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Surprising Trends in Land Invasions in Metropolitan Lima and Quito
Abstract
Study of land invasion organizations in Lima and Quito reveals six surprising trends that differ by metropolitan context. Specifically, invasion organizations tend to differ with respect to building materials, original land ownership, the difficulty and consequences of acquiring land titles, strategies for acquiring electricity, and types of neighborhood regimes. A more general contrast also emerges: Lima organizations are more likely to encounter quick initial success followed by gradual decline, while the success of Quito organizations is often more gradual, resulting in long-term organizational survival. These citywide trends can be explained by three factors—public policy, local democratization, and geography and climate—that are often neglected in favor of neighborhood-level explanations.
... The intervention of government organizations (GS1-a) impacts the capability of gated communities to organize autonomously. Research demonstrated that the intervention of government organizations (GS1-a) will be occasioned by a negative impact on residents' ability to independently organize management within the community (Dosh andLerager, 2006, cited in Pl€ oger, 2012). However, Zhu et al. (2021) have demonstrated that the neighborhood governance strategy carried out by the Chinese government has played a significant role in the COVID-19 pandemic prevention. ...
Purpose
Within a gated community, management of common property presents great challenges. Therefore, the diagnostic social ecological system (SES) framework proposed by Elinor Ostrom providing a holistic understanding of complex collective action problems in terms of management of commons is used to investigate key institutional-social-ecological factors influencing collective action in the context of gated communities.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) was used to systematically screen and review the relevant literature from 2000 to 2022, where 28 papers were selected for further analysis.
Findings
The study systematically identifies and categorises a series of variables related to self-organizing management in the gated community, and consequently a SES-based gated community management framework is developed. Based on the conceptual framework, the paper discusses logical interrelationships of institutional-social-ecological factors and their impacts on collective action performance of gated communities.
Research limitations/implications
Apart from requiring empirical validation, the conceptual SES-based gated community management framework is certainly subject to continuous improvement in terms of refinement and addition of other potential determinants of gated community collective action.
Originality/value
Not only the review paper provides updates on the latest gated-community collective action research, it also contributes theoretically by conceptualizing the SES framework and its institutional–social–ecological design principles in gated community management. Studying these factors should also be of practical significance because the findings ultimately offer policy insights and management strategies that help policy-makers, property developers and local communities to govern such neighbourhood common resources efficiently and sustainably.
... Clientism has been found to be one of the most prominent and enduring features (Ruth 2016) in the political landscapes in the favelas of Brazil (Cardoso 1992;Gay 1994), the pueblos jóvenes of Peru (Stokes 1995;Dietz 1998), the ranchitos of Quito (Lind 2005;Dosh 2006;Burgwal 1995), las invasiones of Colombia (Gilbert and Ward 1984;Gilbert 1998), and las colonias of Mexico (Barriga 1996;Eckstein 1990). An optimistic view would suggest that it provides a mechanism of exchange and solidarity in asymmetrical power relationships between elites and masses (Gay 1994: 5-6). ...
What social factors influence political participation among the urban poor in Latin America? This article engages conventional theories of political action pertaining to the urban poor characterised by analytical cleavages that have traditionally accounted for the majority of variation in political behavior. Using primary survey data from La Carpio slum of San José, Costa Rica, multivariate regression analyses shows that differing social factors influence political participation in dissimilar ways. Because La Carpio slum respondents moderately participate in community-based organizations and civil protest, nor are they manipulated by clientism, a theory of “quiet encroachment” may serve as an alternative framework for understanding the political behavior of respondents who seek to ameliorate harsh urban realities which have not improved in spite of a move to the center-left by transitional political movements in Latin America.
... Th is process was similar to the experience in other Latin American countries -for example when compared with what happened in much of Venezuela, Central America, Coastal Colombia and Ecuador -but the main diff erence was that in Lima the new settlements normally occupied desert areas where the land had little or no commercial value. More importantly, the formation of a new barriada in Lima was relatively straightforward due to both the leniency of public authorities and competent grassroots mobilisation (Dosh, 2006). Apparently short of options, successive governments passed legislation with provisions for the regularisation of the existing barriadas as a de facto necessity for the functioning of Lima (starting in 1961 with the Law of Marginal Neighbourhoods [Ley de Barrios Marginales]). ...
The introductory chapter situates the debate on the Latin American city in the wider historical and geographical perspective of colonisation, nation building, economic development and neoliberal reforms. Because Latin America is a diversified and dynamic region, a critical assessment of large-scale urbanisation offers a helpful entry point into its socioeconomic and environmental complexity. Particularly the achievements and failures of public water services reveal a great deal about the organisation, functioning and politicisation of metropolitan areas, as well as about the commitments and limitations of the state. The chapter finally explains the structure and innovation of the book, especially regarding the nexus between Latin American megacities and the evolving apparatus of the state using the dilemmas of the water sector as a critical category of analysis.
... Th is process was similar to the experience in other Latin American countries -for example when compared with what happened in much of Venezuela, Central America, Coastal Colombia and Ecuador -but the main diff erence was that in Lima the new settlements normally occupied desert areas where the land had little or no commercial value. More importantly, the formation of a new barriada in Lima was relatively straightforward due to both the leniency of public authorities and competent grassroots mobilisation (Dosh, 2006). Apparently short of options, successive governments passed legislation with provisions for the regularisation of the existing barriadas as a de facto necessity for the functioning of Lima (starting in 1961 with the Law of Marginal Neighbourhoods [Ley de Barrios Marginales]). ...
Lima is an emerging Latin American megacity and the most critical case of a large metropolis located in a coastal desert. Urban development, in particular since the middle of the last century, consolidated a dualist city in which the large majority of the population has to live in marginalised, precarious settlements. Macroeconomic and political reforms adopted since 1990 have tried to enhance and regulate the housing market and, crucially, incorporate water infrastructure projects as a key element of business-friendly programmes. The Water for All initiative, closely examined in the chapter, constitutes one of the most emblematic examples of the ongoing process of water commodification, of the political appropriation of the metropolitan water utility (SEDAPAL) and of the mounting manifestations of corruption.
... Th is process was similar to the experience in other Latin American countries -for example when compared with what happened in much of Venezuela, Central America, Coastal Colombia and Ecuador -but the main diff erence was that in Lima the new settlements normally occupied desert areas where the land had little or no commercial value. More importantly, the formation of a new barriada in Lima was relatively straightforward due to both the leniency of public authorities and competent grassroots mobilisation (Dosh, 2006). Apparently short of options, successive governments passed legislation with provisions for the regularisation of the existing barriadas as a de facto necessity for the functioning of Lima (starting in 1961 with the Law of Marginal Neighbourhoods [Ley de Barrios Marginales]). ...
Urban dilemmas represent today some of the most challenging questions for Latin American governments and society. The region is one of the most urbanised in the world and has a significant proportion of its population living in large, chaotic metropolitan areas, including a growing number of megacities. A proper examination of large-scale urbanisation requires a coherent framework of analysis, as discussed in the chapter, able to address metropolitan changes, sociospatial inequalities and multiple forms of interaction and reaction. The key player behind urban transformations has been the state apparatus, which must be understood as a constantly evolving entity, fraught with contradictions and conflicting interests. Water policy-making demonstrates the territorialisation of sociospatial disputes, the diversity of interventions and multiscale agency and identity.
... Th is process was similar to the experience in other Latin American countries -for example when compared with what happened in much of Venezuela, Central America, Coastal Colombia and Ecuador -but the main diff erence was that in Lima the new settlements normally occupied desert areas where the land had little or no commercial value. More importantly, the formation of a new barriada in Lima was relatively straightforward due to both the leniency of public authorities and competent grassroots mobilisation (Dosh, 2006). Apparently short of options, successive governments passed legislation with provisions for the regularisation of the existing barriadas as a de facto necessity for the functioning of Lima (starting in 1961 with the Law of Marginal Neighbourhoods [Ley de Barrios Marginales]). ...
The Mexican state apparatus has been the object of sustained, often violent, disputes between different elite groups and the wider national society. With the political settlement achieved in the early 20th century, the state was able to promote a reasonably successful agenda of national development, which nonetheless increasingly exhausted its results and was partially replaced by controversial liberalising reforms since the 1980s. The national capital city encapsulates, in dramatic ways, the process of national building, economic growth and political clashes. It is now one of the largest megacities in the planet, spreading to many states and municipalities, but has to rely on distant water reserves and large engineering infrastructure, which has caused renewed forms of controversy, antagonism and uncertainty.
... This process was similar to the experience in other Latin American countries -for example when compared with what happened in much of Venezuela, Central America, Coastal Colombia and Ecuador -but the main difference was that in Lima the new settlements normally occupied desert areas where the land had little or no commercial value. More importantly, the formation of a new barriada in Lima was relatively straightforward due to both the leniency of public authorities and competent grassroots mobilisation (Dosh, 2006). Apparently short of options, successive governments passed legislation with provisions for the regularisation of the existing barriadas as a de facto necessity for the functioning of Lima (starting in 1961 with the Law of Marginal Neighbourhoods [Ley de Barrios Marginales]). ...
The final chapter summarises the main findings, in particular the conclusion that water dilemmas represent the common moment of truth of all Latin American metropolitan areas. The analysis of urban water issues also serves to emphasise the politicised and constantly evolving organisation and functioning of the state apparatus. Recent policies and investment programmes have tried to conceal the ideological and class-based goals of politico-economic reforms. Consequently, meaningful alternatives to urban inequalities require not only a critical understanding of the connections between past and present, but also between personal and interpersonal attitudes with national and international scales of interaction. This requires the recognition of the politicised basis of sociospatial changes, assessing complex cross-scale phenomena in a way that helps to remove pre-established conceptions about the origin of problems and possible solutions.
... Then, a second wave happened some years later, when in the 1980's the terrorism 1 broke out across the country, forcing the survivors of abused and slaughtered indigenous families to seek refuge in the sandy lands and steeped hills of the capital's peripheries (Chambers 2005). To this situation was added the contemporary political centralisation encouraged by the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) giving rise to the birth of a myriad of Pueblos Jóvenes or Barriadas (slums) (Figure 2b) (Dosh et al. 2006) as a response to the inadequate -and almost non-existentplanning policies and the inability of public and private institutions 2 to provide affordable housing for the increasing population (Lloyd 1980). ...
It is estimated that more than 900 million of the total population of developing countries is living in squatter settlements (Montgomery 2005); phenomenon originated from the accelerated process of urbanisation unleashed by the massive migration of the poorer from rural to urban areas (Johansson et al. 2011). The purpose of this paper is to determine and identify those attributes, factors, strategies and policies necessary for boosting the upgrading capacity of slums in order to turn them into less vulnerable, more resilient and environmentally-oriented places. The case study of Villa El Salvador, a slum located in Lima-Peru, is analysed as a supporting evidence of effective grass-roots management and as an exemplary self-help model led by residents and community organisations. This analysis emphasizes the necessity to change the attitude towards squatter settlements, by unveiling their potential to provide affordable housing and socio-economic development to the poorer. Conclusions are intended to gain a better understanding of this problematic from a more positive and humanitarian perspective, with the hope of contributing with the accretion process and urban integration of segregated communities; a vision that demands the incorporation of dwellers as the social catalyst needed to achieve a more sustainable and equitable future.
... Also social dynamics in the settlements have changed. Once the settlements acquire basic services and individual land titles, collective action tends to decline (Dosh & Lerager, 2006). In the initial development stage, communal organisations undertake those activities that are prior to and necessary for individual activities (Riofrío, as cited in Hordijk, 2000: 95). ...
Much in contrast to the city John Turner (1967) once described as progressive in terms of housing approaches for the urban poor, today in Lima, the capital of Peru, private enterprises have assumed unprecedented planning powers. The city that for a substantial part has been produced ‘from below’ through collective action is increasingly transformed ‘from above’ through large-scale urban development projects. The article discusses how Lima's urban poor collectively resist the intervention of a megaproject in their neighbourhoods, the ‘Vía Parque Rímac’ expressway. This mixed-use project combines conventional road infrastructure with urban redevelopment, including public green spaces in the city centre. It is concluded that this emblematic project has significant implications for issues of spatial justice, political transparency and accountability.
... With the support of some populist national governments, such as the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s, Latin American squatting took the form of land invasions in which land occupiers targeted underdeveloped public land or the estates of a single large landowner (Davis, 2006, p. 38). As a result, tens of millions of Latin Americans have participated in illegal land invasions during the second half of the twentieth century (Dosh and Lerager, 2006). Whilst land invasions were the result of illegal squatter community action, there were also pirate urbanizations that were the result of illegal subdivision of land lots usually sold with a minimum of services (Gilbert, 1981). ...
This article aims to contribute to the literature on city organizing, an important yet under-researched area in the intersection of organization theory and urban studies. The concepts of the city and change, translation and action nets are fundamental to this analysis. The study takes as its object the collective process of organizing the change of La Chureca, the rubbish dump of the city of Managua, Nicaragua. Through its translation into a global spectacle of degradation, La Chureca has become a flagship for urban change projects. La Chureca is referred to as an example of an ‘uncanny place’. In association with urban social movements, these uncanny places are strong catalysts for mobilizing urban change and resilience. The article concludes by discussing the revival of the local in Latin American cities and the permeation of the historical role of urban movements as agents of change in the processes of urban governance and managing resilience.
... Intense labor-market competition in urban areas, moreover, further weakens incentives urban residents from similar socioeconomic strata to coordinate action. In some districts, innovative squatters employed a mixed repertoire of clientelist deal-making strategies combined with militancy to get services delivered, including piped water, electricity, and land titles (Dosh 2006). Surveys of the poor in New Delhi, too, have found a much more varied picture of participation and mobilization by the poor than was once believed (Harriss 2005). ...
The implications of urban development for overall economic prosperity are well known. Employment, housing, policing, infrastructure and social policies in cities have been shaped and institutionalized through a complex set of interactions between various urban interests, public officials, and institutions. In advanced industrial countries, for example, the rise of influential coalitions with the urban working class at the center was responsible for the proliferation of social protection in the 19th and 20th centuries. Consequently, a great deal is known about the dynamics of urban political mobilization and behavior in richer countries, and of participation among the urban poor. In the cities of the developing world, however, there is far less information available regarding these issues. I survey some theoretical foundations for understanding the political-economy of urban poverty before examining several pathologies of political life for the urban poor in the developing world. I focus on some aspects of the city-dweller’s political agency - or the lack thereof - that limit the ability of the urban poor to engage in collective action, to participate in decision-making, to form effective organizations, and to resist predatory behavior by officialdom. I then examine some areas where further research is needed, including the political-economic bases for mobilization, the prospects for pro-poor urban social policy, conditions determining the effectiveness of delegation, and of membership organizations for the urban poor.
In a shantytown in Lima, who counts as a resident depends on who is counting. Drawing on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Peruvian “self-help” housing community, I show how censuses and surveys are woven into residency determinations and negotiations over property rights. In these contexts, “residency” is not a self-evident status but rather a complex performance that involves possessing the right kind of need, participating in development activities, accumulating documents, and being legible to myriad political and personalistic “state-like” entities. Meanwhile, conflicts over inadequate residency performances generate violence, insecurity, and confusion about who “the community” is and who is entitled to represent it. I argue that viewing residency as a contested performance that mediates and remakes long-standing inequalities can improve anthropological interpretations of the sprawling and pockmarked cities of the Global South and the dynamics of urban citizenship that produce them. © 2018 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved
Peru's urban peripheries have long been shaped by the intertwining of urban development policies with Peruvians' domestic aspirations. Since the 1960s, different formulations of progressive and self‐help housing policies have relied on and reproduced a domestic life course model in which Peruvians' inexorable progress through the “domestic cycle” is mirrored in the steady transformation of their precarious, unconsolidated shantytown homes into “noble” (modern; concrete) constructions in fully urbanized neighborhoods. While shantytowns partially reflect this predictable life course temporality, they are also shaped by future imaginings and contingent time. People use shantytowns to fulfill ideals of adulthood, autonomy, and success, but also to hedge their bets, retreating from some relations while striving to forge new ones. Drawing on twenty‐one months of fieldwork in Peruvian shantytowns, this article examines informal urban development from a contingent life course perspective to demonstrate how Peru's urban peripheries are embedded in and shaped by Peruvians' efforts to pursue domestic life projects while managing fluctuating kin relations and preparing for uncertain futures.
In the wake of the Great Recession, housing and its financing suddenly re-emerged as questions of significant public concern. Yet both public and academic debates about housing have remained constricted, tending not to explore how the evolution of housing simultaneously entails basic forms of socio-spatial reproduction and underlying tensions in the political order. Drawing on cutting edge perspectives from urban studies, this book grants renewed, interdisciplinary energy to the housing question. It explores how housing raises a series of vexing issues surrounding rights, identity, and justice in the modern city. Through finely detailed studies that illuminate national and regional particularities- ranging from analyses of urban planning in the Soviet Union, the post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans, to squatting in contemporary Lima - the volume underscores how housing questions matter in a wide range of contexts. It draws attention to ruptures and continuities between high modernist and neoliberal forms of urbanism, demonstrating how housing and the dilemmas surrounding it are central to governance and the production of space in a rapidly urbanizing world. © Edward Murphy and Najib B. Hourani 2013. All rights reserved.
The explosive growth of so-called marginal settlements in Latin America’s cities has received considerable academic attention in past decades. The inability of the state to adequately provide
affordable housing for a rapidly growing urban population has meant that these neighbourhoods relied on community mobilization to achieve common objectives of basic infrastructure and legal recognition. With increasing consolidation and less need for coordinated action, many local organizations lost their rationale. Fear of crime and violence, a major concern in Latin American metropolises, is inscribed on the urban landscape by a growing number of gated and fortified residential enclaves for the better-off. Marginal neighbourhoods, however, experience a ‘security gap’ as they receive insufficient police protection and lack the financial resources to employ private guards. In many cases, the real or perceived insecurities of inner-city life have prompted organized bottom-up, mostly informal and sometimes vigilante, responses. Drawing on research on the rise of informal security-related interventions in the neighbourhoods of Lima Metropolitana, Peru, this paper explores the rationales underlying the different approaches and adoptions, including the involvement of the main actors, community associations and other local interest groups.
Urban popular movements that organize illegal land invasion communities present an intriguing puzzle. When most invasion organizations acquire land titles, their participation levels plummet and their agendas stagnate; yet some neighborhoods achieve land titles, sustain high participation, and acquire other services, such as piped-in water. Why do these organizations achieve movement resilience? The more typical trajectory of movement collapse is explained by the disappearance of the key selective incentive, property security. Some organizations, however, evade this “security trap” through mixed motives: their basic material agenda is supplemented by a nonmaterial and often altruistic agenda, which sustains participation in the face of reduced selective incentives. Examining three neighborhood case studies in Lima and Quito, this article argues that a new, “innovator” type of invasion organization is more likely to exhibit sustained participation and movement resilience due to tactical innovation, democratic governance, and mixed motives.
It is often assumed that lower classes will resist market-oriented neoliberal reforms that impose economic austerity on popular sectors and exacerbate social inequalities. However, the Peruvian case suggests that there are contexts in which political leaders can implement market reforms while sustaining lower-class political support. Survey data and the electoral results of a 1993 constitutional referendum indicate that President Alberto Fujimori's unexpected postelectoral embrace of the neoliberal model cost him support among lower-class constituents in the short term. However, the renewal of economic growth and accelerated poverty relief funding, combined with a reduction in political violence, enabled Fujimori to win back lower-class support for his 1995 reelection. In the process, Fujimori constructed a multiclass electoral constituency that broke with Peru's previous pattern of polarized class-based voting distinctions.
Presents evidence to suggest that the picture of the urban poor as conservative and concerned primarily with individual advancement should be adjusted rather than discarded. Extensive research in a poor community in the northern part of Lima during the mid-1980s revealed a complex and politically divided population in which patterns of conservatism and clientelism persisted while new currents of popular radicalism and class-based activism appeared. The article begins by presenting evidence, drawn from interviews with two dozen shantytown leaders and community activists, of a complex and mixed popular political culture in contemporary Lima. It then places current patterns in the context of recent Peruvian political history and suggests ways in which macro-level changes during the period of military rule (1968-1980) and since the transition back to civilian rule have influenced popular political culture. The article ends by highlighting the implications of the Peruvian case of heightened social mobilization and class consciousness for a more theoretical and regional understanding of the political character of the urban poor. -from Author
Reviews recent trends in the urbanisation process of major Latin American cities, against the background of the well-researched situation in the 1960s and 1970s. The central features of that era were accelerating primacy, spatial polarisation of social classes, and high informal employment. Attempts to assess whether the regional economic crisis of the late 70s and 80s has changed these central features, and if so whether it is a common phenomenon in many countries. Concentrating on three major urban centres-Bogota, Montevideo and Santiago-finds that primate city growth is declining, spatial polarisation has undergone significant changes, and informal sector earnings have contracted due to greater formal sector unemployment. Suggests that the shift towards an export oriented economy may be at least partially responsible for some of these effects. -M.Amos
Recruitment and commitment in protest movements are best explained by analyzing group-level political processes such as consciousness-raising, collective empowerment, polarization, and collective decision-making. Such processes increase protesters' political solidarity--their commitment to the cause and their belief in the non-institutional tactics that further that cause. Other frameworks, such as the rational choice and collective behavior approaches, are less adequate in accounting for recruitment and commitment. Rational choice perspectives neglect group processes by suggesting that decisions about whether to join or stay at a protest are based largely on isolated individual cost/benefit calculations. The collective behavior view that protests are spawned by confused and insecure individuals in situations of social unrest cannot be reconciled with the fact that most protests originate among close-knit groups of politically committed activists using carefully planned strategies and tactics. These conclusions are based on a study of the 1985 Columbia University divestment protest.
One of the most significant developments in Latin American politics and political economy in the last two decades has been the increasing decentralization of government. This development has generated a substantial literature on the pros and cons of decentralization and on subnational politics but few attempts to explain differences in the pattern of decentralization across countries. Fiscal decentralization must be understood as a political bargain involving presidents, legislators, and subnational politicians, each having somewhat conflicting preferences. How these bargains are struck will depend heavily on the lines of accountability within political parties. In systems with centralized political parties, the central government has exercised greater control over resources and uses than in countries with decentralized parties, in which subnational politicians exercise strong influence over legislators. The article explores this hypothesis through a comparative analysis of decentralization in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico.
Drawing on debates in lesbian and gay periodicals and writings from and about post-structuralist ''queer theory'' and politics. this paper clarifies the meanings and distinctive politics of ''queerness,'' in order to trace its implications for social movement theory and research. The challenge of queer theory and politics, I argue, is primarily in its disruption of sex and gender identity boundaries and deconstruction of identity categories. The debates (over the use of the term ''queer'' and over bisexual and transgender inclusion) raise questions not only about the content of sexuality-based political identities, but over their viability and usefulness. This in turn challenges social movement theory to further articulate dynamics of collective identity formation and deployment. While recent social movement theory has paid attention to the creation and negotiation of collective identity, it has not paid sufficient attention to the simultaneous impulse to destabilize identities from within. That tendency, while especially visible in lesbian and gay movements, is also visible in other social movements. It calls attention to a general dilemma of identity politics: Fixed identity categories are both the basis for oppression and the basis for political power. The insights of bath sides of the dilemma highlighted here raise important new questions for social movement theory and research.
Latin American populism is generally associated with the
developmental stage of import substitution industrialization; it is
thus widely presumed to have been eclipsed by the debt crisis of
the 1980s and the free market reforms of the neoliberal era.
However, the leadership of Alberto Fujimori in Peru suggests that
new forms of populism may be emerging despite the fiscal
constraints of neoliberal austerity. This new variant of populism
thrives in a context where economic crisis and social dislocation
undermine traditional representative institutions, enabling
personalist leaders to establish unmediated relationships with
heterogeneous, atomized masses. Political support can be
cultivated through populist attacks on entrenched political elites or
institutions, along with targeted but highly visible poverty alleviation
programs. This new form of populist autocracy complements the
efforts of neoliberal technocrats to circumvent the representative
institutions that are integral to democratic accountability. The
Peruvian case thus demonstrates that populism has been
transformed rather than eclipsed during the neoliberal era and that it
should be decoupled theoretically from any particular phase or
model of economic development.
The frequent resort to protest activity by relatively powerless groups in recent American politics suggests that protest represents an important aspect of minority group and low income group politics. At the same time that Negro civil rights strategists have recognized the problem of using protest as a meaningful political instrument, groups associated with the “war on poverty” have increasingly received publicity for protest activity. Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation, for example, continues to receive invitations to help organize low income communities because of its ability to mobilize poor people around the tactic of protest. The riots which dominated urban affairs in the summer of 1967 appear not to have diminished the dependence of some groups on protest as a mode of political activity.
This article provides a theoretical perspective on protest activity as a political resource. The discussion is concentrated on the limitations inherent in protest which occur because of the need of protest leaders to appeal to four constituencies at the same time. As the concept of protest is developed here, it will be argued that protest leaders must nurture and sustain an organization comprised of people with whom they may or may not share common values. They must articulate goals and choose strategies so as to maximize their public exposure through communications media. They must maximize the impact of third parties in the political conflict. Finally, they must try to maximize chances of success among those capable of granting goals.
Past analysis of social movements and social movement organizations has normally assumed a close link between the frustrations or grievances of a collectivity of actors and the growth and decline of movement activity. Questioning the theoretical centrality of this assumption directs social movement analysis away from its heavy emphasis upon the social psychology of social movement participants; it can then be more easily integrated with structural theories of social process. This essay presents a set of concepts and related propositions drawn from a resource mobilization perspective. It emphasizes the variety and sources of resources; the relationship of social movements to the media, authorities, and other parties; and the interaction among movement organizations. Propositions are developed to explain social movement activity at several levels of inclusiveness-the social movement sector, the social movement industry, and social movement organization.
In Latin America, shantytowns and squatter settlements were portrayed as “slums of hope” and inner-city areas as “slums of despair” in the 1960s and 1970s. It is argued in this article that the positive conception of the former and the negative conception of the latter were both exaggerated. By the latter 1980s, inner-city areas may be “slums of hope” while shantytowns, in comparison, are “slums of despair”. The reversal is attributable to changed macro conditions: the economic crisis plaguing Third World economies, and the austerity policies implemented as a consequence. Ethnographic work in Mexico City over a 20-year period shows center-city residents to be better situated than residents of the city periphery to adapt to the economic crisis.
Thesis (Ph.D. in Political Science)--University of California, Berkeley, Fall 2004. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 264-269).
- de Soto, Hernando