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This paper contributes to global perspectives on gentrification by interrogating the experiences of urban redevelopment and transformation in the global South. Through unpacking the contradictions of public space revitalization and upgrading in two favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we critically examine changes to the socio-spatial fabric of informal settlements over time. Our analysis reveals that upgrading projects, when combined with state-led favela pacification, create socio-spatial legibility through three inter-related pathways of physical, symbolic, and economic discipline. In the outset, favela upgrading increases property prices and produces an urban scenario molded for outsiders while simultaneously invisibilizing traditional cultural and social uses. For favela residents, however, upgrading is experienced as iterative processes of securitization and restriction, which involve strategies such as environmental clean-up, property enclosure, police violence, and new exclusionary forms of investments. As a result, the most socially vulnerable residents are controlled, coercively driven away, and slowly erased. Over time, the apparent integration of the formal and informal city, of the rich and the poor, of the 'asphalt' and the 'hill' in Rio de Janeiro produces new forms of separation, segregation, and fragmentation.
This paper contributes to critical and Southern urban studies by discussing how the notion of hybridity is useful to understand contemporary modes of politics rooted in equality pursuits and crafted by peripheral subjects. It analyses the birth, discourses and tactics of three grassroots groups in Rocinha, an immense peripheral settlement in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to show how modern insurgent claims – based on material urban rights – are intertwined with other grammars of justice, such as the politics of intersectional difference, critical pedagogies, solidarity and care. These cases suggest that contemporary insurgency builds on rights-based citizenship claims to create unique pathways that somehow articulate the universality and relationality of justice. I suggest that hybrid insurgent citizenship operates like a braid in which different strategies are uniquely and interdependently linked over time. Whilst in Rocinha the central thread is insurgency, the same logics could apply to other context-situated political traditions.
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