Insurgent Citizenship: James Holston and the Peripheries of São Paulo

Insurgent citizenship is the concept with which the American anthropologist James Holston, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, explains how the residents of São Paulo's self-built peripheries became citizens at the margins of, and against, a legal order that excluded them. He develops it in Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (2008), after decades of fieldwork in neighbourhoods such as Jardim das Camélias and Lar Nacional. His thesis is that Brazilian citizenship was designed from independence onward to be universal in law and differentiated in practice, and that the self-construction of the city broke that formula from below.

Differentiated citizenship: equal in law, unequal in practice

Holston first reconstructs differentiated citizenship: a system that grants rights according to each person's social position, property, education, race, while proclaiming formal equality. The Land Law of 1850, which required public land to be purchased just as slavery was beginning to end, left the poor population without legal access to property and established the norm that occupying and later regularising is the usual way to gain access to the city. Illegality, Holston shows, is not a Brazilian anomaly but the mechanism through which both elites and the poor have produced the city, under different rules for each.

Autoconstruction in the peripheries of São Paulo

The insurgency is born in the peripheries of São Paulo between the 1940s and 1970s, when millions of migrants bought plots in irregular subdivisions and built their houses with their own hands over decades. That process, autoconstruction, gave them more than a roof: the experience of having made the city, and with it the conviction that they had a right to it. When developers or the state tried to evict them, residents learned to use the law, to organise in neighbourhood associations and to demand services, and in that process they became citizens who claimed rights instead of asking for favours.

The three features of insurgent citizenship

Insurgent citizenship, for Holston, has three features. It is a citizenship of residents, grounded in living in the city and helping to build it, not in legal status. It is a citizenship of law, because the insurgents do not reject the law but invoke it, study it and reinterpret it in their favour. And it is a citizenship that transforms the existing order: the 1988 Constitution and the 2001 City Statute, with their social function of property and their regularisation instruments, are largely the fruit of the struggles of those peripheries. Insurgent does not mean violent; it means erupting where it was not expected.

Limits, disjunctive democracy and the concept's reach

Holston does not idealise. He shows that the same democratisation that expanded rights coexisted with rising violence, the privatisation of security and middle-class rejection of the rights of the accused, what he calls, with Teresa Caldeira, disjunctive democracy. And he warns that insurgent citizenship can be captured by clientelism, fragmentation or market logic, as when regularisation turns the occupant into an owner who sells up and leaves. His earlier book, The Modernist City (1989) on Brasília, had already shown how planning from above produces its own insurgent peripheries.

The concept has travelled from São Paulo to urban studies across the Global South, from the villas of Buenos Aires to the settlements of Nairobi or Jakarta, and has given its name to the insurgent planning studied by Faranak Miraftab or Marcelo Lopes de Souza. Its lesson is that citizenship is not granted only by the state: it is also built from the peripheries, house by house, when those who made the city claim the right to decide about it. For planning, that means recognising autoconstruction as a legitimate production of the city and its inhabitants as citizens with a voice, not as a problem to be solved.