which the tree feeds upon the rhizome and the distinction between
the formal and the informal proves to be an ideological fantasy: not in the conventional
sense of being a mystification of (grounded) reality, but in the lacanian or deleuzian pro-
ductive sense of rendering possible all kinds of ‘ungrounded’ fantastic imaginations. Fol-
lowing Badiou (2007, see also de Vries, 2016), I argued that the urban situation is
inconsistent; in other words the city is grounded in inconsistency. A disjunctive synthesis
operates as a screen that both expresses and disavows this absence of ground, and as I
showed for the case of PROMETRÓPOLE, community leaders fill in the space of this
disjuncture, hence operating as a symptom of the inconsistency of the urban situation.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Silvia Arrais for her support during fieldwork. Martijn Koster and Monique
Nuijten as always have been encouraging and critical commentators.

Endnotes

1 See de Vries (2016), for a fuller elaboration of Badiou’s ontology of inconsistency and its rele-
vance for urban participatory planning.
2 Representative of such views are the business sections of newspapers such as Diario de Pernam-
buco (http://www.diariodepernambuco.com.br) and e Jornal do Comercio (http://jconline.ne10.
uol.com.br).
3 Impression management is a concept coined by Goffman (1959) in order to describe how individ-
uals present themselves in everyday life and to influence the perceptions others have of them.
The concept is also used to describe the construction of public images by organizations.
4 The deliverance of houses to residents that had been relocated became an important political
event with the participation of the city major and television broadcast. Also, during the municipal
elections campaign in 2007, TV advertisements featured happy beneficiaries of the first housing
estate.

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