THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CYCLE OF SOCIO-SPATIAL VIOLENCE AND URBAN REDEVELOPMENT PROCESSES IN BRAZILIAN METROPOLISES

Abstract

This research examines the structural relationship between socio-spatial violence and urban production within the context of large redevelopment projects in major Brazilian metropolises. The analysis is based on the premise that violence functions both as instrument and product of urban development. In contemporary times, this dialectical relationship has become increasingly accelerated, complex, and multifaceted. Socio-spatial violence—understood as the violation of rights, erasure of human subjectivity, disruption of public and common spaces, and obliteration of urbanity—has become deeply embedded in urban spatial production dynamics. This reality underscores the urgent need to understand the practices of violence intersecting urban development: their reconfigurations, consequences, and lethal potential for individuals and territories. In Brazil, a peripheral country within the global capitalist system, violence has historically been a constant mechanism in urbanization since the colonial period. However, new modalities, operational logics, and dynamics have emerged, reshaping violence and the production of Brazilian cities. Within the neoliberal context, major metropolises have adopted redevelopment projects as a mechanism of sanitizing urban space, promoting segregated development paradigms, and accelerating financial returns through commodification of urban land. These megaprojects seek to maximize the commodification of urban land and life, benefiting privileged groups while making other sections more precarious. These processes involve a cyclical pattern of violence and rights violations within this rentier dynamic. This cycle encompasses various forms of violence, from symbolic, such as stigmatization of spaces and groups, to explicit and implicit violent actions and interventions. This constitutes a cycle of symbolic and literal death affecting individuals, communities, and territories. The process reveals the integration of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2019) and urbicide (Graham, 2010; Harvey, 2014) dynamics, sustained by socio-spatial violence fueling neoliberal urban production. This study aims to undertake a theoretical exploration of the practices and processes constituting this cycle of socio-spatial violence structuring large redevelopment projects in Brazil’s major cities. The objective is to identify violent practices, their categories, and manifestations, constructing a theoretical overview of socio-spatial processes that strip rights, erase subjectivities, and deteriorate spatialities in service of an urban commodification agenda. The purpose is an ontological investigation to analyze the functional logic underlying redevelopment projects characteristic of city production processes in metropolises of the Global South (Burte & Kamath, 2023; Kundu & Shivani, 2023). The focus is to examine the phenomenon in Brazilian metropolises and construct an overview of how this cycle operates and the role of violence within it. The research is organized around the following themes: neoliberal dynamics in Brazil involving commodification of the city and erosion of rights and citizenship (Telles, 2010); the logic of value extraction from urban land through megaprojects and redevelopment (Burte & Kamath; Kundu & Shivani, 2023); the development of categories related to socio-spatial violence and its urban manifestations; and the structuring of a cycle of death affecting territories and subjects—and consequently urban ‘revitalization’—through processes such as socio-spatial violence, violent displacement, ruination (Nixon, 2011), social and real death (Mbembe, 2009), slow violence (Nixon, 2011), and socio-spatial stigmatization (Wacquant, 2008), all analyzed herein.