Contenu du sommaire : Le droit à la ville en Amérique latine

The production of the “Latin American city”This paper proposes a historical analysis of the category “Latin American City” as a cultural construct. The central subject is that, during the period between the postwar and the 1970's, the idea of a “Latin American City” became a category of social thought, as part of the intellectual and political imagination in several regions of the continent. The text tries to rebuild the main conceptual and ideological turns, their political and institutional functions within the specific regional circumstances. The article suggests that this approach to the “Latin American City” category in its precise historical configuration may be a productive path for a Latin-American cultural studies.

Right to the city as a path
Raquel Rolnik, Brazilian urban planner, is a main figure of the social struggles for housing. Student of the USP (University of Sao Paulo) in the seventies when the social urban mobilization arises, she becomes then an important actor of the National Movement for Urban Reform (MNRU) in Brazil and one of the authors of the urban reform project, which in particular introduce the social function of the urban land in the Brazilian Constitution (1988). Tireless militant, teacher, researcher, her trajectory tells us about the history itself of Brazilian version of the Right to the city, and also how this notion weighed on social and political agenda from the seventies to now. In this interview, Raquel Rolnik shares her personal vision of the Right to the city, a notion which remains relevant for her, and which has been in the same time militancy, research object and implement for governing.

Right to the City, Multiculturalism and Ethnic Minorities in Latin American Cities. The case of Mexico CityAfter a decade marked by multiculturalism, the rise of the Right to the City in Latin America occurs at a time when this acknowledgment of cultural diversity – especially that of the Indigenous populations – seems to be losing momentum. At the crossroads of these two dynamics in the formulation of rights, Latin-American cities thus constitute a unique vantage point in examining the potential of how the notion of Right to the City may integrate considerations about ethnical minorities. Based on the signing of the Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City in 2010, the article analyses the local instances where multiculturalism and the Right to the City were able to establish a dialogue. It shows how the Right to the City in Mexico has been reinterpreted in favor of ethnical minorities since the 2000s which saw the emergence of an important network of actors and institutions committed to Indigenous issues and the fight against discrimination stemming from multiculturalism. It also states how these two political paradigms are confronted with similar obstacles, especially when proceeding from a statement of principles to the effective reductions of social inequalities.

International migrants and Right to the city, an impossible equation? Central American citadinities
By mobilizing the perspective of the right to the city and expanding it, the article proposes an analysis of the modalities of the urban experience of Central American migrants in Mexico City and the possibilities for these populations to go through appropriation of the city and subjectivation despite situations of strong constraints. The measures implemented by the city of Mexico over the last decade, results of a proactive approach based on inclusion and assertion of rights, are compared with the forms of urban insertion that usually occur along others registers and far from the authorities. The context of the transformation of migratory dynamics in Mexico, where emigration is now only one component alongside immigration, transit and returns, questions the ability of urban actors to make a hospital and inclusive city truly exists. The article questions the scope of an urban citizenship under construction, taking in account the affirmation of the urban as a possible scale of an alternative citizenship, possibly in opposition to that of national level. In parallel, the conditions of the urban experience of Central Americans in Mexico refer to the effects of situations of violence and vulnerability of migrant populations and the difficult access to rights in and to the city.

Micropolitics for the right to the city in Brazil: weaves of a minor social movement
The article proposes a reflection on contemporary activism and its micropolitical weaves for the right to the city in Brazil. It analyses the ways in which Rio de Janeiro's anti-asylum (antimanicomial) movement addresses and problematizes this issue. Through resistance, affirmations and experiments, this minor social movement invests the city as a place of mental health care and care with the common. The article explores militant practices and discourses that think and occupy urban space as a political space, a space of circulation and of taking into account difference, in particular madness. By focusing on the micro-policies generated by minor social movements, it is possible to envisage processes that run counter to the sad scenario of democratic rupture under the guise of legality that Brazilian macro-politics are currently going through.

“Interracial” unions in Brazil. Demographic evolutions and sociological interpretations
This article proposes a complete description of the many sociological analyses concerning “interracial” unions in Brazil. The goal is to compare the various approaches: at first ethnographical from the 1930s to the 1980s, then demographic afterward and to criticize some of their limits. A personal empirical research is also used to show the interest to think in terms of phenotypic distance rather than in terms of barriers between groups. The conclusion reminds the interest of using together ethnographical and demographic perspectives for this field.