1 Chapter 7 Acting From the Slums: Questioning Social Movement and Resistance Nicolas Bautès, Véronique Dupont, Frédéric Landy Introduction The focus of this chapter is to examine some of the modalities of resistance emerging in and around slum rehabilitation schemes in the metropolises of India and Brazil. For most of the slum dwellers in both urban spaces, mobilization means fighting for and defending a place to live in the city and, more broadly, the right to maintain and maybe enhance their livelihoods. Expressed through a very wide range of practices, from direct confrontations and protests in the streets to mobilization movements strongly connected with civil society organizations and structuring strategies to contest the dominant forces, the social movements emerging from the slums in these metropolises seem to be recognized beyond the spatial limits of the slums. We posit that they relate to broader expressions of urban contestation that bring to light some of the major issues at stake in these metropolises. As such, they concern all urban dwellers and strongly contribute to the political structuring of urban affairs. The growing influence of social movements from the slums has to be viewed as a reaction to the socio-economic changes occurring since the 1990s, both in India and Brazil, through the “deregulation and privatization of state-owned and state-provided services – a new kind of State intervention with a larger entrepreneurial capacity was brought in, to roll forward new forms of governance that ostensibly suited a market-driven globalizing economy” (Theodore Brenner, 2002, quoted by Banerjee-Guha, 2009, p. 95). This process has had major consequences in many other cities and metropolises of the south, including Brazil. The deepening social polarization of urban spaces and both the social and spatial fragmentation inherent to the rehabilitation schemes in these countries (Balbo, 1993; Bautès et al., 2011) tend to stimulate contestation, expressed in different forms, enabling us to observe that the “theories and praxis of neoliberal urbanism and the enforcement of the regulatory regime in cities and their regions are getting intrinsically associated with such resistances and struggles, signifying a radical politics of contestation” (Banerjee-Guja, 2009, p. 109). The way these movements are expressed differs considerably in the slums under study, depending both on the general socio-economical and political contexts and the specific conditions under which slum dwellers are taken into consideration in such interventions. Selecting who could be “eligible” to get access to rehabilitation, public interventions often operate through both formal and informal processes, marked by inequities that provoke feelings of injustice among slum dwellers, which lead them to protest. But many of the protests emerging from slums are not initiated mainly by local dwellers. They often bring together a wide range of actors, both endogenous and exogenous – non-governmental organizations (NGOs), residents’ associations, political leaders, slum dwellers, etc. – who get mobilized at different phases of implementation of a slum’s public policy, as a way to confront, react or reorient such policies for a better inclusion of the slum dwellers’ concerns. It is therefore important to analyze the inter-connections between the different types of mobilization and resistance structured to fight against hegemonic or dominating forces (Pile and Keith, 1997), and how “place-specific” social movements (Pile and Keith, 1997) play a key role in the complex interplay between movements for individual or collective emancipation and strong domination processes. Hence, the aim of this chapter is to study how both the diversity of actors – individuals or groups, whether emerging from within the slum itself or not – and the complexity of slum rehabilitation schemes not only lead slum dwellers to confront the State directly and use the street to demonstrate, but also to develop more complex protest movements. To be heard by public institutions, activists mobilize a broad range of tactics, from discussions to negotiations with public officials or, as in many cases, their role is often substituted by civil society organizations playing the role of mediators. Do the slums in these four metropolises exhibit certain features that could characterize specific ways of “acting from the slums” – ways of being visible and influential in a context where rehabilitation processes increasingly attract a new set of actors (developers, political parties, and social leaders) in areas long forgotten in the context of social concerns in cities? Are the resistance Megacity Slums: Social Exclusion, Space and Urban Policies in Brazil and India (Anglais) - décembre 2013 de Marie-Caroline Saglio-Yatzimirsky (Sous la direction de), Frederic Landy (Sous la direction de)