James Holston

His critique of Brasília is a classic: an entire city designed from scratch, with the best modern intentions, which eliminated the street as a place of encounter and ended up segregating those who built it into satellite towns never shown on the plan.

From there he moved to the peripheries of São Paulo and found the opposite: residents who build their houses without permits, organise, litigate and eventually obtain services and title deeds. He called that insurgent citizenship: rights that are not granted from above but won by building.

An American anthropologist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Holston began with an anthropological critique of Brasília, The Modernist City (1989), which showed how the capital planned by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer to abolish the street and inequality produced a segregated city and an informal periphery its plans had not foreseen. São Paulo has been his field ever since: with Teresa Caldeira he wrote in 1999 on democracy and violence in Brazil, and he edited Cities and Citizenship (1999), which put citizenship at the centre of urban studies.

Insurgent Citizenship (2008), the fruit of decades in the self-built peripheries of São Paulo, is his major work: the poor who built their houses and neighbourhoods claimed rights as taxpayers and residents and transformed Brazilian democracy from below, even though a differentiated citizenship still denies them equality. In recent years he has directed Berkeley's Social Apps Lab, which develops digital tools for citizen participation, and his concept has travelled to India, South Africa and the Middle East.