Milícia-created Enclaves and Urbanization in Rio de Janeiro with Priscila Coli Rocha

In today’s episode, we look at the the criminal actorsshaping urban enclaves in Rio. I wanted to provide a little backstory, because this actually connects to work and research I was deeply involved with before starting my PhD. As part of the bureaucratic deployment resulting from the 2016 peace agreements signed between the armed revolutionary forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Santos government in Colombia, I was lucky enough to live in the amazon region of Caquetá on and off for several years. As I worked with coca-growers there in the Caguán region, I was researching the process of urbanization of the main city in the Colombian Amazon, Florencia after the coca boom of the 1970s, and I found that many of the newly created guerrillas of the period, including the FARC and the M-19, had included city-making in their political repertories and helped found one of the biggest informal neighborhoods of the city. A little later, I also researched the construction of hundreds of miles of road network by collaborations between the FARC, the local government, and coca communities in this same region.  I mention these because I think there is a risk ofthinking that criminal governance – and all its variants – are extra-ordinary and for that reason marginal phenomena. Like this is something that happens at the geographic and political margins of our cities and our countries, and that, while interesting, it ultimately is not that central to the praxis of urban planning, partly because it happens outside of the state.  I think this is wrong on both fronts. First of all, theseare not minor issues -  a recent cross-national study of 18 Latin American countries found that almost 15% of respondents lived under some form of criminal governance; which adds up to between 70 and 100 million people. Second, this is not something that happens “outside” thestate, but in relationship to it in ways that overlap, conflict, and relate in specific situated ways. My work with the Amazon cities and road networks showed me not only that the border between legal and illegal can be very porous, but ultimately that the process of state-formation can be intimately enmeshed with the governance of these armed actors.   Furthermore, “Planning” is not something only done withinCity government offices; or that the forms of territory-making outside of those offices lacks a logic or coherence. Instead, we need to seriously reckon with the fact thatin our Latin American cities, criminal organizations – as well as amultiplicity of other actors which also include the residents themselves – are all part what goes into making our cities; and that only by acknowledging this reality can we begin to think about what we should do about it. And in that context, I bring you Priscila Coli Rocha’s brilliant ethnography, titled Making the City, Making a Constituency:Milícias-created Enclaves and Urbanization in the Peripheries of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Priscilla undertook years of field work in Rio’s peripheries, where criminal governance of different actors, including the Milícias, has been an important phenomenon for decades now. Among her contributions, Priscilla argues that there is a typology of milícia which not only governs parts of the city, but with distinct origins and ways of operation that include the active production of enclaves in the city.  Priscila Coli holds a PhD in City and Regional Planning from theUniversity of California, Berkeley. She is currently an Assistant Professor at PUC-Rio and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and her research focuses on the role of criminal organizations in urbanization processes in the Global South.