Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the contradictions between the treatment of the poor as stakeholders in Brazilian urban policy and the class-biased definitions of public interest that shape such policy in practice. What looks like a successful exercise in neoliberal governmentality does not produce docile objects of management but new political subjects.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines an urban area in which rich and poor now live in close proximity as condominiums have grown up around slums established on invaded lands on what was once the periphery of the city. Land values continue to rise not only because of high-income residential development but also due to the area's suitability as a location for "new economy" firms and a state-sponsored technology park. Their prospects for spatial expansion increasingly circumscribed by such developments, poor residents and their organisations nevertheless find themselves invited to the party of participation in the urban planning process as stakeholders whose rights to the city are recognized by government. Yet spokespersons of this same government have argued that the densely occupied slum areas have created major environmental problems best avoided by a policy of non-interference in private property relations, given that the condominium developers and their clients can be relied on to maximise the preservation of the Atlantic forest. Everyone, it seems, now deserves a stake in the city, but their rights are limited by the way ownership over resources relates to ownership of policy, as expression of a transcendent public interest that in practice reproduces a strong class bias. Yet the paper shows that whilst it is easy to dismiss much of what is happening here as a successful exercise in neoliberal governmentality, the outcome is not the production of docile objects of management but a proliferating range of new political subjects.