Insurgent Citizenship: James Holston and the City from Below

Insurgent citizenship is the concept with which the anthropologist James Holston, in Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (2008), described how the residents of São Paulo's peripheries, by building their houses, legalising their plots and organising to demand services, produced a new citizenship the state had not granted them. Against formal citizenship, defined by rights handed down from above and in practice reserved for elites, insurgent citizenship is won from below, in the daily struggle for housing, water, transport and recognition. Manuel Castells had shown in The City and the Grassroots (1983) that urban movements change the meaning of the city; Holston adds that they also change who counts as a citizen.

The Brazilian paradox: legal equality and differentiated citizenship

Holston starts from a Brazilian paradox. Brazil had for centuries a differentiated citizenship: equal in law, unequal in access to rights, so that property, education and proximity to power decided who was treated as a full citizen. The self-built peripheries that grew around São Paulo from the 1940s seemed proof of that exclusion, but his ethnographic research, carried out over decades in neighbourhoods such as Jardim das Camélias, showed the opposite: by occupying land, litigating over titles, learning the law and organising residents' associations, their inhabitants turned the periphery into a school of citizenship.

Self-construction as political practice and the 1988 Constitution

The mechanism is self-construction as political practice. Building one's own house over years, with scarce resources and without permits, generates a sense of contribution and belonging that grounds claims: those who built the neighbourhood demand the asphalt, the school and the bus as earned rights, not favours. Holston shows that those demands transformed the relationship of the urban poor with the state and fed the constituent process of 1988, whose Constitution recognised the social function of property and opened the way to the City Statute of 2001. Insurgent citizenship is at once everyday and constitutional.

Castells and the three goals of urban movements

Castells provides the comparative frame. In his study of urban movements in Madrid, San Francisco, Glasgow and Latin America he identified three goals, collective consumption, community identity and political autonomy, and concluded that movements combining them change the city. Holston's insurgent citizenship meets all three: it claims services, affirms the identity of the periphery and contests the state's definition of citizenship. Both authors stress, however, that these movements rarely take power and that their gains coexist with repression, clientelist co-optation and internal fragmentation.

Ambiguities: new exclusions and the city of walls

Holston warns of the ambiguity of the process. The same insurgency that expands rights can produce new exclusions, when already regularised occupants oppose newcomers, when violence replaces organisation or when differentiated citizenship is reproduced inside the periphery. And Brazil's democratisation in the 1980s and 1990s coincided with rising urban violence and the privatisation of space, the gated condominiums Teresa Caldeira studied in City of Walls, so that insurgent citizenship and the fortified city grew together.

The concept's contribution is to have changed how the peripheries of the Global South are seen. What planning saw as illegality and informality is, for Holston, the place where real citizenship is produced, and that reading has influenced studies of informal settlements from Mumbai to Mexico City and policies of regularisation and neighbourhood upgrading. The lesson for planning is that the just city is not granted by plans but won by those who build it, and that the state's task is to recognise that conquest in rights, services and voice.