Article

Critique of Anthropology
33(1) 8–25
The perversity of the ! The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
‘Citizenship Game’: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X12466683

Slum-upgrading in the coa.sagepub.com

urban periphery
of Recife, Brazil
Monique Nuijten
Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Abstract
This article analyses the effects of slum upgrading on the lives of slum dwellers, espe-
cially on their position in society and their relation with the state. It zooms in on the
implementation of Prometrópole, a World Bank-funded slum upgrading project in
Recife that removes the population from shacks close to rivers to new housing estates.
In this project, the state embraces participatory democracy and stresses the growing
inclusion of the poor as citizens of the Brazilian nation-state. The question that inspired
the article is: ‘How does the ‘‘citizenship agenda’’ employed by the Brazilian state relate
to practices of political belonging in the urban periphery, characterized by social exclu-
sion and violence?’ On the basis of ethnographic research, the article concludes that the
upgrading of poor neighbourhoods indeed increases feelings of belonging and inclusion
among the poor population. At the same time, however, the stress on the responsible
citizen and the empty participatory procedures in the project have the perverse effects
of side-lining the poor and reinforcing clientelist politics.

Keywords
Citizenship, political society, Brazil, slum upgrading, exclusion, clientelist politics

Introduction: The citizenship agenda in slum-upgrading

in Recife
Brazil has invested heavily in ‘urban infrastructure, especially in sanitation, to
the point that Brazil became the World Bank’s largest borrower in the area of

Corresponding author:
Monique Nuijten, Social Sciences Department, Wageningen University, PO Box 8130, Wageningen, 6700 EW,
The Netherlands.
Email: monique.nuijten@wur.nl
Nuijten 9

urban development’ (Caldeira, 2006: 114). This article focuses on Prometrópole, a

World Bank funded upgrading project in Recife, the fourth largest city in Brazil,
with a population of 1.4 million and 3.3 million in the wider metropolitan region
(IBGE, 2010). More than half of the working population is employed in the infor-
mal sector and Recife has the steepest income gap between the rich and the poor of
any Brazilian city (World Bank, 2006: 2). Nearly 40% of the inhabitants live in
favelas (informal settlements), one of the highest percentages in the country (World
Bank, 2006: 2). As is common in most major cities of Brazil, Recife has high violent
crime and homicide rates.
After many years of talking and negotiating, in the summer of 2003, contracts
were signed between the municipalities of Recife and Olinda, the state of
Pernambuco and the World Bank for an US$ 84 million upgrading programme
for low-income areas.1 The Prometrópole project started in Jacarezinho, a poor
slum built on the banks of a small stream at the edge of the Chão de Estrelas
community. For a long time, the inhabitants of Chão de Estrelas had been asking
for the Jacarezinho slum to be cleared as the shack-type dwellings caused flooding
of the entire neighbourhood in the rainy season and lowered the status and prop-
erty prices of houses in the surrounding streets. The pulling down of the shacks
started in March 2007 and part of the population was moved to a new housing
estate in Chão de Estrelas in April 2008.
In the Prometrópole project, slums built on river beds are pulled down and
roads and infrastructure in the surrounding neighbourhood renovated. The slum
inhabitants receive free houses in new housing estates built in the same area. In the
period between the demolition of their shacks and the completion of the project,
the families have to find temporary accommodation elsewhere and receive monthly
financial compensation (auxilio moradia) of R$ 151 (US$ 60. Slum residents are
persuaded to participate in the resettlement process and no violence is used against
them. Thus, in many ways, the Prometrópole project in Recife is a benign project
compared to the brutal slum clearances taking place in other parts of the world.
The Prometrópole project is the forerunner of the ample slum clearances organized
in Recife and other Brazilian cities that will host the World Cup (2014) and the
Summer Olympics (2016).
According to official documents, Prometrópole’s aims are to address infrastruc-
tural problems in the city and ‘to improve the wealth and well-being of the urban
poor who will benefit from a housing program that gives them access to a risk-free
home, which meets liveability norms and which are supplied with basic services’
(World Bank, 2003: 39). What is less openly expressed is that slum-upgrading
programmes also aim to resolve the evils of insecurity (Gledhill and Hita, 2009).
Slums are considered a security problem not only because of their inhabitants, who
are seen by many as ‘public enemies’ (Scheper-Hughes, 2006) but also in terms of
their spatial layout. Slums are labyrinths of narrow alleys that form no-go areas for
people who do not belong there, including state officials and the police. Put differ-
ently, ‘slum spaces (i.e., Brazilian favelas) challenge the control and ordering effect
10 Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

of power by subverting the disciplinary gaze of the state apparatus’ (Garmany,

2009: 723). Through slum upgrading, the state intends to regain control over lost
territory and unruly people and, in this way, fight insecurity.
Another mission of slum upgrading is to ‘civilize’ slum inhabitants. It is telling
that, in Brazil, the very word ‘‘marginal’’ has a derogatory connotation. ‘Um mar-
ginal or um elemento marginal means a shiftless, dangerous, ne’er-do-well, usually
associated with the underworld of crime, violence, drugs and prostitution’
(Perlman, 1979: 92). Slum-upgrading programs intend to transform marginal,
criminal people into law-abiding, obedient subjects.
There is nothing new about the above-mentioned aims of slum upgrading. In an
exemplary study of slum upgrading in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s, Perlman pre-
sents an excellent analysis of these underlying objectives, which in fact can be found
in urban upgrading and social housing projects throughout the world. Yet, what is
new in Brazil today is that these projects are framed within the discourse of citi-
zenship. In the last three decades, the citizenship discourse has become popular
throughout the world but has grown to be overwhelming in Brazil (Dagnino, 2007;
Holston, 2008). One could say that slum upgrading projects in Brazil are turned
into ‘citizenship projects’ (Lazar, 2004).
In the Prometropole slum upgrading project, the state conveys specific ideas
about the responsibilities of the state and the duties of citizens. The message is
that by taking them out of their miserable living conditions, and giving them a
decent house, the state takes care of slum residents and turns them into full citizens.
The state fulfils another important condition for democratic citizenship by using a
participatory approach, which involves the target population in all steps of the
project from design to implementation. Yet, the project also emphasizes the duties
of slum residents to attend the meetings and peacefully cooperate with the entire
operation. Once they receive the new house, they should behave properly, meaning
that they must use the house and public space according to the project design.
Another dimension of citizenship that is much stressed in the project is the import-
ance of individual relationships between citizens and the state. Residents should
individually keep the state accountable without intermediation of political brokers
or neighbourhood associations. Summarizing, it may be said that this project aims
to help the poor and simultaneously turn them into ideal citizens, who take respon-
sibility of their own life, cooperate with government interventions and establish an
individual link with the state.
The question that inspires this article is ‘‘How does this slum upgrading
project Prometrópole, with its particular citizenship agenda, effect the relation of
residents with the state?’’ Does the project change practices of inclusion and exclu-
sion in the urban periphery? What are the consequences of the project for political
life and political subjectivity? How do people in the slum conceive of citizenship
and political belonging? Before following the implementation of the project, I will
first discuss my approach towards citizenship and political life in the urban
periphery.
Nuijten 11

Political society and citizenship

Today citizenship is primarily understood from a liberal perspective as a legal
status, which determines the rights of individuals in relation to the nation-state.
Yet, many authors have argued that citizenship is also about a cultural ideal of
belonging to a community, shared languages and common values that evolve over
time such as religious beliefs, and human dignity. Some claim that citizenship
includes social norms, which refer to loyalty, moral worthiness, and contribution
to the common good (Ong, 2009: 302, cf. Gordon and Stack, 2007).
In most places there exist wide gaps between the formal definitions and actual
practices of citizenship. For that reason citizenship has been combined with mul-
tiple adjectives. The categories of people who face discrimination and exclusion and
for that reason receive fewer rights have been called second-rate citizens, incom-
plete citizens, non-citizens, or mutilated citizens (Santos, 1987). The phenomenon
that citizenship is gendered, racialized, and differs according to class has been
captured by concepts, such as variegated citizens (Inda, 2005) or differentiated
citizenship (Holston, 2008). Terms such as, experienced citizenship, lived citizen-
ship, or citizenship from below, have been coined to express the everyday reality of
political belonging.
Several authors have also incorporated the informal and sometimes illegal
expressions of the population to demand their rights and inclusion. In his book
‘‘Insurgent Citizenship’’, Holston (2008) shows how, through illegal occupations of
land and collective mobilizations, poor people in the city claim land and housing
and, in the process, shape a new form of urban citizenship outside the official
channels. Owensby introduces the term ‘‘unofficial citizenship’’ to depict cultural
practices through which people avoid entanglements with a politics that tends to
exclude them (Owensby, 2005: 339). Lazar (2004) takes a special position in the
debate by including clientelism as part of citizenship practice. These authors have
enriched the debate by opening up the citizenship concept to the reality of the poor
and taking distance from the mainstream bias towards state endorsed rights and
official forms of participation.
Here I take a different approach and argue that rather than opening up the
citizenship concept, we should go beyond the citizenship framework if we want to
give serious attention to the perspective of the poor. For that reason, I make a
distinction between political society and citizenship. Political society refers to the
force field composed of antagonistic relationships, contesting groups, and opposing
interests that can be found in every society (Mouffe, 2005, Nuijten, 2003). Political
society includes the variety of means through which people in the periphery, or
other groups for that matter, carve out a space in society, make their voice heard
and shape their relation with the state or other authorities. Political agency can be
expressed in multiple ways. How do people engage with the established order and
try to influence policies that affect their lives? More often than not this is based on a
combination of legal and illegal methods. As several authors have discussed, the
political life of the poor and the politics of the underclass have little to do with
12 Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

official politics (Chatterjee, 2004; Gay, 1999). Extra legal means can vary from land
invasions, insurgency, obstruction of state intervention to requests of personal
favours. Extra-legal means are often the only way for poor people to defend
their ‘‘right of being’’ in a society which largely excludes them and sees them as
superfluous. Political society for slum residents is to a large extent informal, illegal,
and largely organized around personal relations and clientelist practices.
In my conceptual framework, citizenship is a language of the political. With a
language of the political I mean a discourse that frames practices of governance,
distinguishes a variety of political agents, defines their corresponding responsibil-
ities and duties, etc. A language of the political describes how power and politics in
society work, but can also contain opinions about how the political system should
work differently, or express hopes and ideas for a different political landscape.
Languages of the political are often used with a political aim. Citizenship is a
clear example of a language of the political. As was mentioned above, the
Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) government in Recife used a neoliberal citizenship
discourse in the implementation of the Prometrópole slum-upgrading project. This
discourse stresses the importance of direct relationships between citizens and the
state. It discourages the intermediation through community leaders or local organ-
izations. It stresses the responsibilities of slum inhabitants to take care of their own
life. However, we will see variations on this theme. Depending on the position of
the persons talking and their specific political goals, the emphasis shifts.
It is important to realize that apart from citizenship, other languages of the
political are simultaneously at work. More often than not, popular languages of
the political differ from state discourses. As we will see, the PT citizenship discourse
did not touch a chord with the lived reality in the slums and the local languages of
the political, used by the subjects of intervention. The people in the slums hardly
use a language of citizens and rights. They use the language of patronage. They are
grateful for anything that politicians and officials do for them, which they see as
gifts rather than rights. Their language of the political is framed in terms of gifts,
favors, reciprocity, and taking care. This language of power and politics from
below and the public self-representation of local populations give important infor-
mation about their political subjectivity and their understandings of self in relation
to higher authorities.

Life and exclusion in the urban periphery of Chão de Estrelas

Let us first have a look at the lives of the residents in Chão de Estrelas and the
practices that constitute their relation with other segments of society and the
Brazilian state. Chão de Estrelas is a peripheral neighbourhood of Recife, which
has a bad reputation in terms of drug trafficking and homicides. The neigbourhood
is the result of several slum resettlement schemes, the first of which was imple-
mented in the beginning of the 1980s (Cabral, 2004). Today the neighbourhood is
characterized by a combination of well-established areas with nice houses and poor
parts with shacks and makeshift dwellings. Over the last three decades, the living
Nuijten 13

standards and access to public services have improved considerably for the popu-
lation in Chão de Estrelas. Yet, the inhabitants still suffer widely from economic
and social exclusion. The distribution of incomes in Brazil is extremely unequal, as
is access to state services and the administration of justice. The services that favela
residents receive pale in the light of the lack of attention given to their well-being.
This leads to many bitter and paradoxical situations. For instance, in April 2008,
on the day that the residents of Jacarezinho finally heard that they would receive
their new houses, there was a TV broadcast about the hospital in the neighbour-
hood. The programme showed parents who had to wait for hours in the hospital
with children who were critically ill, for there was only one paediatrician available
in the entire hospital. They showed parents in despair and angry, seeing their
children die because medical attention arrived too late. So, while on the one
hand the state takes care of them by removing them from the precarious living
conditions at the river and giving them a new house, this same state does not
provide basic medical care for their children.
What inhabitants deeply regret is the impossibility of finding jobs and having
a steady income. There is a structural lack of employment possibilities for
slum residents as they lack good schooling and the indispensable social networks.
In addition, people from ‘bad’ neighbourhoods are feared, held in contempt,
and discriminated against in job competitions. People get by on a range of odd
jobs, alternated with periods of unemployment. Leaving their neighbourhood,
and going to a cidade [the city], which stands for the part of society to which
they do not belong, is a perilous undertaking for people from the periphery.
Many try to avoid going there, or only go in the company of other people.
However, they often have to visit the bank or governmental offices or shops in
the city. On these occasions, they tend to dress up and try not to behave or look too
much like a favelado.
When asked about their main preoccupations in life, without exception, slum
residents mention violence as their central worry. They immediately dwell on and
talk about recent shoot-outs and their fear that something might happen to their
children in one of the frequent exchanges of fire between drug traffickers. It is
common to see fully armed police cars drive through the neighbourhood at high
speed. People try to keep a safe distance from the police because of their dubious
reputation for being involved in the drug trade themselves and for being violent
and corrupt.
Most people have had unpleasant experiences with the police and other state
representatives during their lives. People fear the indifference as well as the violence
from the state (Dalsgaard, 2004: 15). During election periods, politicians make
frequent visits to the neighbourhood and ‘buy votes’ through gatherings with
food and soft drinks and promises for future improvements. People are used to
empty promises and to politicians who soon forget about them after the elections.
They do not expect much from the state and are happy for anything that comes
their way (Winkelhoff, 2011). Public services, such as the construction of roads,
schools, or houses, which in other contexts are considered to be the right of citizens
14 Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

and the responsibility of the state, by slum residents are seen as ‘favours’ or ‘gifts’
by politicians and government officials. The residents in Chao de Estrelas were very
grateful to President Lula for Bolsa Famı´lia, a social welfare programme that
provides direct cash transfers to the poor. These monthly payments have made a
difference in the lives of many poor families and give them the feeling that they do
matter.
Nevertheless, most of the time, the inhabitants of Chão de Estrelas feel that, as
‘favelados’, they are seen as a lesser type of human being, as ‘low-status citizens’
(Dalsgaard, 2004: 35), and they consider this unfair. Treatment with contempt by
state officials, humiliation, and other forms of ‘exclusive governmentality is con-
ceptualized as lack of ‘‘recognition’’’ (Stepputat, 2001: 298). Poor people do not
mind so much about their lack of political voice. As Owensby (2005) points out,
Brazilians do not feel diminished in their sense of national belonging for being
excluded from effective political participation. Yet, they do feel diminished in their
sense of national belonging and in their human dignity for being treated with
contempt.

The Prometropole project and the citizenship game

In March 2007, the first slum Jacarezinho was pulled down in the project and part
of the families received their new house more than a year later, in April 2008.
Others had to wait much longer. Although the project was planned to be concluded
by November 2008 (World Bank, 2003), by September 2011 many families had not
yet received a new house.
As was mentioned, community participation was a pillar of the project. Long
before the PT came to power in Recife, the city had already demonstrated
advanced forms of popular participation and participatory budgeting in municipal
governance (Bitoun et al., 2002, Etapas, 2003). The PT (Workers’ Party) came to
power in Recife in 2000. Contrary to former forms of participation, the PT stressed
individual involvement over more collective forms of representation, or intermedi-
ation through brokers, which according to PT officials stimulated patron–client
relations and undemocratic practices. The PT employs a citizenship discourse in
which the population is stimulated to actively engage with formal procedures and
individually hold the state to account.
A project participation manual was developed between the World Bank and the
Recife municipality. The manual stressed the importance of active involvement of
the target population in the design and implementation of all steps in the project.
Community participation in Prometrópole was institutionalized through neigh-
bourhood assemblies, co-management groups, and workshops (World Bank,
2003: 13). A local project office was maintained in the community during the
entire period of the project. The aim was to establish a direct relationship with
the population and respond to their questions, complaints, and demands
(Prometropole, 2006). From this local office, the social programme, including
workshops and home visits, was organized.
Nuijten 15

A central participatory mechanism of the Prometropole project was the public

neighbourhood assembly, where the population was regularly informed about the
course of the project. The families were consulted and had to agree with the
proposed plans through voting to enable the project to continue. The project dir-
ector, Claudio, would regularly visit the neighbourhood with several members of
the Prometrópole team, the architect, engineers, the head of the participation div-
ision, and several others. They would use a room in a community building, or rent
a suitable place, and arrive in a convoy of municipal cars carrying the necessary
equipment such as loudspeakers, a computer, projector, and screen for the
PowerPoint presentation. In addition to these public meetings, an important par-
ticipatory mechanism was the local co-management group (Comissão de
Acompanhamento Social das Obras) that was established to monitor the different
steps in the implementation process. They would meet every 2 weeks with project
officials to discuss the work in progress, and any complaints by the population.
Although according to the official program, the target population had an
important voice, the participatory procedures were deceptive. There was not
much room for adapting the design or implementation process to the wishes of
the population. As most big infrastructural projects, Prometrópole was shaped by
political, technical, legal, and institutional rationalities. Most of the time, the resi-
dents could only say yes or no to the overall project and were not allowed to talk
about other topics that were more important to them. Often the people were
confused through the presentation of technical details that they could not under-
stand (Koster and Nuijten, 2012). At one of the meetings somebody exclaimed:
‘What are we voting for? I did not understand anything of what was said’.
During the public assemblies, many worries, questions and grievances were
expressed. Residents were not submissive and could be very critical and angry.
They lodged many complaints and with good reason. As a consequence of the
construction work, streets had enormous potholes and some houses were seriously
damaged to the point of almost falling down. Often the construction work would
stop for weeks or months, leaving the area in a complete mess. People asked how
much longer they would have to stay in auxilio de moradia (temporary rental
accommodation) as the project was so much delayed. The same topics came up
over and over again. The reaction was always the same. They were listened to, they
were always given extensive answers and explanations, everything was carefully
written down, and promises made: we will visit and inspect your house, we will
look into that, we will tell the municipality to take care of this issue, we will pass
your complaints to the right office. So, worries were responded to with much
(imaginary) action power. In reality, most of the time nothing much happened,
apart from extensive registrations in notebooks.
The officials made it the duty of the people to actively take part in the official
spaces created for participation, to take care of themselves, and to behave as ‘good
citizens’ in relation to the state (Holston, 2008). During their meetings with the
residents, the officials told the people to continue participating in the formal pro-
cedures in order to resolve the problems. They admitted the failures in the project
16 Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

but said that in the end everything would work out as long as people followed the
rules and right procedures.
There were other dimensions of the project that reflected an educating and
civilizing mission (cf. Scott, 1998). A social programme accompanied the families
in the relocation process. A variety of workshops were offered. During home visits
and workshops, the people were told how they ought to maintain their new house,
how they were expected to take care of the environment and trees, how they should
separate their garbage, what agencies they had to address with their problems, how
they were supposed to raise their children, and what they should do to improve
their lives. In other words, they were instructed about their rights, but more espe-
cially their duties, as decent citizens. Helping the poor in the project was aimed at
changing them from marginal, criminal subjects into lawful, self-helping citizens.
Here we see how the citizenship discourse becomes perverse. In exchange for being
taken care of by the state, the target population had to adopt the subject position of
self-disciplining citizens, who behave in ‘‘appropriate ways’’.
If the residents complained about technical problems in the houses, the violence,
and conflicts with their new neighbours, they were told to behave as good citizens,
meaning that they should talk to their neighbours, call the police, or lodge com-
plaints at the correct office. In this way, ‘citizenship and self-government were
tirelessly put forward as solutions to poverty, [..] crime and innumerable other
problems’ (Cruikshank, 1999: 1). The families were often told that they themselves
were to blame for problems as they did not follow the correct procedures. Problems
in the housing estate were attributed to the bad attitude, the poor culture, and the
lack of education of the slum dwellers. Project officials tended to describe them as
people de baixa cultura (of low culture) and treated them as children that had to be
educated. Hence, the citizenship discourse supported the patronizing and condes-
cending attitude of patrons towards their clients.
The project encouraged patronage in other ways as well. The preference for
direct interaction between residents and the state together with the multiple par-
ticipatory and monitoring events boosted the frequency of contacts between resi-
dents and project officials. Senior officials ‘came down’ to the periphery and
interacted with slum people. This was different from the past when the state was
mostly absent in the periphery. Rather than resulting in a more impartially oper-
ating state apparatus, this closer personal contact increased the affective dimension
of state power. Several residents were grateful for the increased personal contacts,
home visits, and practical help they received in the project. They talked about their
personal misery, and the officials understood their dire situations and sometimes
engaged in a sincere dialogue with them. They regularly saw each other over a long
period, so warm bonds could develop, even if they were of a paternalistic nature. It
is important to mention that the deeply affective nature of patron–client relations
characterize the hierarchical, yet intimate, social structures of Brazilian society
(Owensby, 2005; Collins, 2008).
Hence, the participatory procedures and increased personal contacts in the
Prometrópole project built upon, yet changed, earlier forms of patronage. This is
Nuijten 17

paradoxical in the light of the PT citizenship agenda that claimed to fight clientel-
ism and endorse a more impartial and bureaucratic relation between citizens and
the state. The intensification of the affective dimension of the relation between slum
residents and the state is another perverse effect of the citizenship game. In the next
part, we will see how the slum residents responded to the citizenship game enacted
by the project.

The reception of the new houses

I will now focus on the ways in which the slum residents perceived the project and
reacted to it. The residents of the Jacarezinho slum did not ask to be resettled, it
was imposed on them by the municipality of Recife. The people living in shacks are
more worried about their daily survival, the violence around them, and the struc-
tural lack of income than about their housing. They also know that new housing
will bring anticipated and unexpected new problems in terms of having to find
temporary shelter, unwanted government interference in their lives, utilities that
have to be paid for, and the eventual move to an unknown place with unfamiliar
neighbours. As such, this is not something they will easily request themselves.
At the same time, these projects entice dreams of a better world, a dignified life;
the hope of being included and taken on board of the project of modernity (Koster
and Nuijten, 2012). The residents were excited about the prospect of receiving a
new, clean house in a modern area. The aesthetics of modernity, in terms of straight
lines, a spacious lay out, and much concrete, became especially clear to me when
the river was gradually canalized. I found the straight concrete construction much
less pretty than the river that had flowed before. However, without exception, the
slum residents were surprised and slightly annoyed with my question if they liked
the canal better than the river; could I not see that it was beautiful? I then realized
that for them these symbols of modernity are ‘loaded with promises of inclusion in
the larger world’ (Dalsgaard, 2004: 85).
In April 2008, after having lived in temporary housing for more than a year, 240
families received a house on the new estate. On the day of the inauguration, when
they received the keys of their new houses, and saw how small they were, many
became angry and indignant. They felt they had been deceived with false promises
and had been misled during the presentations. The new houses were only 36 square
metres and many families could not get their furniture in. Especially, the people
who had had large houses at the river felt betrayed.
The families have many complaints about the design of the new houses and the
layout of the housing estate. The houses are too small, and people are not used to
living in monotonous rows without backyards and being visible to everybody, they
do not like the fact that they are randomly put next to neighbours they do not
know and often do not like. It is no longer possible to keep animals, or store
garbage or pushcarts behind the house. Many families cannot afford the water
and electricity bills. At the river they had illegally tapped electricity without
paying for it. Yet, a whole array of possibilities opened up, even though many
18 Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

options were illegal and not part of the concept of being a good citizen from the
project’s perspective. Families who were in need of money, could not pay the
electricity bills, or needed more space for their livelihood activities immediately
rented or sold their new house and moved somewhere else. According to the pro-
ject’s register, one-fifth of the houses had changed owner within 2 years. The people
who stayed on immediately started to enlarge and reconstruct their houses to adapt
it to their personal needs and taste (cf. Holston, 1991).
Another issue that was the topic of much debate was the insecurity of the new
housing estate. Security issues are spectacularly absent in housing programmes for
the poor, who are seemingly considered to be the perpetrators, rather than the
victims, of crime (Lopes de Souza, 2008). When asked about the advantages and
disadvantages of their new houses compared with their shacks at the river, the
families regularly complained about the open structure of the estate, which
makes it easier for gangs and police patrols to drive through, shoot at targets,
and get out again. I was told more than once that it would feel safer if the estate
had closed streets and walls around it. They had felt better protected in the slum at
the river where neither the police nor neighbouring gangs dared to enter. In fact,
shortly after the new Jacarezinho housing estate was handed over to the inhabit-
ants, it was struck by a wave of violence. The inhabitants also complained about
the lack of protection offered by their houses. When they had the means to do so,
people immediately put burglar bars on their home windows and built fences
around their houses against home break-ins. These new insecure housing condi-
tions are ironic, given the fact that one of the official aims of Prometropole was to
offer poor families ‘‘access to a risk-free home which meet liveability norms’’
(World Bank, 2003: 39).
At the same time, many residents expressed their happiness with the new houses.
What they like most is the fact that the houses are clean and hygienic in compari-
son with the dirty and unhealthy living conditions at the water. Many people
exclaimed that they were so glad no longer to be burdened with inundations,
snakes, and rats. At the river, they had felt very worried about the health risks
for their children. Very important, the slum people felt that the state finally looked
after them.

Political society and the language of the political

in the periphery
What favela residents want is to be respected as human beings and not being seen
as favelados. They want to live in a secure environment, with possibilities to make a
living. They want a dignified, organized life and dream of becoming a cidade
(Winkelhoff, 2011). As mentioned before, the people in the urban periphery of
Recife make a sharp distinction between their area and a cidade. The cidade
stands for the city with middle-class people and state institutions, a space where
they do not belong. It stands for good and modern life, shops, and prosperity. The
cidade is something to be aspired for. An expression that was much used by the
Nuijten 19

resettled families is that with the project the area had become more cidade. A man
from Jacarezinho who received a house in one of the housing estates expressed
himself in the following way: ‘‘actually here it turned now into cidade, before it was
not cidade, today we can consider it cidade.’’ [mk] When asked further why the area
can be considered cidade now, he answered: Because comparing to what it looked
like before, it changed a lot, really a lot. It changed because today we have a road
here in front [..] it has become more beautiful, the house, all well made, it isn’t as it
was before, the favela barrack, pushed one on top of the other, it was horse, dog,
everything next to the barrack. Today not, today everything is different, for that
reason people today consider this cidade [mk]
This is an interesting way of expressing their feeling of growing inclusion
and belonging through modern infrastructure. Interesting in this respect is also
the meaning of having an official postal address where they receive their bills.
An electricity bill with your address is a proof of residence that can be used
for buying on credit. It is only poor, marginal people, living in favelas, who do
not have a postal address. Decent people have a postal address and tend to pay by
instalments. In this sense, the postal address is an important symbolic marker of
social difference. As somebody explained it: ‘‘When we lived in Jacarezinho we didn’t
have a proper address. Everything was just Jacarezinho. There were no street
names. It was just Jacarezinho. Now we have a proper address, everything alright,
good [tudo certinho, legal]’’. [mk] The other side of the coin is that with the
registration of their address they can no longer avoid bills, such as the electricity
and water bills, either. Inclusion as a ‘decent’ member of society also comes
with duties.
Slum residents enjoy becoming fuller members of society. A clean, organized
house with an official postal address in an area with broad, paved streets and big
concrete canals is more cidade and means being more included. That part of the
project people liked. Yet, they do not keep the state responsible for making this
dream come true. They do not talk in terms of their rights on housing. This was
also remarked by Winkelhoff (2011) who interviewed resettled families and noticed
that not a single person initiated a conversation about rights during her visits. She
found that when she asked people if they felt it was their right to receive a house
from the government, the majority of people answered negative. Some people even
started laughing about the idea that it was a duty of the government to give them a
house. For them the house was a gift, not a right.
The population immediately links interventions in their neighbourhood to the
efforts of specific politicians, community leaders, and political parties. These efforts
should then be rewarded during elections when they tell the residents whom they
have to vote for. In this context, the official inaugurations of the Prometrópole
housing estates were political events par excellence and were carefully monitored.
Also, for the local community leaders, this was the moment ‘to claim the project’
and show the local population that they were well connected and thus useful for the
community (Koster, 2009). If officials feared disturbances, the events would be
cancelled. The celebrations were accompanied by an enormous police presence
20 Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

and security operation. Highly placed officials such as mayors and governors used
these events for their political campaigns and ensured that there was ample media
coverage. For instance, an interesting incident occurred at the inauguration of the
next housing estate in the Prometrópole project, Saramandaia. The local people
were angry that these houses were even smaller than those in Jacarezinho and only
had one bedroom rather than two. Standing next to the high officials and in front
of the cameras, the community leader Eustaquio extensively explained that it was a
shame that the houses only had one bedroom. The State Governor felt pressured to
declare on the spot that he would take personal responsibility for ensuring an extra
bedroom was added to the houses. Every house indeed received an extra bedroom,
which by the people was baptized ‘Estaquio’s room’. This clearly illustrates how
activities and achievements tend to be attributed to personal interventions.
The population saw the houses as a ‘gift’ from President Lula, and from the PT
mayor of Recife, João Paulo. They wanted to show their gratitude and vote for
Lula during the presidential elections in October 2010. Many were confused
because they could not vote for Lula, who was not standing as a candidate
having served the maximum two terms, but rather were expected to vote for his
PT successor, Dilma, whom they did not know. Here we see how their political
subjectivity is not shaped through notions of citizenship and rights but
rather through affective feelings of being taken care of within patron–client
relationships.

Citizenship as a language of the political

Their not talking about rights but rather about gifts bestowed upon them by par-
ticular politicians explains that slum residents do not talk in terms of citizenship
either. They use the term citizen [cidadao] as a synonym for ‘‘a person’’ without
political meaning. For instance, they can say: ‘‘this citizen went to the shop’’. The
notion of the citizen as a political subject with rights and duties is hardly ever used.
Yet, it seems that this political notion of citizen slowly starts entering the vocabu-
lary in the periphery. For example, a woman who was interviewed in her new house
said: ‘‘today we pay here the water, we pay energy, [. . .] they ask you a proof of
residence, we have it, the point is that there [¼ Jacarezinho] we did not have this
thing. Now here we are citizen, [. . .] Here everything is legalized. (mk) So, for this
woman the proof of residence that comes with the official registration of the new
houses and the electricity and water bills turns them into citizens.
Community leaders who are sensitive to the politically important discourses are
more familiar with the notion of citizen. When Celia, a community leader, was
asked whether the housing project made the residents of Jacarezinho ‘‘more citi-
zens’’, she answered: ‘Yes, not only because of the house but because they are dis-
criminated against when they live in a favela. . . . Yes, it is not only because of the
house, but their quality of life has improved’ (ac). Being asked the same question,
Ricardo, one of the BAM project officials, answered: ‘No, I don’t think so, because
the people do not look after their house without training in conservation, cleaning
Nuijten 21

etc. . . . education is required, once the people pay for their water and electricity, then
you can speak of citizenship’ (ac). The interesting thing here is that the community
leader talks about citizenship in terms of being treated as a worthy person and
having access to basic requirements. In contrast, the project official defines citizen-
ship in terms of duties and decent behaviour. In this way, the two answers clearly
reflect opposing positions in the debate around citizenship. It shows how citizen-
ship is used as a political language and defined according to one’s position in
society. During an interview with Fernanda, the project director of participation,
she said that an important dimension of citizenship was that the inhabitants them-
selves had to look for temporary accommodation between the pulling down of their
shacks and the completion of their new houses. Here again we see how project
officials above all emphasize the ‘‘taking care of one’s own life’’ and ‘‘duties’’ as
part of being a citizen.
It is important to realize that the PT has been in power in Recife since 2000
and that the majority of Prometrópole officials are party affiliates. This explains
that the project follows the PT agenda of neoliberal democratic citizenship, which
includes the importance of popular participation, as well as the view that the
poor should take responsibility for their own lives (Miguel, 2006; Nuijten,
Koster and de Vries, 2012). The PT citizenship agenda also claims to fight
patron–client relations by establishing individual relations between citizens and
the state. As was mentioned above, the irony is that the increased intensity of
individual relationships between state officials and slum residents has further rein-
forced patronage.
When necessary, however, project officials switched their language of the polit-
ical from ‘democratic citizenship’ to ‘patronage’. During the presidential elections
in October 2010, the same Prometrópole officials changed their t-shirts, so turning
into PT supporters, in order to mobilize votes in the project area. The people, who
had liaised with the population in the resettlement process and had informed them
about their rights, now visited them in their PT outfits stressing the fact that the
new houses were ‘‘given’’ by President Lula. They would ask the resettled popula-
tion: ‘You remember who gave you this house, don’t you? It was Lula, the PT. So
you know whom you have to vote for, don’t you?’

Conclusions: The perversity of the citizenship game

The citizenship discourse is today widely employed by a wide amalgam of actors,
from local councils, national governments, politicians, NGOs, community leaders,
social movements, to institutions such as the World Bank. This article sees citizen-
ship as a language of the political. Different languages of the political emphasize
different ideas about political agents and their corresponding responsibilities. For
instance, the language of citizenship tends to be framed around ‘rights’ and ‘duties’
while the language of patronage is organized around ‘gifts’, ‘taking care’, and
‘exchange of favors’. Languages of the political come in a variety of versions.
They can be used to describe and analyse daily situations, but they can also be
22 Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

employed with a political aim. The article zoomed in on the Prometrópole slum-
upgrading project in Recife, a state-imposed project that is guided by the
PT agenda of democratic citizenship.
The article shows that the project makes deceptive claims with respect to the
inclusion of the poor as citizens of the Brazilian nation state. The promise of
including the poor as citizens, by offering them better living conditions, was deceit-
ful. The new housing estate did not fit the livelihoods of the poor who were
resettled there. The houses are too small and insecure, the utilities are too expensive
and important income-generating activities have become impossible. This explains
the departure of a significant percentage of the population and the high turnover of
occupants. However, at an affective level the project resonates with the longing for
inclusion of the slum population. They were grateful that they were looked after
and became part of the project of modernity. Residents liked the modern infra-
structure and the tight lay out of the new housing estate. In this way, the residents
felt more part of a cidade, which is the bright opposite of favela. For the slum
residents this claim to the modern city (Appadurai and Holston, 1996) stands for
being seen as worthy people who deserve state services.
The promise of including the population in the design and implementation of the
project was also misleading. Despite the profusion of participatory mechanisms,
the slum dwellers had little voice in the project. The project used the democratic
citizenship discourse above all as a tool of governance (Cruikshank, 1999; Hindess,
2005) to control the target population and hold them responsible for anything that
went wrong. If the residents did not like the new houses, or the way the project was
implemented, they themselves, it was said, were at fault for not being active enough
during the participatory procedures. They had not fulfilled their duties as citizens
to take responsibility for their own lives and living environment.
I argue that the citizenship game played by the state in this project was perverse
for two reasons. First, in exchange for a new house, slum residents had to assume
the subject position of self-monitoring, self-disciplining citizens, who behave in
‘‘appropriate ways’’ and are willing to work within the framework of a housing
project that they had little influence over. It is interesting, though, that the slum
residents did not assume this subject position and – according to project officials –
turned into ‘unruly’ and ‘ungrateful’ recipients. The inhabitants, far from being
docile subjects, involved themselves in illegal reconstructions and transactions,
once they received the houses. They creatively manipulated the opportunities
offered by the project. This again shows that extra legal means are often the
only way for the poor to defend their ‘‘right of being’’ as the official state proced-
ures (participatory mechanisms) do not give them any influence (Chatterjee, 2004).
Informal networks and illegal actions are often the more effective part of political
society for slum residents.
A second reason why the citizenship game in this project was perverse is that in
the end it stimulated patronage. The Prometrópole project claimed that, now,
everybody could individually hold the state accountable. Local associations and
community leaders were no longer necessary, it was said, and were replaced by
Nuijten 23

democratic project committees. Officials frequently visited the project area

and maintained close contacts with the residents. In this way, slum inhabitants
indeed have more contact with state officials than ever in the past.
However, rather than increasing the impartial working of the state apparatus,
this has had the effect of encouraging personalized politics. It is ironic that it is
precisely the socialist PT government in Recife, which fiercely claims to fight old
patron–client patterns, that strengthened the affective dimension of patronage in
the project.
The people in the poor neighbourhoods do not use the political language of
citizenship, which is, above all, a public policy language employed by the state.
Among the population, we do not see the understanding of selves as right-bearing
individuals but rather as creatively struggling individuals who through personal
relationships with influential people try to survive and improve their lives. The slum
residents use a patronage language of the political and see the houses not as a right
but rather as a gift from President Lula and Mayor João Paulo of the PT. And they
are grateful to be taken care of. Although their politicized subjectivity rests in great
part on patronage (Collins, 2008: 251), I argue that the relationship with the state is
definitely changing. The PT builds upon, yet also transforms earlier forms of
patronage. An important change with the past is the openness and directness of
the interaction with the state and the stronger presence of officials in the local
neighbourhoods. Hence, patronage has not become less under PT rule, but it has
become more affective.

Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the valuable comments and suggestions of the anonymous
referees. I like to thank Jilles van Gastel, Martijn Koster, Sian Lazar, Trevor Stack and
Finn Stepputat for their useful critique on earlier versions of the article. I am grateful to
Augusto Antonio Campelo Cabral and Monica Valeria dos Santos Cabral for our ongoing
dialogue about events in Chao de Estrelas in relation to broader developments in Brazil. The
following people have participated in various stages of the project and I am indebted to them
for our discussions and the sharing of practical and academic dilemmas: Andrezza Alves,
Silvia Cavalcanti, Marie Kolling, Martijn Koster, Edvania Torres, Pieter de Vries, and
Merel van Winkelhoff. This research was financed by a VIDI grant (nr. 452-05-365) from
NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.
Comments from interviews conducted by Augusto Cabral are indicated by (ac) by Marie
Kolling (mk).

Note
1. Of the US$ 84 million, US$ 46 million was provided by the World Bank, US$ 21 million
by the State of Pernambuco, US$ 13.5 million by the municipality of Recife and US$ 3.5
million by the municipality of Olinda (Boletim Dairario, sec. comunicacao, noticias,
Recife 24 de Outubro de 2003).
24 Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

References
Bitoun J, Costa J, Silva EB, et al. (2002) Orcamento participativo em Recife: Gestão do
planejamento, exercicio de cidadania. Recife: FASE Pernambuco.
Cabral A (2004) Os gestores públicos e suas ações no bairro de Campina do Barreto: O vivido e
o instituı´do. Recife, UFPE: MSc thesis.
Caldeira T (2006) ‘‘I came to sabotage your reasoning!’’ Violence and resignifications of
justice in Brazil. In: Comaroff J and Comaroff J (eds) Law and Disorder in the Postcolony.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 102–149.
Chatterjee P (2004) The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of
the World. New York: Columbia University Press.
Collins J (2008) Public health, patronage and national culture: the resuscitation and com-
modification of community origins in neoliberal Brazil. Critique of Anthropology 28(2):
237–255.
Cruikshank B (1999) The Will to Empower. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Dagnino E (2007) Dimensions of citizenship in contemporary Brazil. Fordham Law Review
75(6): 2470–2482.
Dalsgaard A (2004) Matters of Life and Longing: Female Sterilisation in Northeast Brazil.
Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum press.
Etapas (2003) Gestão participativa no Recife: do Prezeis ao Orçamento Participativo: 1
encontro da RPA6. Recife: H3 ComunicaçãoVisual Ltda.
Garmany J (2009) The embodied state: governmentality in a Brazilian favela. Social and
Cultural Geography 10(7): 721–739.
Gay R (1999) The broker and the thief: a parable (reflections on popular politics in Brazil).
Luso-Brazilian Review 36(1): 49–70.
Gledhill J and Hita M (2009) New Actors, New Political Spaces, Same Divided City?
Reflections on Poverty and the Politics of Urban Development in Salvador, Bahia. Paper
presented at LASA, Rio de Janeiro, June 11–14, 2009.
Gordon A and Stack T (eds) (2007) Citizenship beyond the state: thinking with early modern
citizenship in the contemporary world. Citizenship Studies, 11(2): 117–133.
Hindess (2005) Citizenship and empire. In: Hansen T and Stepputat F (eds) Sovereign
Bodies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 241–256.
Holston J (1991) Autoconstruction in working-class Brazil. Cultural Anthropology 6(4):
447–465.
Holston J (2008) Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil.
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Holston J and Appadurai A (1996) Cities and citizenship. Public Culture 8: 187–204.
IBGE (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatı́stica) (2010) Censo demográfico 2010
[Demographic census 2010]. Available at: http://www.ibge.gov.br/home/estatistica/
populacao/censo2010/PE2010.pdf (accessed 23 November 2010).
Inda JX (2005) Analytics of the modern: an introdcution. In: Inda (ed.) Anthropologies of
Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality and Life Politics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–22.
Koster M (2009) In Fear of Abandonment: Slum Life, Community Leaders and Politics in
Recife, Brazil. PhD Thesis, Wageningen University, Wageningen.
Koster M and Nuijten M (2012) From preamble to post-project frustrations: the shaping of
a slum upgrading project in Recife, Brazil. Antipode 44(1): 175–196.
Lazar S (2004) Education for credit: development as citizenship project in Bolivia. Critique
of Anthropology 24(3): 301–319.
Nuijten 25

Lopes de Souza M (2008) Fobopole; o medo generalizado e a militarizacao da questão urbana.

Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil.
Miguel L (2006) From equality to opportunity: transformations in the discourse of the
Workers’ Party in the 2002 elections. Latin American Perspectives 33(4): 122–143.
Mouffe Ch (2005) On the Political. Oxford: Routledge.
Nuijten M (2003) Power, Community and the State: The Political Anthropology of
Organisation in Mexico. London: Pluto Press.
Nuijten M, Koster M and Vries P. de (2012) Regimes of spatial ordering in Brazil: the
merging of neoliberalism, leftist populism and modernist visions in slum upgrading in
Recife. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 33: 157–170.
Ong A (2009) Political citizenship in the midst of transnational regimes of virtue. Power and
Social Theory 20: 301–307.
Owensby b (2005) Toward a history of Brazil’s ‘‘Cordial racism’’: race beyond liberalism.
Comparative Study of Society and History 47(2): 318–347.
Perlman J (1979) The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Prometropole (2006) Plano de acompanhamento social de obras.
Santos M (2007) Por Uma Outra Globalização: Do Pensamento Único a Conscieˆncia
Universal. Rio de Janeiro: Record.
Scheper-Hughes N (2006) Death squads and democracy in Northeast Brazil. In: Comaroff J
and Comaroff J (eds) Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, pp. 150–187.
Scott J (1998) Seeing Like a State; How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Stepputat F (2001) Urbanizing the countryside: armed conflict, state formation, and the
politics of place in contemporary Guatemala. In: Hansen T and Stepputat F (eds) States
of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham and
London: Duke University Press, pp. 284–312.
Winkelhoff M van (2011) Factory of dreams: Experiences and expectations around slum
upgrading in Recife. MSc Thesis, Wageningen University.
World Bank (2003) Project appraisal document on a proposed loan for the Recife upgrading
project, April 1.
World Bank (2006) Project information document (PID) Appraisal stage. Recife Urban
development and social inclusion project.

Author biography
Monique Nuijten is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences of
Wageningen University, the Netherlands. She conducted research on peasant com-
munities and state formation in Mexico and Peru. Her current research focuses on
slum upgrading projects and power relations in Northeast Brazil. She published the
books Power, Community and the State: The Political Anthropology of Organization
in Mexico (London: Pluto Press, 2003), the co-edited volume Corruption and the
Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) and
numerous articles.