Sur-Urbano

In the late 2000s, two movements emerged in Sao Paulo, each trying to make the city more humane and livable for its residents. On the one hand, green policy elites worked on a downtown revitalization plan that would model a moreintelligently dense, and hence lower-carbon, style of urbanism.
On the other, the city’s housing movement occupied vacant buildings to pressure state actors to build up affordable housing and democratize urban planning. These groupscould have been allies, but first, they ended up on opposite sides of a battle over the future of the city. What were the conditions for the climate and housing agenda to pull in the same direction?
There is a line of argumentation that says: “working class people don’t care about the environment or climate change; this is a privilege of the middle class or urban educated elites, that is incapable of accounting for the immediate necessities many families have”. And yet, this itself fails to recognize that many working class struggles already have a green agendaof sorts: they want good housing in central places; they want transit systems that work and access to urban amenities that the wealthy already have. In other words, what the environmentalist movement – and its critics - sometimes miss isthat some of the most important climate actors are not always the people who speak in the language of carbon emissions and bike lanes, but rather fight for the right to the city.
Talking through this today is Daniel Aldana Cohen, who is not only Assistant Professor  of Sociology at UC Berkeley, but is also one of my models for public intellectual and leftist policynerds, particularly around working class politics and climate change. In this episode, we talk about Daniel’s upcoming book, titled Street Fight: Climate Change and Inequality in the 21st Century City.
We look at the case of Nova Luz, a downtown redevelopment project sold as a green and dense revitalization urbanism, but that was actually experienced by housing movements as a kind of displacement from above. But the framing that there is an intrinsic conflict between climate and social justice is a strawman – instead, we need to understand the distinction between luxury and democratic ecologies and who reaps the benefits or pays the costs of these different political projects.
There is a critique, but also hope in this! The environmental movement is doomed to alienate working class people if it shifts the costs of changes onto the people already bearing the worst brunt of climate change and inequality.But by integrating working class needs – including appropriate measures – such as protecting housing security to avoid green gentrification, or creating affordable housing in central locations – then the power of both movements can reinforce each other. This isn’t necessarily easy, and there are tensions tonavigate – but it’s the only long-term strategy that can create a deep leftist project of public affluence and climate justice.
Daniel Aldana Cohen is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2, and serves as a member of the Graduate Group of the Designated Emphasis in Political Economy. He is also Founding Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute (CCI), a progressive climate and economy think tank. He has been a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar (2021-24), and Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ (2018-19). He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019).

Entre 2024 y 2025, hice parte de un pequeño experimento habitacional y social llamado Tulpa, en el barrio Palermo en Bogotá. Ahí, tengo un apartamento con una terraza que mira hacia los cerros, en el mismo piso donde vive mi mejor amigo, Simón Fique. Junto a nuestros otros dos vecinos, David Moreno y Juan Pablo Pardo y su estudio Ensamble, diseñaron y supervisaron la construcción de ese hermoso edificio. Por las noches, iba al apartamento de Simón a tomar cerveza y ver televisión chatarra. El edificio tenía incluso un grupo musical, a quienes escuchaba practicar su repertorio de música andina  los Jueves por la tarde. El dia de mi cumpleaños, mis vecinos conocieron a mis amigos cuando nos reunimos en la terraza para un asado.
 
En las ciudades en que vivimos, es difícil considerar una aproximación a la Vivienda diferente a la de su aprovechamiento  como mercancía, cuyo valor, diseño y distribución está determinada por el mercado. Nuestra aproximación a la Vivienda social – en el caso colombiano pero también aplicable a  muchos otros países – consiste en ofrecer subsidios a la compra de vivienda.
 
Pero otro mundo es posible! El experimento de Tulpa está inspirado, en algunos aspectos, en uno aún más ambicioso, el del cooperativismo Uruguayo. Allí, desde 1968, se ha desarrollado modelo diferente de construir y habitar en comunidad. Actualmente, más de 120,000 personas viven en cooperativas – la mayoría de bajos recursos y clase media, y muchos de ellos participaron en la misma construcción no solo de sus viviendas, sino también de sus comunidades.
 
Para aprender más, Simón – si, mi Vecino – y yo hablamos con Lucía Anzalone, arquitecta que ha investigado el cooperativismo de Vivienda en Uruguay, y que además presta asistencia técnica en la Federación Uruguaya de Cooperativas de Vivienda por Ayuda Mutua (FUCVAM).. Lucía es doctoranda en Arquitectura (FADU-Universidad de la República), y  es Profesora Adjunta en el Centro de Vivienda y Hábitat y en el Instituto de Tecnología de FADU.

In today’s episode, we look at the the criminal actorsshaping urban enclaves in Rio. I wanted to provide a little backstory, because this actually connects to work and research I was deeply involved with before starting my PhD. As part of the bureaucratic deployment resulting from the 2016 peace agreements signed between the armed revolutionary forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Santos government in Colombia, I was lucky enough to live in the amazon region of Caquetá on and off for several years. As I worked with coca-growers there in the Caguán region, I was researching the process of urbanization of the main city in the Colombian Amazon, Florencia after the coca boom of the 1970s, and I found that many of the newly created guerrillas of the period, including the FARC and the M-19, had included city-making in their political repertories and helped found one of the biggest informal neighborhoods of the city. A little later, I also researched the construction of hundreds of miles of road network by collaborations between the FARC, the local government, and coca communities in this same region.
 
I mention these because I think there is a risk ofthinking that criminal governance – and all its variants – are extra-ordinary and for that reason marginal phenomena. Like this is something that happens at the geographic and political margins of our cities and our countries, and that, while interesting, it ultimately is not that central to the praxis of urban planning, partly because it happens outside of the state.  
I think this is wrong on both fronts. First of all, theseare not minor issues -  a recent cross-national study of 18 Latin American countries found that almost 15% of respondents lived under some form of criminal governance; which adds up to between 70 and 100 million people.

Second, this is not something that happens “outside” thestate, but in relationship to it in ways that overlap, conflict, and relate in specific situated ways. My work with the Amazon cities and road networks showed me not only that the border between legal and illegal can be very porous, but ultimately that the process of state-formation can be intimately enmeshed with the governance of these armed actors.  

Furthermore, “Planning” is not something only done withinCity government offices; or that the forms of territory-making outside of those offices lacks a logic or coherence.
Instead, we need to seriously reckon with the fact thatin our Latin American cities, criminal organizations – as well as amultiplicity of other actors which also include the residents themselves – are all part what goes into making our cities; and that only by acknowledging this reality can we begin to think about what we should do about it.
And in that context, I bring you Priscila Coli Rocha’s brilliant ethnography, titled Making the City, Making a Constituency:Milícias-created Enclaves and Urbanization in the Peripheries of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Priscilla undertook years of field work in Rio’s peripheries, where criminal governance of different actors, including the Milícias, has been an important phenomenon for decades now. Among her contributions, Priscilla argues that there is a typology of milícia which not only governs parts of the city, but with distinct origins and ways of operation that include the active production of enclaves in the city.
 
Priscila Coli holds a PhD in City and Regional Planning from theUniversity of California, Berkeley. She is currently an Assistant Professor at PUC-Rio and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and her research focuses on the role of criminal organizations in urbanization processes in the Global South.

This week, we are digging one of our classic episodes from the archives - our conversation with the canonical critical and public urban scholar, Raquel Rolnik.
Many of you may know Raquel for her critical scholarship and prominent defense of the right to house and the city. Based out of São Paulo, Raquel is professor at the Architecture and Urbanism Department at the University of São Paulo. She has held various government positions including Director of the Planning Department of São Paulo and National Secretary for Urban Programs of the Brazilian Ministry of Cities, and between 2008 and 2014, she was the UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing. 
On this episode, we discussed one of her papers which we translated to rent-seeking landscapes, and landscapesfor life, which you can find here.
She described how new financial instruments and technologies have transformed the way we produce or relate to housing. We discussed her views about  land value capture instruments, which have changed over the years... And Raquel ended by talking about how creativity and resistance, rather than planning, can create new possibilities and changeurban realities.

Si escuchas este episodio en Marzo del 2026, es muy possibleque en estos momentos, se esté terminando la construcción de un edificio en Barcelona muy diferente a los otros. Se llama Wikihousing, y es, como dice su página, una solución alternativa de acceso de vivienda pública. Para empezar, tanto su diseño como su construcción ha sido participativo. Es a la vez, asequible para jóvenes de la ciudad , y sostenible en sus materiales, pero a la vez eficiente en su construcción, que se ha hecho de manera prefabricada y se está montandoaproximadamente 1 piso cada diez días.  
 
Para serles sincera, no era de lo que esperaba hablar en unepisodio sobre el Decrecimiento y la Vivienda.
 
Cuando mi cohost, Sonia Torres, me propuso el tema de decrecimiento para el podcast, me intrigó, en parte porque despertó mi trauma de cuando vivía en Berkeley. Ahí, hay una crisis de vivienda gigante, en parte porque los Californianos ricos – quienes llamabamos NIMBYs, o los “no en mi patio tresero”, bloqueban todo esfuerzo de construir viviendas nuevas. El resultado eran ciudades, a mi parecer, que se morían por dentro porque sus clases trabajadoras ya no podían vivir ahí.
 
Entonces, a pesar de que pienso mucho sobre como descarbonizar la Economía y sobre todo la Vivienda, me preocupaba que el discurso del decrecimiento ante la vivienda no tomara seriamente en cuenta la necesidad de alojar nuevos habitantes urbanos.
 
En esta conversación me encontré algo muy diferente: encontréa WikiHousing y a la Concejalía de Participación eInnovación Democrática en A Coruña y una visión creativa yesperanzadora de un futuro que responde a los fracasos del presente.
 
Y esto fue gracias a nuestros maravillosos invitados, Claudia Delso Carreira y David Bravo. Claudia es invesitgadora y técnicade proyectos en el Instiuto de Investivación Urbana de Barcelona, pero también entre 2015 y 2022 fue concejala en el Ayuntamiento de A Coruña con la plataforma municipalista Marea Atlántica, diputada y Concejala de Participación e Innovación Democrática.
Por su lado, David Bravo es Arquitecto, miembro fundador de la consultora Urban Front y del equipo interdisciplinar responsable de la estrategia ATRI.city, que crea sistemas de vivienda asequible contra la gentrificación. Es en el marco de esta estrategia, que trabaja en la iniciativa WikiHousing. Además, Entre 2015 y 2019, fue asesor de la alcaldesa de Barcelona como responsable de la estrategia municipal contra la gentrificación. 
 
Como academica empedernida, mi aproximación al decrecimiento solo habia sido desde lo teórico – fue tan alentador y emocionante ver cómo esta idea se interpreta y pone en práctica desde la escala del edificio, hasta el municipio, para demostrar que un futuro diferente es possible.