Gareth Jones City As A Contested Space
Gareth Jones City As A Contested Space
Gareth Jones City As A Contested Space
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Bull. Latin Am. Res., Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 1-12,1994
Elsevier Science Ltd
Pergamon Society for Latin American Studies
Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved
0261-3050/94$6.00 + .00
GARETHA. JONES
Department of Geography, University College Swansea, UK
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2 BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH
The acquisition of land and housing is, perhaps, the most visible form of the
contest for space. While this can clearly be no less evident while looking at the
prices households pay and the methods they employ to cope with the
economy of acquisition, it is the physical representation of this process which
is uppermost and for which most observers probably have the highest
admiration. A startling example is provided for the establishment of a settle-
ment in Lima by Blondet (1990:27):
The river flowed right by here. The stream ran behind and the water here
stank. ... We were here, you see, when I saw one of those corpses.
People died like dogs, lots of them. The water arrived, it came in here
bringing mud and rocks from the river banks. It came in here. It was full
of water here, and the river was full. And the people... so many people
died. And a woman said that the water carried a woman right back here
in the yard. She was put in a pit and she rotted here. She's been there ever
since and people live there now, right on top.
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THE CITY AS CONTESTED SPACE 3
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4 BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH
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THE CITY AS CONTESTED SPACE 5
Depoliticising space
If there appears to be an opening of ne
depoliticisation of old ones. One possibl
munity, or at least the conventional view o
consistently stress the power and protest in
considered to be a rigid and territorial con
embedded (Boschi and Valladares, 198
1990; Stokes, 1991). This is at its most ev
ments defined as 'a social organisation with
strives for emancipation by way of coll
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6 BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH
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THE CITY AS CONTESTED SPACE 7
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THE CITY AS CONTESTED SPACE 9
NOTES
1. Hebdige is from 'Subjects in space', New Formations 11: vi-vii, cited in Soja and
(1993:196).
2. The other two papers presented at that session were by Jorge Fiori and Ann Varle
explored the place of self-help housing in urban policy, noting the increasing conve
between urban policy and established ideological and theoretical approaches.
discussed the connectedness between the supposed anti-poverty programme in M
known as PRONASOL and the electoral fortunes of the government party, the PRI.
3. The challenge to modernity and urban violence is brought out in other examples fro
America. The actions of Sendero Luminoso, for example, have concentrated upon att
'the agents of modernity' resulting in urban victims rather than the imagined confinem
rural areas (Bourque and Warren, 1989).
4. It is interesung to note how the Santiago poblaciones as communities of resistance w
'no-go' areas for the police (see Salman, this issue).
5. Lehmann (1991) observes that popular movements are prone to colonise the stat
they oppose to extract civil or labour rights rather than democracy and citizenship.
6. Sarah Radcliffe (1993) draws a similar conclusion from an analysis of the Madres de
de Mayo in Argentina. The women made a conscious effort to occupy public spaces
had become significant under military rule, but which previously had held no such mea
In other respects, however, Radcliffe notes that the women reinforced their gender po
7. The IMF-debt riots of the 1980s were significant not only because of the numbers i
but through the symbolic importance of people 'taking to the streets'. Occupation
street transcended space to become a metaphor for opposition to national develo
The urban informal sector might be similarly interpreted. There is an extensive literatu
'repeat' studies which confirm the linkage between the informal and formal sector, but
unaware of an account of the informal sector which relates this dynamism to the ab
this sector to appropriate public space.
8. See Foweraker (1990) for a discussion of the transformative ability of social movem
represent a true birth of civil society.
9. I am grateful to Richard Trenchard for drawing my attention to this literature. The Cu
example is also his.
10. Interview, Mtro. Mario Ramirez Breton, Delegado SRA. Puebla, 9 May 1988.
11. Both Long and Slater argue that development thinking has been caught be
agnosticism on the one hand, and an inability to include power and human agency in
calculus on the other. A failure to deal with the 'subject' other than as a constituent
continues to plague discussion.
12. One important voice to emerge has been from indigenous peoples, particu
Amazonia. In taking on the state, multinational companies and colonists of the front
indigenous groups have asserted a position which has drawn upon ethnic and hi
images, but has also brought more contemporary issues of citizenship, developmen
and nationhood to bear?even if, internationally, It has been far more difficult to m
western public opinion on behalf of murdered peasants and labour organisers than
behalf of trees' (Cleary, 1991:129).
REFERENCES
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THE CITY AS CONTESTED SPACE 11
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