Spaces of corruption and abuse

Spaces of corruption ad abuse. The dialectic between legality / illegality, formality / informality in territorial development.
Marvi Maggio (Firenze), Silvia Macchi (Roma and Dar), Beatriz Perralta (Mexico City), Costanza La Mantia (Cairo e Kigali), Christy Petropoulou (Athens). (we need more examples / cities so please contact us)



Proposal for part III of NMM book, referred categories “spaces of corruption and abuse” and “informal urbanization” (with interrelation with the categories displacement, eviction and environmental degradation).



Corruption and abuse can be found easily in many urban developments, especially in some space-time contexts (see data on transparency international). But a core issue is the definition of what is meant with these categories. If we relate them to the legal system and we look at what go against it, we miss the ability of the ruling elites (or classes) to change laws as they pleased. We can find similar events that in a country are legal and in another are not: think of the pressure of the lobbies, or the financing of political party by elites, and enterprises. Actually there is an obvious contradiction between what can be label “legal” in the status quo and what can be label “fair” in the direction of equitable possible urban worlds. This means that we have to study the definition and the actual use of these categories in different time- space perspectives. We will draw information for a comparison from the results of the research NMM on these categories in theory and in practice (see the definition in the list of categories august 2012 copied below).

We can say that we are living an extreme situation that show an increasing brutality by the ruling classes: many theorists (Gallino 2011, 2012, Revelli 2010, Harvey 2012) have shown in their essays and books that the neoliberal forces are winning and are fighting a class war upon us (the exploited, dispossessed, powerless) while there is not an effective fight back: in so doing the border of what the ruling classes can do move in the direction of their class and elite group interests (as we already stress, they have the power to design laws, regulation, governance systems). In other words the ruling classes very often broke the laws in force, especially when they have emerged from a mediation between different interests and were not only the expression of their own interests. Some of these corruption and abuse practices are there from a long time (the roman empire had good examples) and other will be newer. In particular we have to look at “Predatory urban practices” (Harvey, Rebel cities, 2012:53) that “constitute, at least in the advanced capitalist economies, a vast terrain of accumulation by dispossession, through which money is sucked up into the circulation of fictitious capital to underpin the vats fortunes made from within the financial system”. For examples “many of the foreclosure (over a million during 2010) turn out to have been illegal if not fraudulent…” (Harvey, 2012:54).

The role of the state is pivotal. The formal and informal have to do with what is competence of the state and what not. Foucault sustains “it is possible to suppose that if the state is what it is today, this is so precisely thanks to this governmentality, which is at once internal and external to the state, since it is the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on; thus the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality” (lecture given at the College de France in February 1978, italian version transcribed and edited by Pasquale Pasquino, published in Aut Aut 167-8 September, December 1978)

Our aim is to use the data collected for the categories “spaces of corruption and abuse”, and informal urbanization to draw a picture of what seems to be nowadays a crucial power systems set upon urban developments and more broadly, upon urbanization processes. Without forgetting the relations with displacements, evictions and environmental degradation.

But who and which processes draw the border between legal and illegal, between formality and informality? Which is the difference between elite illegality and informality and the illegality and informality of all the others? And how the line between them changes through time and spaces as the social forces fight for their interests and their vision of the future?



Nous montrerons que la confusion de la terminologie reflète une tendance à considérer de la même façon (type 15 informal urbanisation) toutes les formes d’urbanisation, différentes de celles connues dans les pays occidentaux. A l’interieur de cette categorie il existent des types des quartiers d’autoconstruction populaire, des occupations des terres par des mouvements sociaux qui defend leur droit à la ville mais aussi des espaces de corruption et abuse. Ces deux processus ne devraient pas se considérer ensemble, car les premiers sont des processus qui résistent à NMM et les secondes font partie de NMM (Petropoulou, 2011, Leontidou 2006). Les processus spatiaux actuels reflet les effets de corruption et abuse par divers groups de pouvoir qui appliquent l’ « accumulation by dispossession » ligne directrice de néolibéralisme (Harvey, 2012)



We show that the confusion in terminology reflects a tendency to regard the same way (informal urbanization type 15) all forms of urbanization, different from those known in the Western world. In the inside of this category there are types of neighborhoods on self popular occupations of land by social movements that defend their right to the city but also areas of corruption and abuse. These two processes should not be considered together, as the first processes that are resistant to NMM and the second is part of NMM (​​Petropoulou, 2011, Leontidou 2006). Spatial processes reflect current effects of special corruption and abuse by various groups of power that apply the "accumulation by dispossession" guideline of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2012)



Bibliography

Crainz, G., Autobiografia di una repubblica, Roma, Donzelli, 2009.

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">Gallino, L., ''Finanzcapitalismo. La civiltà del denaro in crisi'', Torino, Einaudi, 2011.

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">Gallino, L., Borgna, P., La lotta di classe dopo la lotta di classe, bari, Laterza, 2012.

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">Harvey, D., Rebel cities, London, Brooklyn, Verso, 2012.

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">Parlato, V., Il blocco edilizio, Il Manifesto, n.3-4, 1970:

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">http://eddyburg.it/article/articleview/3277/0/45/

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">Revelli, M., Poveri noi, Torino, Einaudi, 2010.

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">Roy, A., The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory, Regional Studies, vol. 43.6, pp. 819-830, July 2009.

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">Salzano, E., Vent’anni e più di urbanistica contrattata, Relazione al convegno di Italia Nostra La città venduta, Roma, 6 aprile 2011:

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">http://www.eddyburg.it/article/articleview/16826/0/15/

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">Saviano, R., Gomorra, Milano, Feltrinelli, 2006.

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">Web site: Transparency International, The global coalition against corruption, Corruption perception index:

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm"> http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/results/

<p align="JUSTIFY" lang="el-GR" style="margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; background: #ffffff">Leontidou L., 1990/2006, The Mediterranean city in transition, New York, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press Human Geography

<p align="JUSTIFY" lang="el-GR" style="margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; background: #ffffff">Petropoulou C., 2011, ''Développement urbain et écopaysages urbains. Une étude sur les quartiers de Mexico et d’Athènes''. L’Harmattan.

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">The categories of reference:

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">Spaces of corruption and abuse (new) (not necessarily mappable but can be studied and addressed in the texts: introduction, conclusion and case studies in the portrait of the city): Quite similar to what was described as Deals in the case study guidelines. Projects, plans or public works heavily affected by corruption. Strategic plans designed by the ruling groups outside and beyond urban planning legislation. Speculative legal (or almost illegal) buildings and illegal elite villas. Indicators: 1. judicial inquiries on development plans and projects because of bribery and corruption; judicial inquiries on cooked bids or competitions for a public contracts to build public works; newspapers inquiry and campaign about corruption in land issues; 2. protests by community groups and people's committees against specific plans or projects because they insist that there was an abuse against their rights (could be an alleged illegality or something that is perceived as unjust and unfair even if it is not against the law and the legal order), very often in these cases the people's groups produce studies about the contrast between the contested specific plan or urban project and the urban - metropolitan plan or planning law in force.

<p style="text-align: JUSTIFY; margin-bottom: 0cm">Informal urbanization (15) urbanization grown outside the formal regulated masterplanning (e.g. slum, shanty-town or unregulated private urbanisations). Although a variety of different processes of informal urbanization exist in different historical and geographical contexts, it is often typified by illegal occupation of land, setting up of makeshift constructions and lack of basic public utilities like water supply, drains, electricity etc. Informal urbanization usually takes place where large sections of the people are excluded from the mainstream economy and find neither work nor shelter, but it is also practiced by the elites operating in ‘special tolerated regimes’. Informal urban processes lie on the borderline between legal, illegal; legitimate, illegitimate; authorized, unauthorized. This border is arbitrary and ever-shifting and is a site of power relations, state power and sometimes violence. Indicative indicators: 1. Data: about being outside the building regulations, urban plans or planning laws (lack of planning permission,); 2. observations on the ground: bad building conditions like risk of flooding, pollution, landslide, proximity to hazardous site, lack of public infrastructure, services, facilities, self-building, variety).

<p align="JUSTIFY" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm">Displacement, eviction, environmental degradation.