Unequal urbanization, punitive control, and citizenship in dependent economies

Abstract

We discuss the relationship between urbanization and public security in dependent economies, focusing on Brazil. The relationship between urbanization and police and penal control is a two--way street: urban growth produces new demands for criminal justice, while security concerns shape urban space itself. This dynamic is more acute in contexts of greater social inequality and stronger authoritarian traditions. Residential segregation is a central factor in the production of urban violence, though not exclusive, as it also results from the state’s repressive apparatus, the globalized criminal economy, and diverse socioeconomic variables. The hegemonic political response has been the criminalization of poverty, contested by urban social movements that articulate citizenship in a language of equal rights.

Keywords
urbanization; violence; inequality; security; citizenship

Resumo

Discutimos a relação entre urbanização e segurança pública nas economias dependentes, com ênfase no Brasil. A relação entre urbanização e controle policial-penal é uma via de mão dupla: o crescimento das cidades produz novas demandas para a justiça criminal, ao mesmo tempo que a preocupação com a segurança contribui para modelar o espaço urbano. Essa dinâmica é mais dramática em contextos de maior desigualdade social e tradições autoritárias mais intensas. A segregação residencial é fator central – não exclusivo – na produção da violência urbana, que resulta também do aparato repressivo estatal, da economia criminal globalizada e de fatores socioeconômicos diversos. A resposta política hegemônica tem sido a criminalização da pobreza, disputada pelos movimentos sociais urbanos que articulam a cidadania numa linguagem de direitos igualitários.

Palavras-chave
urbanização; violência; desigualdades; segurança; cidadania

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to discuss, in theoretical terms, the relationship between public security and urbanization, focusing on peripheral regions of the globalized capitalist world. We start from the observation that, although the city is an ancient form of socio-spatial organization, the urbanization process is a modern characteristic and has become dominant in contemporary times. We also note that the formation of large cities, driven by industrialization, was accompanied by concerns with social control that led to the creation of police forces in the modern sense of the term: bureaucratic, State-owned, specialized, and professional institutions that exercise internal coercion and serve as the spearhead of criminal justice, distinguishing themselves from both private militias and armies. A significant portion of the specific demands placed on modern police forces is linked to the vicissitudes of urban life: the intense circulation of people and goods, "collective disturbances," the relative ineffectiveness of informal social controls (by relatives and neighbors), etc. However, the role of the police has always been conditioned by the existence of the so-called "dangerous classes," the preferential target of more aggressive police control, defined in broader or narrower terms according to political convenience.

In peripheral regions, the urban "dangerous classes" have always constituted a considerable contingent, as urbanization in dependent economies proceeds faster than industrialization. The disorganization of rural life outpaces the generation of industrial employment as a factor in rural-to-urban migration. Rising rent prices due to real estate speculation, combined with low wages and unemployment among the working classes, pushed them towards illegal occupation and self--construction, simply because their wages made subsistence incompatible with paying rent.

Thus emerge favelas and peripheries, devoid of urban services and concentrating poverty and violence, often dominated by armed gangs. On the other hand, the search by the privileged for property and personal security fosters the construction of walled and guarded areas for housing and leisure. In the dynamics of fragmentation and dispersion of urban territory, the intense and complex social insecurity demands political responses, which differ according to the emphasis placed on the criminalization of the undesirables or on the universalization of rights, on the militarization of cities or on popular mobilization.

City and police

One of the fundamental traits of industrial modernization, whether capitalist or in its "Soviet" variant (practiced in the former Soviet Union and in the early decades of the People's Republic of China), is urbanization. However, Lefebvre warns that the city is an institution much older than the development of capitalism, and moreover, that the logic of capital accumulation is destructive to the cities, as it subjects them to generalized commodification, thus emptying the enjoyment of common urban space as a use-value (Lefebvre, 2001). Nevertheless, it is not difficult to note how industrialization, which, despite the presence of a planned variant for a few decades, is a process dominated by a capitalist logic, is correlated with urbanization, at least in the strict sense of population relocation. "Indeed, if demographic growth is strong, that of the urban population is spectacular, as are the spatial forms it takes–deeply expressive and laden with political significance" (Castells, 1983, p, p. 53, author's translation). About a decade ago, it was announced that, for the first time, the majority of humanity lived in cities, with one-third of urban dwellers inhabiting illegal or irregular occupations in places devoid of urban services –that is, in favelas – which can be interpreted as an urbanization of misery, widely underestimated by distorted and unilateral measurement criteria (Davis, 2006).

With the urban population grow the strata known as the "dangerous classes," objects of aggressive State surveillance. But the relationship between the urbanization process and the police-penal apparatus is reciprocal. On one hand, urban growth produces new demands on criminal justice and public order. On the other hand, the very concern with security (of the State, property, and persons) contributes to shaping urban space in a way deemed, by planners, to be instrumental for guaranteeing the security of society, its members, and its goods.

In a way, the creation of the police, in the modern sense of the term – that is, a bureaucratic, public, professionalized, and specialized institution, an authorized State agent of internal coercion (Bayley, 2001), is the State's response to the demands and situations produced by the expansion of the industrial, urban, and mercantile economy. An instrumental organization for the State management of urban space in accordance with dominant interests and their demands for a certain "public order". And in this sense, the police in the modern sense, conceived as a public administrative body serving as the spearhead of criminal justice, has more or less the same duration as the emergence of industrial metropolises. The intense daily circulation of goods and people in a space of high demographic density, and the need to control and discipline the labor force, all demand more permanent and capillary surveillance, carried out by State servants especially selected and trained for this purpose. A function that military troops or private militias could not perform as effectively as a specialized and permanent organization, established for this objective.

Thus, the use of military troops and private guards became exceptional or quite restricted, at least initially, as the State centralized in bureaucratized police forces the patrolling of public thoroughfares, the investigation of crimes, and the fight against "disorders" generated by all kinds of conflicts – from worker strikes to soccer hooliganism. Although the relations between police and criminals are ambivalent,¹ and the results achieved in repressing violent crime are disappointing, State police forces are still today one of the most present faces of public authority in the daily life of cities.

The process we have just outlined seems to have been, as far as we know, universal: where there was capitalist modernization, with the consequent expansion of urbanization through some combination of industrial development and rural disintegration, there also advanced the professionalization and specialization of State officials in charge of defending and imposing politico-legal order. The more individual and anonymous existence in large cities weakens informal control, exercised among neighbors, relatives, etc., and the volume of people and wealth in intense circulation generates a great demand for greater formal control. The very idea of "public order" has much to do with the existence of urban public spaces (streets, squares, etc.) patrolled in a supposedly impersonal manner by servants recruited on merit.

Things, however, unfold in a more complex way. Some factors create complications for police forces patrolling the streets, and also for citizens to trust that police officers will carry out their work in an impersonal manner and according to written law, rather than according to informal and personalized relationships. This is because what is observed, firstly, is that in urban space, a produced environment, what predominates is not necessarily something like an immediately recognizable "order"– not when we observe a city in a capitalist country more broadly. What manifests before our eyes seems closer to urban disorder than to order. However, so-called urban disorder is the socio- -spatial organization produced by the functioning of the capitalist market, operating through a hierarchized division of labor in space, with the ultimate goal of unlimited capital accumulation, dictating the dynamics of the cities' economic and demographic growth (Castells, 1983, p. 23, author's translation). There is, therefore, an implicit principle in the (dis)organization of urban space: unlimited capital accumulation as an end in itself, converting everything into a commodity.

Moreover, urban growth played an eminent role in capital accumulation, not merely as a stage, the place where factories and nearly all associated services necessary for the functioning of factory production are installed, because

[...] urbanization has played a crucial role in the absorption of surplus capital, and has done so on an ever-increasing geographical scale, but at the price of flourishing processes of creative destruction that entail the dispossession of urban masses of any and all right to the city. (Harvey, 2014, p. 59; author's translation)

And it is upon this apparent disorder that public security forces must impose "public order," as the first and most visible representation of State authority. On one hand, in a context where unlimited capital accumulation subordinates everything, even the police (or military troops and private guards performing police functions) serve as instruments for the "dispossession of urban masses," as seen in forced evictions or the dispersal of popular protests.

On the other hand, police and criminal justice behavior hardly fits the "weberian" image of an impartial bureaucracy applying legal and technical norms. On the contrary, police and penal activity has not only proven, in several countries, to be quite selective in the administration of criminal justice, but also maintains quite ambivalent relations with criminality, including the kinds where some police officers are caught by their superiors when investigated.²

The selectivity of police activity extends throughout the criminal justice system as a whole, operating as the first of a series of successive filters: Police, Public Prosecutor's Office, Courts, and Penal Execution (Ribeiro; Silva, 2010). Criminal Law, far from being a neutral and egalitarian application of universal norms, operates as an instrument for the differential management of populations, defining who is treated as an "enemy" to be neutralized and who deserves the guarantees of a citizen (Zaffaroni, 2007). In this sense, Foucault (2013) had already pointed out that the intensification of penal control does not have as its primary effect the elimination of illegalisms, but their selective management: the main target is popular illegalisms, the survival and rebellion practices considered harmful to the prevailing economic system, while other types of illegalisms are tolerated or even functional to dominant interests. The result of this penal selectivity is a massive overrepresentation of the poor, youth, and Blacks in the prison population, which Misse (2010a) analyzes in terms of "criminal subjection": a process by which certain social subjects are previously identified as criminals, simply by belonging to certain social and territorial categories. Ultimately, criminal subjection defines social categories that can be killed with impunity.

Dependent urbanization

The relationship between the police-penal apparatus and the urbanization process acquires, as one might expect, more dramatic facets when it occurs in contexts where there is greater social inequality and less democratic and constitutional tradition (or, conversely, more intense authoritarian and segregationist traditions). Such is, as a rule, the case of economically peripheral countries in the capitalist world, whose structural peculiarities cannot be understood in terms of "backwardness," as if all countries necessarily passed through the same stages of economic and institutional development. "Underdevelopment" is essentially a different modality, another path, and occurs simultaneously and in connection with the "development" of central capitalist countries. In short, it is a position in the international division of labor.³

As expected, the national (and subnational) position in the international division of labor manifests itself in the urbanization process. Urban growth in peripheral countries exceeds the pace of their industrial development and does not follow the same stages as those of central countries (Castells, 1983, p. 55). The differences in the urbanization process are explained by the economic dependence of peripheral countries on central countries. This dependency relationship, which is internalized in the country's socioeconomic structure and not merely the result of external ties, has gone through several phases, varying throughout the history of each peripheral country. Economic dependence is reproduced internally because, once politically and ideologically internalized, it counts on powerful domestic interests favorable to its maintenance.

For Brazil, we can enumerate, successively, direct colonial domination, commercial, financial, and technological dependence, similarly to what Castells (1983, p. 60) generalizes regarding Latin America, especially Hispanic America. Each phase conditioned the urbanization process, whose products remained sedimented in the production of urban space in subsequent stages, resulting in the extreme concentration of a huge relative surplus population in a few major cities, which possess neither the urban infrastructure to accommodate this population nor a productive system capable of absorbing it as wage labor, "a growing mass of unemployed population with no precise function in urban society, after having broken its ties with rural society" (Castells, 1983, p. 64, author's translation).

The absence of an economic function for these masses is relative, as they are a reserve of low-skilled labor, which can be employed at low cost or self-employed in the informal economy, providing small services and products to other classes and class fractions. But if their lack of function is relative, their deprivation of the right to the city is much less so, to the point that it would be more accurate to speak of urban inequalities rather than just the superfluity of this portion of the population.

If there is a mismatch between the faster speed of urbanization and the slower speed of industrialization, there is also a lack of sufficient urban services for the populations attracted to the cities. Thus, the relatively low offers of industrial employment and urban services lead to the expansion of the informal economy, ecological segregation, and social polarization (Castells, 1983, p. 77). The disorganization of rural life, leading to rural-to-urban migration, was as decisive, or more so, for Latin American urban growth as the industrial demand for labor. Therefore, one must consider the maintenance of the latifundium as an explanatory factor for the contrasts and confrontations of Latin American urbanization (Castells, 1983, pp. 83-84), as much as the dependent character of industrial development.

The disintegration of rural ways of life and the generation of industrial employment – the first expelling people from the countryside and the second attracting them to the cities, but without fully complementing each other to the point of employing migrants as industrial workers – thus cause a true overpopulation concentrated in the main cities of each country and region. The public authorities fail to include these masses of migrants as urban citizens, relegating them to territorialized marginality.

But there is another highly important factor for explaining the unequal dynamics of Latin American urbanization: "Real estate speculation [which] derives, ultimately, from the combination of two converging movements: the superimposition of a social site onto the natural site; and the dispute between activities or people for a given location" (Santos, 2013, p. 106, author's translation). Thus, the city is divided among activities and social strata, in such a way that the built space expresses the socioeconomic structure that conditioned the mode of production and distribution of urban space.

To understand the phenomenon of urban violence, it is necessary to focus on residential segregation, that is, the unequal distribution of housing among more or less favored localities to more or less favored individuals and families. Access to urban services, proximity to or distance from certain activities (such as workplaces or leisure areas, business and production centers), and finally, the very size of the occupied space, are objects of dispute that will result in urban inequalities or territorialized social polarization. Beyond income distribution, there is the privileged enjoyment of collective goods associated with one locality or another. Therefore, both the dynamics of private consumption and public investment contribute to the worsening of real estate speculation as the main factor in the (dis)ordering of urban space:

[...] a first moment of the speculative process comes with the extension of the city and the differential implementation of collective services. Monopoly capitalism aggravates differentiation in terms of resource allocation, since ever larger portions of public revenue are directed towards the economic city to the detriment of the social city. (Santos, 2013, p. 107; author's translation)

This conflict can persist or worsen even with the expansion of public investments in poor areas, because these improvements make these previously marginalized territories an object of interest for the middle and upper classes, as the production of wealth and poverty are interconnected, and public investments in the urbanization of marginalized or decaying areas can be appropriated by the "market" (i.e., by speculators) as yet another profit opportunity (Santos, 2013, p. 115 and p. 125).

This is not a fatality, which might suggest that the best course for all is a "market solution," but rather a consequence of the development models adopted in Brazil. The process of capitalist modernization, by which the interests of large corporations are favored by government action, was implemented in Brazil and had a major impact on the urbanization process, allowing us to speak of corporate urbanization and corporate cities (Santos, 2013, p. 117). Here, it is necessary to set aside the idea that market and State are mutually exclusive. Public and private agents have complex and diversified relationships with each other, which vary according to the economic development models that are politically favored internally and externally. Thus, it can be said that, in Brazil, both the "market" and the "State" favored the concentration of wealth, and that, regarding the production and appropriation of urban space, both the "State" and the "market" acted to favor real estate speculation.

Space, especially urban space, is strategic for governments and corporations, a basis for corporate power, and is therefore continuously produced and transformed according to their economic and political interests, with the State always playing a decisive role (Santos, 2013, p. 118). These business interests operating in urban territory are increasingly internationalized, just as the financing of territorial infra-structure is, an area where credit from multilateral agencies is fundamental (Santos, 2013, p. 119). This process of corporatization of the city, towards which the market and urban planning converged, has its other side in illegality, self-construction, and territorialized marginalization.

Thus, the process of building cities in Brazil did not respond to the needs created by the urbanization process itself coupled with industrial development (Maricato, 2001, p. 16). The first large Brazilian cities date back to colonization, but a decisive moment for Brazilian urbanization was the transition from slave labor to free labor (self-employed or wage labour), with the gradual expansion of the internal market and the first steps of industrialization. Industrial growth, from 1930 onwards, was accelerated by public investment, resulting in high rates of economic growth until the 1970s.

The various republican governments also implemented urban reforms, with "changes that combined environmental sanitation, beautification, and territorial segregation" (Maricato, 2001, p. 17, author's translation). Throughout the period of industrial development, the reproduction of labor power, which in theory would be carried out via the consumer market, was never resolved, even after the restricted and differentiated granting of social rights to formalized workers in officially recognized professions. Low wages combined with real estate speculation made life in the "legal city" unviable for broad segments of the popular classes. And investments in collective services, which could meet these demands, were too restricted to do so.

Vigorous, yet extremely unequal, economic growth, which proved incapable of overcoming Brazil's peripheral and dependent position in the international division of labor, was correlated with a segregating urbanization process, fueled by rural-to-urban migration of a population attracted by business demand for low-skilled (and very cheap) labor that it was unable to absorb, and by the role of the State as a direct or indirect urban investor.

The expansion of Brazilian metropolises went hand in hand with real estate speculation, which further hindered poor workers' access to legal housing, already practically barred by low wages. This is because "productive real estate activity in Brazilian cities did not subdue speculative activities, as occurred in the central capitalist countries. For the majority of the population seeking housing in cities, the market did not open up. Access for the middle and upper classes was prioritized" (Maricato, 2001, p. 21, author's translation) by both the market and the State.

It is here that, through the relationship between the labor market and the urbanization process, the illegal, irregular, or both, occupation of empty spaces and the construction of favelas and peripheries by the workers themselves seeking housing became imperative. Self- -construction is an alternative to prohibitive rental prices. However, it is a solution that brings other problems, both individual and collective. On one hand, low wages, unemployment, and informality, and on the other, real estate speculation, made survival within the legalized city impossible for the vast majority of workers – even for many of those with formalized jobs, that is, with some access to labor rights – due, among other things, to the extremely high cost of rents, pushed up by real estate speculation.

Segregation, fragmentation, and insecurity

The solution found by millions of workers was to build their own homes on public, irregular land, purchased or invaded, in empty areas devoid of or lacking public services. A process that was managed by the State with a mixture of negligence and violence, depending on the occasion, the interests involved, and pressures from residents and speculators.

Industrialization based on low wages determined much of the environment to be built. Alongside the large contingent of workers who remained in informality, the employed workers in the industrial sector did not have their wages regulated by their reproduction needs, including housing expenses, for example. The illegal and precarious city is a byproduct of this complexity in the labor market and the way industrialization took place. (Maricato, 2001, p. 41; author's translation)

The urban violence concentrated in favelas and urban peripheries is a multi-causal phenomenon, not reducible to any single factor. Intentional homicides, in particular, result from a complex combination of variables: socioeconomic inequalities that generate relative deprivation and the accumulation of disadvantages; labor market dynamics, such as unemployment and informality, which disproportionately affect the youth; the action of the public security and criminal justice apparatus itself, with low efficiency and high excesses; the territorial penetration of criminal networks linked to international illegal markets; and gender relations that shape patterns of victimization and perpetration of violence (Malta, 2017; Sandoval, 2014; Tavares, 2016). Within this multi-causal framework, residential segregation occupies a central analytical position – not as a single cause, but as the spatial axis around which the other factors are articulated and mutually potentiated. In other words, socio-spatial inequalities favor the concentrated conjunction of various structural factors of violence by creating a social ecology that favors competition for armed territorial control and the private resolution of interpersonal conflicts.

Thus, urban segregation was one of the main factors that favored the growth of interpersonal violence in Brazilian cities, as "the increase in violence is intrinsically related to the metropolises" (Maricato, 2001, p. 31, author's translation). What occurred was both an urbanization of poverty and a heightened vulnerability of the urban poor (especially the young) to intentional violence, both from the police and from people close to them, such as neighbors, relatives, acquaintances, etc. This violence is less linked to poverty than to social inequality, which manifests itself, among other things, as residential segregation between classes and class fractions. "It is impossible to dissociate territory from socioeconomic conditions and violence" (Maricato, 2001, p, p. 36, author's translation). Here, we can recall the strain and anomie theory, initiated by Merton (1938; Ramírez de Garay, 2013), to explain the relationship between social inequality and crime: the criminal would be the one who, deprived of legitimate means to achieve legitimate social values, resorts to illegalisms as a way to circumvent the lack of resources or opportunities and achieve personal success, regarded as the supreme value of modern capitalist culture.

The illegal and precarious city is also the main site for intentional lethal violence in Brazilian society, besides being seen primarily as threatening and stigmatized areas, whose residents are an important reserve of cheap labor, but who must be kept away and isolated, under coercion from a militarized public security apparatus. A repressive logic that contributes to preserving urban inequalities, since the main victims of socio-spatial segregation are presented as criminals until proven otherwise. Thus, their demands are disqualified, and their social position legitimized as moral failure, while State authority makes demonstrations of force through police and penal repression.

This process of territorial stigmatization has a direct translation into the functioning of the penal system. The selective expansion of incarceration is a political strategy for managing urban poverty through punitive means, not merely an effect of increased crime. Wacquant (2003) argued, analyzing the United States, how the Penal State was built as a functional substitute for the retreating Social State: as social protection programs were dismantled or restricted by neoliberal adjustment, the prison system expanded to contain, in cells, the populations made precarious by the markets, especially labor and housing, and by the retraction of social policy. This dynamic is more acute in peripheral countries, where social inequalities are deeper, political and legal traditions more authoritarian, and the Social State more thin and fragile, so that violent penal control has always operated as the primary mechanism for State management of marginalized populations (Wacquant, 2003; Zaffaroni, 2007).

The violence that plagues the favelas and peripheries of Brazilian metropolises does not depend only on territorial concentration of poverty, even though relative deprivation is an important explanatory factor. This is because one must also remember: a) the public security apparatus itself, which directly or indirectly is one of the main agents of the violence that victimizes the poor, the young, and Blacks, either through directed excesses in the use of force or through the association of a portion of police officers with organized crime; b) the international illegal economy, whose operations far transcend the scope of favelas and peripheries, through multinational financial operations, political and administrative corruption, a network that has the criminals of the favelas as its most visible, least benefited, and most exposed nexus to violence.

Intentional homicides are interconnected with numerous factors, ranging from social inequalities that lead to the accumulation of disadvantages (unemployment, informality, poverty, etc.) in some groups, to the inefficiency of security agencies and policies, passing through gender relations. Despite these general trends, there is great diversity in the intensity of manifestation of these trends among states and municipalities, such that the average homicide rates between 1990 and 2015 are higher in states like Espírito Santo, Pernambuco, and Alagoas, and lower in Santa Catarina and São Paulo (Malta, 2017).

In addition to the analysis oriented by characterizing the common traits of victims and instruments of homicide, which is the most common approach in the literature, it is also possible to focus the analysis on the relationship between homicides and the characteristics of the places where they occur. Thus, one can observe the correlation between homicide rates and socio-spatial inequality, demonstrating the urban-social contrasts within the cities themselves, originating from an unequal, heterogeneous, and disorderly urbanization and metropolization process, resulting in a segregated space where poverty, absence or precariousness of infrastructure and public services are territorially concentrated, and, along with them, intentional homicidal violence (Batista, 2016; Tavares, 2016).

However, such concentration does not occur around average municipal socioeconomic indicators, but at the intramunicipal level (neighborhoods and sets of neighborhoods), with even cases where the large circulation of wealth and people in a municipality or group of municipalities of high inequality favors homicidal violence, by making more flagrant the tension created by inequality in the distribution of resources and also the opportunities for profitable criminal activities, thus generating a territorialization of homicidal violence corresponding to intramunicipal social segregation (Souza, 2014; Alves, 2014; Tavares, 2016).

These correspondences between personal and local factors of victimization have a synchronic dimension, which is not necessarily fully repeated in variations over time, although there is a partial correspondence. Variations in the rate of deaths from intentional homicides are attributed to factors such as the proportion of youth, unemployment, inflation (Sandoval, 2014), seized weapons and people arrested by the police, general incarceration, reorganization of control over illicit markets, and social expenditures.⁴

For the municipality of São Paulo, which achieved a reduction in the homicide rate of around 70% between 2001 and 2008, an association of this trend with police activity and incarceration, access to firearms, and the percentage of youth and unemployed in the population was verified. However, the police and penitentiary variables lose significance when controlled by the percentage of youth and unemployed, demonstrating the decisive importance of socioeconomic variables in this case, to the detriment of public security activity (Peres et al., 2012).

In recent decades, concurrent with processes of industrial restructuring, financial liberalization, and market globalization, there has been an "urban metamorphosis" in Latin America, consisting of the strengthening of trends towards the dispersion of the urban fabric, whose construction, occupation, and use become increasingly fragmented and spread over an ever-larger territory. Both popular and dominant classes, and both inhabitants and companies, contribute to these trends and suffer their impact in a differentiated (and unequal) manner. Transnational corporations use industrial decentralization and capital mobility to organize their production and power networks across more or less distant territories, chosen for their various strategic advantages for business. Among the advantages are everything from the availability of service infrastructure and equipment to cost savings on transportation, labor rights, and taxation. And families act according to their resources and opportunities: the middle and upper classes seek gated locations well supplied with services and protected (such as walled and guarded condominiums), while the poor resort to cheaper and denser areas, not yet urbanized, self-construction, and illegal occupation (Mattos, 2010).

The relationship between urbanization and crime in the era of capitalist globalization is quite complex. If criminalization is expanded among the lower fractions of social stratification, if the police become more repressive in poverty territories, now redefined as risk areas, among the dominant strata the direction is opposite. The mobility of capital, managed through financial networks directed from "global cities," has weakened controls over white-collar crime. Financial liberalization and market globalization favor money laundering by criminal organizations. Large contingents of poor youth are especially vulnerable to being co-opted as disposable labor by groups linked to international criminal organizations, many of them directly or indirectly linked to the violence of territorialized armed groups:

In this context, multiple expressions also manifest themselves, on the rise in most of the cities of the already mentioned areas controlled by organized crime, which have managed to generate numerous and extensive urban fragments, mostly inaccessible to a large part of the population, including in many cases the police forces themselves. In recent years, these activities, thanks to the expansion and efficiency they achieved by organizing themselves as global chains, have been able to occupy ever-larger parts of the respective metropolitan territories, in processes that in many countries have proven unmanageable so far. (Mattos, 2010, p. 275; author's translation)

On other occasions, the marginalized masses are not only the disposable labor recruited by criminal organizations, but also the very "raw material" used by these networks of agents that carry out human trafficking. The business has grown to the point that in some countries the economy of human trafficking, exploitation of illegal immigrants, and remittances from emigrants to family members who remained in the country are significant generators of national income (Sassen, 2001).

Indeed, international criminal networks,

[...] using various mechanisms for recycling income and wages, have come to have a growing impact on the dynamization of the economic base of important parts of many large cities in the world and, in particular, practically all large Latin American urban agglomerations. In some of them, given the magnitude of the resources they manage to mobilize and the co-optation mechanisms used, these networks have assumed practically total control over certain urban areas of significant size, thus increasing their fragmentation with respect to the rest of the city. (Mattos, 2010, p. 252, author's translation).

Therefore, criminal activities not only manifest the worst consequences of extreme inequality, while the State's repressive actions are limited to controlling the effects of socio- -spatial segregation, but also, both repression and criminality contribute to reinforcing and channeling urbanization trends, among which is the fragmentation of urban space into an archipelago of enclaves. And here, the favelas and peripheries disputed by armed gangs and militarized police, or the shopping centers and gated condominiums, participate in the same socio-spatial process.

The behavior of companies and residents, of investment and consumption, accentuate the dispersion, fragmentation, and expansion of occupation, construction, and use of territory, generating increasingly sprawling cities, Balkanized among profoundly unequal zones that include commercial and residential areas dominated by walled condominiums and shopping centers, on one hand, and peripheries and favelas, densely populated areas of poor and stigmatized people, on the other.

The results of this growing polarization in the distribution of wealth and power are indelibly inscribed in the spatial forms of our cities, which increasingly become cities of fortified fragments, of gated communities, and of public spaces kept under constant surveillance. (Harvey, 2014, p. 48; author's translation)

In diverse, yet somehow complementary ways, this type of segregation generates insecurity, as the more favored fear crimes against their property, while the more vulnerable are involved in violent crime as agents, victims, and suspects until proven otherwise. Conversely, it must be recognized that the search for personal and property security is also inscribed in the territory, insofar as it is incorporated as a central concern of urban space management: from selectively aggressive policing policies that attempt to eliminate (by imprisonment, death, or expulsion) those considered dangerous, disorderly, or simply undesirable, to the very production of enclosed, fortified, and guarded spaces, whose access is strictly controlled by electronic means and security personnel. Socioeconomic, spatial, and legal-penal segregation, operated by both public and private agents, is the common denominator of this process of producing a space fragmented by real or symbolic walls.

Reformulations of citizenship

In this context, there are several attempts to impose some kind of political control over the blindness of globalized markets, as well as their impact on the production of urban space and other consequences. Schematically, one can say that:

Political responses to urban violence and the civil rupture it causes have varied significantly from country to country [...]. They cover a broad spectrum between criminalization and the repression linked to it, at one extreme, and the politicization of the problem, through the collective renegotiation of social rights, at the other [...]. No country completely avoided resorting to the criminal justice system, and all had to reconsider some social and citizenship rights, whether to restrict or expand them. (Wacquant, 2005, p. 36; author's translation)

We will initially discuss the political responses that place a stronger emphasis on criminalization, employed primarily as a means to repress the most extreme consequences of economic, urban, and social processes. The contrast between a flourishing and consumerist urban modernization for the rich, and the precariousness of housing and employment for impoverished and impatient masses, makes control over the latter a central political concern, including for military experts (Harvey, 2014, p. 129).

In a way, this response does not address the "problem," only its "effects," and it is not without reason that its public security doctrine is defined as a strategy for controlling behaviors, and not the causes of crime and violence, a "criminology" initially formulated by economists but translated into more practical terms by military experts (Christie, 2011, p. 178). These "thinkers" of militarism managed to see "the geopolitical consequences of concentrated poverty," addressing them in a more direct and pragmatic way, as they had no concern for "reconciling neoliberal dogma with capitalist reality" (Davis, 2006, p, p. 202). We can recognize there, with some clarity, the features of the "war on drugs" and the "war on terrorism," for example:

In short, the best minds at the Pentagon dared to venture where most UN, World Bank, and State Department figures fear to tread: down the road that logically proceeds from the abdication of urban reform. As in the past, this is a 'joyless street'... But the designers of war do not flinch. With the cold-bloodedness of lucidity, they affirm today that the 'failed and ferocious cities' of the Third World, especially their slum outskirts, will be the battlefield that will distinguish the 21st century. Pentagon doctrine is being reconfigured along these lines to sustain a worldwide low-intensity and unlimited-duration war against criminalized segments of the urban poor. This is the real 'clash of civilizations. (Davis, 2006, p. 205; author's translation)

Many of these experts identify growing urban inequality as fertile ground for the emergence of low-intensity internal conflicts, which could provide an occasion for military forces to intervene in police missions, thus leading to the convergence between the militarization of cities and the urbanization of war.

The widening gap between rich and poor, the increasing self-enclosure of political elites, the growing distance between dominant institutions and society, all fuel hostility and distrust. Such factors converge to undermine the legitimacy of social order and authority, which has come to symbolize its irresponsibility and its distinctly repressive character: the police. (Wacquant, 2005, pp. 34-35; author's translation)

Thus, US military experts show great concern for urban marginality, whose improvised, precarious, or devastated dwellings are perceived as places where there is a risk of forming "liberated zones", controlled by armed insurgents with strong popular support in their areas. Therefore, they advocate the militarization of social control in underdeveloped countries, with external support from more powerful countries, with the United States at the forefront (Taw and Hoffman, 1993).

Moreover, one perceives, beyond the danger of an armed popular rebellion, the multiplication of a broader and more varied set of threats to "social order," economic and political, which includes the already mentioned armed insurgency, but also diverse threats: "anarchists, criminals, the dispossessed, foreign meddlers, cynical opportunists, lunatics, revolutionaries, labor leaders, ethnic nationals, real estate speculators" and later adds: "indigenous populations, youth gangs, drug cartels, foreign expatriates, or insurgents" (Demarest, 1995, p. 44).

It is not only a matter of armed political groups, guerrillas, or terrorists, for example, but also groups of thieves or drug traffickers armed and driven by profit, in addition to popular political mobilizations without any military equipment or training (mobs), squatters of urban or rural property, etc. In this way, a broad and heterogeneous range of conflicts and social deviations occurring in the urban context are defined as potential internal military threats for Latin American states, which could do nothing but try to control, by repressive means, the unwanted consequences of wealth--concentrating economic policies in contexts of great ethnic heterogeneity. This would lead to the conclusion that their governments need constant external support (from the United States) and a very frequent recourse to military participation in police operations, the militarization of police forces, the selective restriction of individual rights, internal espionage, harsher sentences, and securitized architecture in their major cities.

In short, it is a militarization of urban management, especially in the periphery of the capitalist world, and the naturalized acceptance of social inequalities as given and unquestionable. The central concern would then be reduced to the punitive and military administration of the risks of urban disorder produced by a myriad of factors that are not discussable or questioned, especially the multiple social inequalities. And fundamentally, strict control over the marginalized and rebels, so that they do not harm the main beneficiaries of the social order sought to be defended manu militari.

A similar view appeared in a video created by the US Army, used in internal Pentagon courses and leaked to the press in October 2016. Predicting a dystopian urban future (not very distant from the current urban reality of many places), the mission of the US Armed Forces would be to control highly complex urban conflicts and disorders in the Third World. The narrative is accompanied by a sequence of images of extreme misery, traffic jams, protests, and insurrections around the world (Turse, 2016). This is not only a matter of external and imperial imposition on underdeveloped countries, since policies of criminalizing poverty were experimented with within the developed countries themselves, as exemplified by "zero tolerance" and more or less similar initiatives, resulting in a restriction or punitive redefinition of social policies and hypertrophy of incarceration (Wacquant, 2001; 2003).

This repressive arsenal is not limited to the direct action of police and military forces, but also mobilizes criminal and prison policy, which constitutes a second axis of the punitive response to social insecurity. Christie (2011) drew attention to the growth of the crime control industry: the expansion of prisons, the proliferation of penal types, harsher sentences, and the reduction of procedural guarantees form a set of policies that promote the criminalization of specific segments of the population. In concrete terms, this means that the penal system acts as a mechanism for the territorial management of poverty: it defines which territories and which populations will be subject to greater surveillance and punishment, thus contributing to reproducing and deepening the very socio-spatial segregation that is at the origin of insecurity (Wacquant, 2003; Zaffaroni, 2007; Zaccone, 2015). Drug trafficking legislation is perhaps the most eloquent example of this logic in Brazil: formulated in apparently universal terms, it operates in fact selectively, falling disproportionately on young Black people from the peripheries, while largely leaving untouched the distribution and money-laundering networks in which members of the dominant classes participate (Zaccone, 2007; Misse, 2011a).

One cannot deny how much such conceptions, which prognosticate the criminalization of poverty and the militarization of social control, have an elective affinity with the legal and political traditions of a country in which colonial slavery prevailed for 300 years, as is the case of Brazil.

[...] Brazilians may consider some Brazilians as 'citizens,' who have rights, and other Brazilians as 'marginals,' who do not – a distinction that only makes sense in the system of differentiated citizenship, which treats some Brazilians as if they were not citizens because, for reasons that have nothing to do with their national citizenship, they are denied those rights. (Holston, 2013, p. 330; author's translation)

Differentiated rights that some are given beforehand, but which others must win at great cost, leading them to defend these micro--privileges as a reward for their personal effort and to share the conception according to which the underprivileged are moral failures (Holston, 2013, pp. 334-336). An alternative conception to the traditional notion of privileged citizenship was gradually built in Brazil over the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, driven by popular mobilization, based on renewed neighborhood associations and progressive Catholicism, with the initial purpose of legalizing acquired or self-built housing and, subsequently, obtaining public investment in services and urban equipment for the residents' enjoyment.

Paradoxically, the 1964 coup and the military-dictatorial regime contributed to creating some conditions for this urban popular mobilization based on place of residence. This is because repression during the Years of Lead brutally emptied other channels of political expression and association, such as trade unionism, the press, elections, and political parties, further aggravating the economic factors that promoted massive rural exodus and the overpopulation of the metropolises (i.e., the policy of import-substitution industrialization while preserving the traditional latifundium).

The effect of State repression on the political, civil, and social aspects of citizenship was thus to drain popular interest from the militarized public sphere, fracture civil organizations, obstruct the centralization of conflicts and mobilizations, and contaminate public relations with fear and distrust. As a consequence, it tended to isolate people in their homes, families, and neighborhoods, confining them to local ties. (Holston, 2013, p. 308; author's translation)

Urban popular mobilizations, articulated around the place of residence, neighborhoods and families, and the Catholic Church, also constituted social struggles against violence, with the denunciation of police abuse and the complicity of public authorities in general with the violent actions of gunmen and henchmen, sponsored by speculators and land grabbers who coveted the land on which the peripheries and favelas were built, being a factor that united the various groups of residents.

Indeed, the language of human rights became a general idiom of citizenship during this period. The violation of human rights by the Military Police united neighborhood organizations and religious organizations in a broad campaign to disseminate information about rights, denounce their transgressions, create data archives and relevant publications, promote rights awareness courses, and provide legal services [...]. Although their priority was police violence, these organizations developed a comprehensive understanding of human rights as both individual and collective fulfillment of basic social, civil, economic, and cultural needs. (Holston, 2013, pp. 323-324; author's translation)

These mobilizations managed to build a language articulated on the principle of equal rights, becoming a new source of law, to the point of decisively influencing the drafting of the 1988 Federal Constitution, generating new rights and channels of access (Holston, 2013, pp. 325-326).

In Brazil, the idea that citizen's rights is a product of personal merit is linked to formal employment (with a work contract) or to the status of consumer and taxpayer, categories that allow claiming differentiated treatment from authorities, whether through access to labor rights, the pursuit of consumer and property rights, or merely as a means, a rhetorical and judicial resource, to be mobilized to avoid becoming a target of arbitrary violence or deliberate humiliation or neglect by State agents. The idea that all citizens have an equal right to have rights duly codified in laws to be claimed by any citizen is new and has not managed to overcome the previous one. Both the logics of privileged treatment and the notion of equality among citizens are codified in the Constitution and written laws, with the egalitarian view having emerged from the increase in civic participation.

However, "the development of citizenship in the peripheries remains contradictory: residents support the anonymous equality of citizens, but at the same time argue that various types of social inequality justify the legalization of unequal treatment" (Holston, 2013, p. 345, author’s translation). It is possible to draw a parallel between notions of citizenship and views on public security: on one hand, a traditional view based on privileged treatment that separates the "law-abiding citizens" from the "marginals," "vagrants," etc., imposing on the latter the processes that Misse (2010) defined as criminal subjection; on the other hand, an egalitarian conception, focused on the social prevention of crime and citizen participation, articulated by the language of constitutional and human rights, by which the right to have rights is considered universal, claimable by all. Hence the demands of groups that consider themselves marginalized and vulnerable, such as the poor, women, Blacks, indigenous peoples, and LGBTs, for the satisfaction of needs and protection against the various violences to which they are subjected by social circumstances.

Final considerations

Industrialization has gone hand in hand with urbanization, both seen as two faces of capitalist modernization, now globally dominant. The "Soviet" alternative for industrialization via centralized economic planning was not capable of overcoming the dominant system, limiting itself to promoting a backward modernization in some peripheral areas of the world-economy. The correlation between industrialization and urbanization, however, is not as perfect as it appears.

Firstly, because the city is a form of socio--spatial organization much older than industrial capitalism, dating back to the political and commercial cities of ancient civilizations, such as Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, etc. Secondly, because the apparent correlation hides a fundamental antagonism, insofar as the generalization of the commodity-form and the subordination of the various spheres of culture to the logic of unlimited capital accumulation often leads to processes of privatization or "creative destruction" of the common goods that constitute the foundation of urban life. Therefore, the relationship between capitalism and urbanization is paradoxical and generates intense social conflict (Lefebvre, 2001; Harvey, 2014).

Finally, it cannot be said that even the apparent correlation between industrialization and urbanization under capitalist regimes is so symmetrical, since urban growth in peripheral countries often far exceeds industrial development. The disintegration of rural life, catalyzed by the preservation of archaic agrarian structures (often of colonial origin), provokes a rural exodus more intense than the generation of industrial employment, creating cities overpopulated by large masses that depend on informal work to survive, not to mention jobs that often come with low wages and few guarantees even when formalized.

Pressured by real estate speculation, which is often favored by public investments or the negligence of public authorities regarding fraud, such as land grabbing, rental prices become prohibitive for most workers, who must therefore seek other private solutions for personal and family housing. Thus, many workers occupy irregular land and dwellings, resulting from illegal occupation and self- -construction, generally in places devoid of urban equipment and services (Castells, 1983; Holston, 2013; Santos, 2013; Maricato, 2001).

In this way, cities whose administration is geared towards favoring real estate speculation, construction companies, and large corporations, to the detriment of providing public services and equipment to satisfy the population's rights, become increasingly segregated and insecure. Financial globalization aggravates the problem, by allowing powerful organizations that manage illicit businesses (drug trafficking, arms smuggling, human trafficking, etc.) to find greater ease for money laundering. Thus, they increase their capacity to recruit poor and disposable youth, to corrupt public agents, and to exercise armed violence (Mattos, 2010).

On the other hand, the search for property and personal security by the more favored leads both to the multiplication of enclosed and fortified places for housing and consumption (condominiums, shopping centers, business centers, etc.) and to support for selective aggressive policing policies, which turn the police, for a less favored and more stigmatized segment of city dwellers, into something akin to a hostile occupation army. The criminalization of poverty, through aggressive policing and the selective expansion of incarceration, has been the hegemonic political response to the situation of intense social insecurity fostered by dominant models of economic and urban development (Wacquant, 2001a, 2001b, 2003; Harvey, 2014).

The militarization of metropolitan security along with the criminalization of poverty was explicitly prognosticated by groups of experts linked to the United States Armed Forces, who saw in the urbanization of poverty a harbinger of the urbanization of war, whether by creating conditions for armed insurrections based on growing urban favelas and peripheries (Taw & Hoffman, 1993), or by creating diffuse opportunities and motivations for a heterogeneous multitude of possible internal enemies, ranging from social movements and ethnic minorities to youth gangs (Demarest, 1995). Such ideological representations are discernible in discourses like those of the "war on drugs," "zero tolerance," or the "war on terrorism," among other variants.

It cannot be said, of course, that the militarization of social control is a unilateral external imposition on Brazil. The logic of privileged citizenship, according to which there is no right to have rights, but rather that rights are somehow the product of personal merit (by birth or effort, by possession of higher academic degrees, by the condition of private owner or formalized employee, and even hierarchically within each of these categories of heirs, owners, employees, educated, etc.), legitimizes the discrimination of Brazilians between "citizens" and "marginals". This distinction operates both in the distribution of economic and moral benefits and in the imposition of punishments and violence in an extremely selective manner.

The idea that rights are deserved because of property, education, or formal employment is deeply ingrained in Brazil, and leads many to defend the logic of privilege for having conquered small rights at the cost of great effort. Thus, they contribute not only to denying rights to those who would deserve none, but also to unconsciously denying rights to themselves. This has been questioned by urban social movements, emerging in the last decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21st, which sought to articulate in a language of rights the demands of residents of the peripheries. Among these, besides the legalization of housing and access to services and urban equipment, is the denunciation of violence in its various facets – police, racist, sexist, drug-trafficking related, etc. These mobilizations, which achieved important victories, are articulated from the bottom up through a language of rights, and thus point towards a dissident political response to the situation of complex and intense social insecurity experienced in large cities.

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Notes

• 1
  On the relationship between police (and prisons) and crime, Foucault (2013) drew attention to what he termed a "management of popular illegalisms", which is the feedback and co-evolution between the punitive system and crime. Misse (2008, 2010a) analyzes these relations in terms of processes of "criminal subjection" and the negotiation of political commodities, in which the object of exchange is the very exercise (or non-exercise) of State power and force by the public agent for the benefit of private individuals (Misse, 2006, 2008, 20, 2008, 2010b, 2011a).
• 2
  On police and judicial selectivity, see the works of Misse (2006; 2008; 2011b), Kant de Lima (1989), Adorno (1996), Zaccone (2007), Zaffaroni (2007). On the relations between police and crime, see Foucault's argument on the "management of illegalisms" and Misse's on the "political commodity", indicated in the previous footnote. On internal police control, see the works of Misse, Grillo and Neri (2015), Zaccone (2015), Boni Bittencourt and Dadalto (2017).
• 3
  On "dependent development", I refer to the classic work of Marini (1991). On the notion of a "system" or "world economy" as a system of economically interconnected states, divided into centers, peripheries, and semi-peripheries, see Braudel (1987) and Wallerstein (2001).
• 4
  A study on the reduction of the homicide rate in São Paulo (Peres et al., 2011) sought to correlate the trend with various indicators, including social expenditures, but used the absolute nominal value of the latter, instead of the per capita value corrected for accumulated inflation, which renders the correlations meaningless.
• Data availability statement:
  All supporting data for the results of this study have been published within the article

• Editors:
  Lucia Bógus
  Luiz César de Queiroz Ribeiro

Data availability

All supporting data for the results of this study have been published within the article

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  21 Sept 2026
• Date of issue
  Sep-Dec 2026

History

• Received
  26 Sept 2019
• Accepted
  17 Mar 2026