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Paper Short Abstract:

In Brazilian working-class neighborhoods, residents welcome street paving as progress, diverging from ongoing Western trends. This perception reflects the inhabitants' relationship to space, but also a political strategy favoring their settlement in former rural areas.

Paper Abstract:

“The progress (progresso) is coming!” This is how the residents of Jardim Maravilha, Rio de Janeiro’s largest “irregular settlement” (loteamento irregular), welcome the authorities’ street paving. In 2011, the dirt road where I conducted my doctoral research, bordered by shrubs and thickets, was paved. While I understood the benefits for residents, I couldn’t fathom why they sought to erase all greenery, pressuring the municipality to concrete the entire sidewalk. At a time when Western countries are removing asphalt from streets to cool the air, in Rio’s poor neighborhoods, the residents applaud the new pavement.

Do these people remain captive to an “ideology of progress,” while we Westerners recognize its limitations? I argue that this adherence to “progress” is not an outdated belief, but a historically situated “perception,” in Tim Ingold’s sense. On the hone hand, residents, often from rural areas, replicate the same relationship to space as in agricultural settings: space becomes inhabitable once “cleared” (limpa) of undesirable elements, especially wild vegetation (mato). On the other hand, the lack of infrastructure is a political strategy: to ensure housing access for the working class without direct financing, Brazilian elites chose to facilitate their settlement in former rural areas, sacrificing urban comfort.

Examining this category of “progress” allows us to overcome the opposition between ontological and materialist approaches to infrastructure: it makes sense only related to the historical experience of the Brazilian proletariat, constantly tasked with clearing space, while elites refuse to allocate part of the social product to improve living conditions.