Beyond Bureaucracy: How Prosecutors and Public Defenders Enforce Urban Planning Laws in São Paulo, Brazil

Land trafficking, responsible for the unprecedented rate of urbanization in many Latin American cities, is often conceptualized through corruption as ‘abuses of public office for private gain’. While those involved in the practice rely at times on violence and illegality, their repertoire is sophisticated, allowing them to move in and out of legality as part of their cost–benefit calculations. In this article I argue that land trafficking is based on legalized corruption. I use an ethnographic approach to observe the strategic conduits that are technically embedded in, and opportunistically related to, different municipal processes to legalize illegality. I demonstrate how land traffickers use morphing possibilities between land tenure types (communal, private and government) and mimic development typologies that have gained legitimacy over time. I also show how conflicting, competing and humanitarian rationalities that characterize the state play a crucial role in promoting land trafficking, by grafting illegality and violations onto ‘formal’ practices.

Section: Interrogating the ‘Illegality’ Of Land Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Land Trafficking and the Fertile Spaces of Legality

Lambert¹

2020

“…In lieu of mass mobilization, much of the political activity in the urban periphery often takes place in the courts. Specifically, appeals are regularly made to the Public Ministry, an independent branch of government that allows for citizens to bring class action lawsuits against the state and the private sector (Holston, ; Coslovsky, ; see also Bhan, , on the ‘juridicalisation of resistance’). While the 2014–16 period in Brazil was marked by extensive mobilizations that brought many residents to the street, much of the political life that I witnessed in the periphery of São Paulo took the form of bureaucratic contestation, appeals to the public ministry, and engagement with local decisionmakers.…”

Section: Methods and Conceptual Framingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linear Parks and the Political Ecologies of Permeability: Environmental displacement in São Paulo, Brazil

Millington¹

2018

This article considers the politics of resettlement within ongoing efforts to construct the Tietê River Valley Park (Parque Várzeas do Tietê), a linear park that upon completion will be the largest linear park in the world. Located in the eastern periphery of São Paulo, Brazil, the proposed project uses riverbank naturalization to dampen floodpeaks and bring green space to underserved populations. Due to the presence of low‐income neighborhoods on the river's edge, however, the project calls for the removal of roughly 40,000 people. Drawing from urban political ecology and contemporary concerns about environmentally induced displacement, I consider the conflicts over resettlement that mark the project. I analyze the project itself and situate it within a regional context defined by autoconstruction, regularized flooding, and insecure tenure. I argue that despite claims that the project will yield less risky lives for displaced residents, the form through which the project is being developed actually puts displaced residents in heightened situations of risk. I consider how communities have organized to resist displacement, and call for an approach to governance in peripheral landscapes that takes seriously the histories of collective infrastructural provisioning and autoconstructed housing that have marked them for decades.

“…Similar observations have been made by researchers analysing urban planning laws in India (Roy, ), China (Shih, ) and Turkey (Kuyucu, ). As Coslovsky () illustrates, when implementing the law, local bureaucracy can exploit this kind of legal ambiguity to favour certain interests or policy goals.…”

Section: Legal Corruption: Rules‐lawyering and Bare Legalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Rule of Law and Rules‐Lawyering: Legal Corruption and ‘Reprivatization Business’ in Warsaw

Kusiak¹

2019

Delving into the nexus between the state and informality, this paper discusses the informality of the legal and judicial systems. Produced by structurally powerful actors, this kind of informality is not so much legitimized by the law, but concealed within the very process of legitimization. To capture how legal engineering welds formalized laws with informal translations, I look at judicial outcomes that, while formally legal, are socially delegitimized and perceived as legal corruption. After analysing the contested judicial outcomes of Warsaw's ‘reprivatization’ process (property restitution), I define the mechanism of legal corruption as rules‐lawyering, by which I mean an attempt to gain legal advantage by obsessively sticking to the written laws, while deliberately desecrating its spirit. I describe three of its mechanisms: appropriation, redefinition and fraud laundering. Finally, in my preliminary vivisection of the recent and ongoing process of delegalizing the legal corruption that has been part of the reprivatization process, all the allied concepts of this forum come together to demonstrate the essential inseparability of informality and state.