Comparative Critical Policy Analysis applied to Territorial Accumulation. Working Paper Series N° 003

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 873082. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) Call: H2020-MSCA-RISE-2019 Grant Agreement nº 873082 CONTESTED_TERRITORY From Contested Territories to alternatives of development: Learning from Latin America Deliverable 3.2: Working Paper 2 Comparative Critical Policy Analysis applied to Territorial Accumulation CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 1 Deliverable 3.2: Working Paper 2 Comparative Critical Policy Analysis applied to Territorial Accumulation 1. DELIVERABLE FACTSHEET 2 2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 3 3. FOREWORD 4 4. COMPARATIVE DIMENSIONS IN PUBLIC POLICY: GLOBAL URBAN STUDIES, POLICY MOBILITY, MULTIPLE CASE DESIGN 6 5. THE MECHANISMS OF TERRITORIAL ACCUMULATION THROUGH THE LENS OF POLICY MOBILITIES 10 6. INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENTS: SUPPORTING TERRITORIAL ACCUMULATION OR ITS ALTERNATIVES 20 7. A PROPOSAL FOR A REGENERATIVE ACTION FOR THE COLLISIVE SITES OF THE SECOND MODERNITY METROPOLITAN REGION 24 8. THE PLACE OF POPULAR HABITAT IN THE PRODUCTION OF BLUE AND GREEN INFRAESTRUCTURE: CASE STUDIES IN THE PERIPHERY OF THE METROPOLITAN REGION OF BUENOS AIRES 31 9. “GREEN” URBAN POLICIES AND TERRITORIAL ACCUMULATION IN THE METROPOLITAN AREA OF BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA 37 10. CONTESTING EPISTEMIC TENSIONS IN PUBLIC POLICIES: INSIGHTS FROM INDIGENOUS AND AFRO-AMERICAN GROUPS 46 11. POPULAR MARKETS, CONSUMPTION CIRCUITS AND FOOD PRODUCTION. 58 12. AFTERWORD 59 CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 2 1. DELIVERABLE FACTSHEET Work Package WP3 Documenting and visualising Contested Territories Deliverable D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Comparative Critical Policy Analysis about territorial accumulation Due Date M28: 31 December 2022 Submission Date M28: 31 January 2023 Dissemination Level [x] PU – Public Deliverable Lead La Hidra Compilers Miguel Kanai, María Florencia Marcos, Carolina Gonzalez Redondo Author(s) Miguel Kanai, María Florencia Marcos, Carolina Gonzalez Redondo, Simone Tulumello, Emanuel Giannotti, Michael Lukas, Gabriel Silvestre, León Felipe Telles Contreras, Antonella Contin, Jorge Blanco, Ricardo Apaolaza, Juan Pablo Venturini, Nela Gallardo Araya, Romina Olejarczyk, Marina Wertheimer, Philipp Horn, Manuel Bayon, Melanie Lombard, Paula Hernández, Walter Imilan, Carlos Andres Tobar Tovar, Stefany Vargas Rojas, Hugo Marcelo Zunino, Pablo Calegaris, Héctor Grad, Sara Gonzalez, Beatriz Nussbaumer, Paula Rosa Point of Contact michael.janoschk[email protected]du Status [x] Final [x] Approved internally Abstract (for public dissemination only) This working paper presents a diverse range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the critical analysis of policy mechanisms implicated in territorial accumulation in Latin America and Europe. The paper reviews various fields of relevance for critical policy analysis including policy mobilities; infrastructure investments; green and blue infrastructure and urban environmental policies in general; metropolitan growth and urban-rural conflicts; and Indigenous and Afro-American perspectives to territorial governing. Keywords Territorial Accumulation, Critical Policy Analysis, Public Policies, Policy Mobility, Infrastructure Regimes, Environmental Discourses, Other Knowledges CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 3 2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This working paper presents a diverse range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the critical analysis of policy mechanisms implicated in territorial accumulation in Latin America and Europe. The paper reviews various fields of relevance for critical policy analysis including policy mobilities; infrastructure investments; green and blue infrastructure and urban environmental policies in general; metropolitan growth and urban-rural conflicts; and Indigenous and Afro-American perspectives to territorial governing. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 4 3. FOREWORD Miguel Kanai University of Sheffield [email protected] María Florencia Marcos Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, CONICET Centro Estudios Urbanos y Regionales, CEUR/CONICET, Argentina [email protected] Carolina Gonzalez Redondo Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, CONICET, Instituto de Estudios de América Latina y El Caribe, IEALC/UBA. Argentina [email protected] This working paper has been prepared by the Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) working group, which began in the year 2020 right after the launch of the Contested Territory network and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Members from different research centres and social organizations participating in the network from Latin America and Europe have been meeting first online and then also in person, through secondments, with the aim of contributing to this theme and producing this document. The discussions presented herein reflect this work in progress and provide an indication of the network’s future outputs, including scientific and dissemination publications and policy briefs. In our first year of existence, the CPA group held three formative meetings in which various members presented research advances across the three following fronts: 1) methodological innovation for critical policy analysis; 2) the ‘policy mobilities’ perspective; and 3) the importance of policy networks, policy conditioners and social resistances to global policy-making. At these meetings two cross-cutting questions emerged. Namely, what do we understand by CPA? And what is the Contested Territory project’s original contribution to this field? On these concerns, we have focused on de-naturalizing power relations, taking "other knowledges" into account, and problematizing the economic models that commonly underpin policy analysis. The network’s publication of Working Paper 3.1 on the dynamics of ‘territorial accumulation’ provided a theoretical framework for our group to update our discussions. This framing incorporates notions from political economy (Harvey), feminism (Federicci), decolonial studies (Williams, Mignolo) and world ecology (Moore). As such, territorial accumulation provides a critical reading of the multidimensional crises that global capitalism faces and how it attempts to restructure through spatial fixes, accumulation by dispossession and new forms of extraction. Territorial accumulation provides a way of understanding what is new in these operations of capital that less integrative literatures miss. The critical analysis of policies helps us account for their role as mechanisms of territorial accumulation but also unveils the contestation that surrounds them. The diverse contributions included herein show that these politics need to be situated with various fields of power struggles between different interest groups, institutional and social structures, and historical and cultural contexts. From this perspective, our aim is to better understand how (contested) policies may promote or hinder extractivist and exploitative forms of development in specific territories. Such CPA relies on the critical review of policy documents and contrasting their content with qualitative empirical research conducted with policy makers, think tanks and NGOs. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 5 In our various meetings we observed that the diversity of our contributors’ methodological perspectives, theoretical framings, and the research contexts where they work provide major opportunities for comparative analysis in the policy mechanisms involved in territorial accumulation and its multiple contestations. This working paper brings together these perspectives into one document as a first step towards the formulation of comparativist strategies and techniques. Our aims are to understand why and how the policy mechanism of territorial accumulation produce different outcomes across various territories; how these outcomes can be better understood through relation and multi-scalar perspectives; and what methodological innovations can result from such broadly defined project, including potential complementarities between ethnographic approaches and quantitative analysis. The sections that follow show that our members have explored questions pertaining to CPA across different fields of research including policy mobilities; the policy regimes conditioning infrastructure provision; the ‘environmental’ dimension of policy and the growing governmental interest in ‘blue and green infrastructure’; the problematic construction of urban-rural differences across metropolitan edges; contrasts between market-centric and popular forms of logistics and provision; and the contestations to territorial accumulation that emerge from the claims of indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants and other groups historically excluded from the policy process. We thank each and every contributor to this document and hope that its discussions may be of interest to those concerned with CPA both within and without our network. Miguel Kanai, Carolina Gonzalez Redondo and Maria Florencia Marcos, Coordinators of the Critical Policy Analysis group CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 6 4. COMPARATIVE DIMENSIONS IN PUBLIC POLICY: GLOBAL URBAN STUDIES, POLICY MOBILITY, MULTIPLE CASE DESIGN Simone Tulumello Habita 65 - Associação pelo Direito à Habitação e à Cidade This section elaborates on some epistemological ideas and methodological approaches that cut across, and broadly inform, the comparative dimensions of Critical Policy Analysis in this working paper and, more broadly, within project Contested Territories. Following a funnel-down structure, from the conceptual to the epistemological and the methodological, and from the general to the particular, the section is organised in three sections: we start, first, by discussing the contribution to comparative research brought forward in recent discussions in global urban studies; then, second, we move to consider the field of policy mobilities, its understanding of travelling policy ideas/practices and its potential for our analysis; finally, third, we zoom into the implications of case study research for comparative analysis, including by considering strategies for theorisation from single/multiple case/s. 4.1. Comparison and global urban studies In broad terms, the comparative lens that we are interested in mobilising needs to go beyond the traditional idea of ‘comparability’ and the static observation of similarities and differences. On the one hand, the critical edge we are aiming to develop for the study of territorial accumulation and contestation needs to be informed by a historical sensibility – the understanding that there is a historical contingency to socio-economic relations and the refusal to accept things as they ‘naturally’ are. On the other hand, the global nature of our interests, together with the attention at developing postand de-colonial re-theorisations, push us to focus on flows and connections: vertical (multi-scalar dimensions of urbanisation and territorial restructuring) and horizontal (social, cultural, economic and political flows among places). We find promising conceptual and epistemological lenses in these directions in the recent development of so-called global urban studies, which have precisely worked toward a (re-)theorisation of the urban through the lenses we are interested in mobilising. Before moving forward, a brief caveat is necessary to note that the conceptualisation of the ‘urban’ that this field has been working on – and that matches our goals – goes beyond that of the ‘city’ as an identifiable morphological character, rather considering the processes of sociospatial transformation that broaden and inter-connect the ‘urban’ with their hinterlands and well beyond. We refer, in particular, to the debates on concepts like planetary urbanisation (Brenner & Schmid, 2015; Wilson and Bayón 2016), extended urbanisation (Keil, 2018), peri-urban developments (Kanai & Schindler, 2022), but also broader discussions on the urban’s constitutive outside (Roy, 2016) and the emerging Urbanocene (Mendieta, 2019). Of particular use for our purposes are the insights by Jennifer Robinson (2016; 2022; see also Urban Studies, volume 59, issue 8), who has built on the recent flourishing of comparative exercises to explore the potentialities of the comparative gaze for, and beyond, urban studies, proposing two modalities for ‘tactics’ of conceptualisation. In ‘generative’ tactics, ‘a virtual field of conceptualization can be provoked and enriched through bringing different singularities, or cases, into conversation’ (2016, p. 18). What characterises generative tactics, in other words, is the use of various cases to build and provide nuance to a conceptual argument or theory – the starting point can be a single case or rather a theory, and the comparative exercise is operationalised by testing and refining the conceptual framework in other cases, and so forth. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 7 ‘Genetic’ tactics, instead, start from (vertical or horizontal) interconnections and flows: ‘a range of comparative possibilities emerge in the practice of tracing the prolific interconnections amongst urban territories and working with the wider processes shaping urbanisation and urban outcomes’ (Robinson, 2022). The starting point, in other words, are not individual or multiple cases, rather the very connections among cases – Ricardo Cardoso (2022), for instance, traces the ‘lineaments of a Southern Atlantic urbanism’ by following the connections among urban developments in Salvador de Bahia (Brazil) and Luanda (Angola) Because they move further away from traditional comparative approaches, Robinson additionally discusses how genetic tactics can articulate theoretical perspectives prominent in urban studies: on the one hand, ‘materialities perspectives’ (which include, for instance assemblages or actor-network theories), for their potential in ‘attending closely to connections and flows’ (2022, p. 1524); on the other, political economic perspectives, with their potential in attending to wider/global/structural processes and how different cases are embedded within extensively spreading socio-political and socio-economic formations (idem, p. 1526). In this working paper, and more broadly within Contested Territories, this articulation is operationalised through multi-scalar and relational approaches (Souza, 2019; Tulumello, 2022), which are necessary to attend to the types of connections and conceptualisations underpinned by territorial accumulation and contestation. This is the case of our contributions enquiring on infrastructural development as a paradigmatic example of connection among global supply chains, local effects and grassroots infrastructures (Section 6 by Kanai et al.; Section 8 by Blanco et al.); the exploration of extractive forms of planetary urbanisation that mobile policies support (Section 5 by Giannotti et al.); and of the use of multi-locality and multi-territoriality as lenses to capture territorial practices of indigenous peoples (Section 10 by Horn et al.). 4.2. Policy mobilities – neoliberalism and beyond The comparative gesture captured in this document is first and foremost mobilised through the epistemological lens of policy moblity/ies, a field that has been developed starting from the empirical observation of the diffusion, and the variegated geographical spread, of neoliberal governmentalities, thus contributing to making sense of the complex – and often contradictory and paradoxical (see Tulumello, 2016) – patterns of neoliberal (urban and territorial) policies (see Brenner et al., 2010; Peck, 2013). In particular, policy mobilities look at the role of the circulation of policy ideas and practices in the processes of neoliberalisation, at the same time going beyond the simple model of irradiation from the centre toward the periphery/ies. In a seminal paper, Jamie Peck (2011) identifies three channels of policy mobility: first, the active role of transnational power networks that (intentionally) promote policy circulations; second, the way policy decisions taken in a place influence those of other places another – an influence that is partially, but not exclusively, shaped by the different positionings of the places of origin and reception in global geographies of power; and, third, the emergence of policy models that get codified for replication (often labelled as ‘best practices’). Peck additionally notes how the study of policy circulation has developed from a modernist conceptualisation of transfer, which seems to be increasingly rare, to mobility, which implies adaptation, and even mutation, whereby the process of transformation is paramount, producing new policy arrangements in the process. These triads have an heuristic role but, the following chapters will show, policy circulations always imply hybrid models. This is the case, for instance, of the interactions and reproductions among public policies guided by Western legal discourses, and often promoting territorial accumulation, and indigenous and Afro-American epistemologies and lived experiences, at times reproducing the same logics (Section 10 by Horn et al.); of the use of creative policies for building local coalitions, which problematises the simple idea of an exportation of policy models (from the North to the South) (Section 5 by Giannotti et al.); and of the complex arrangements CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 8 in the incorporation of the ‘environmental’ in urban policies and territorial accumulation (Section 9 by Gallardo Araya et al.). Additionally, policy mobility is always captured as a policy struggle, that is, beyond the power imposition ‘from the centre and from above’, also in the dialectical role of territorial contestations. This is the case, for instance, of the relationships between infrastructural policies and popular habitats (Section 8 by Blanco et al.) and of the mobility of struggle in transnational mobilisations and activist networks (Section 5 by Giannotti et al.). 4.3. Case study selection and theorisation In line with broader trajectories of urban studies and human geography, this document builds on case study analysis – integrated by mixed qualitative methodologies – as the core epistemological instrument. In order to fully exploit the potential of case study analysis for building multi-scalar causal and relational arguments, we broadly follow Bent Flyvbjerg’s insights (2006) on the strategy of case selection and the implications for theorisation. In line with our broader approach, the type of cases have been selected in terms of the connections under investigation: vertical connections (e.g., local cases that deviates from processes pushed by global transformations) and horizontal connections (e.g. policy transfer, policy mutation and different expressions in different cases). In the following chapters, ‘critical’ cases are the most common, while we can also find instances of ‘extreme’ and ‘paradigmatic’ cases. Among the critical cases, we find indigenous policies that reproduce the colonial urban/rural binary (Section 10’s contribution by Imilan & Hernandez); the contradictory pathways of Latin American countries in granting land rights and territorial autonomy compatible with indigenous practices and cosmogonies, at the same time as allowing and fostering territorial extraction and accumulation (Section 10’s contribution by Horn and Bayón). A European case study of the conflicts produced by metropolitan expansion (Section 7 by Contin). An ‘extreme’ case is allowed by the discussion of the measures put in place in the context of an epidemic urgency prescient of the Covid-19 pandemic, which have resulted in a stress test for policy rationalities and implementation (Section 9 by Gallardo Araya et al.). Finally, we find a paradigmatic cases of (neoliberal) policies in the commodification of food but also its contestation through popular markets and alternative food distribution practices (Section 11 by Calegaris et al.). 4.4. References Brenner, N., Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2010b). Variegated neoliberalization: Geographies, modalities, pathways. Global Networks, 10(2), 182–222. Brenner, N., & Schmid, C. (2015). Towards a new epistemology of the urban? City, 19(2-3), 151-182. Cardoso, R. (2022). Seeing Luanda from Salvador: Lineaments of a Southern Atlantic urbanism. Antipode, 54(3), 729-751. Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219-245. Kanai, J. M., & Schindler, S. (2022). Infrastructure-led development and the peri-urban question: Furthering crossover comparisons. Urban Studies, 59(8), 1597-1617 Keil, R. (2018). Extended urbanization, ‘disjunct fragments’ and global suburbanisms. Environment and Planning D, 36(3), 494-511. Mendieta, E. (2019). Edge city. Reflections on the Urbanocene and the Plantatiocene. Critical Philosophy of Race 7(1), 81-106. Peck, J. (2011). Geographies of policy: From transfer-diffusion to mobility-mutation. Progress in Human Geography, 35(6), 773-797. Peck, J. (2013). Explaining (with) neoliberalism. Territory, Politics, Governance, 1(2), 132-157 CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 15 It is not unusual for local experiences to upscale into organizations which are able to expand their scope and establish networks with other similar organizations, nationally and internationally. The analysis of these housing processes must consider, from one hand, the regional differences between policies, civil societies and national institutions, and, from the other hand, the multiple levels and scales in which the housing activists operate (Herrle et al., 2016). While some authors have used the concept of networks, McFarlane (2009) has suggested conceptualizing the multi-scaled spatiality of these movements as “transnational assemblage”. This points to the importance of the process of collective construction, rather than the resultant formations. Moreover, he stresses “that translocal social movements are more than just the connections between sites” (p. 562). Few studies have explored how ideas and knowledge circulate in regard to housing movements. Hölzl (2022) has examined the German Mietshäuser Syndikat and identified four main mechanisms for the production of networks and exchange of knowledge. First, a group of activists are the principal vector for the circulation of the model. Second, physical meetings facilitate the exchange of learning and contribute to the production of bridging social capital. Third, virtual meetings assure a continuous exchange. Finally, a range of toolkits, continuously updated, further facilitate the process of interchange. Hölzl concludes that those mechanisms helped to establish new experiences in other contexts but are not enough to bridge the inequalities in the allocation of resources and knowledge. This is partly due to the principle of volunteerism. For example, in case of uncertainty, key actors gave priorities to local activities over the international ones. In the analysis of Liverpool’s collaborative housing models, Thompson (2017) highlights the importance of the social memories and resources embedded in place, together with circulating ideas and knowledge. To disentangle the complex interweaving between globally mobile ideas and place-based processes, the author proposes to complement the policy mobility approach with a planning history perspective. Although there is an abundant literature about single experiences based, attempts to compare various cases are still scarce (Herrle et al., 2016; Lang et al., 2020; Mártinez, 2020). It is also less frequent to find studies applying the policy mobility approach to the transnational housing movements and organisations. Future research should focus on the critical interrogation of international organisations, such us the Secretaría Latinoamericana de la Vivienda y el Hábitat Popular (SELVIHP), which brings together several Latin American organisations created to promote self-management of habitat, mutual aid and collective ownership (https://selvihp.org). 5.4. Areas for future research The review of the current state-of-the-art and the cases illustrated here raise a number of key areas to be developed in future research. The following points provide potential directions for a comparative and relational programme in the circulation of knowledge and territorial accumulation: ● Relational analysis of processes of change, accumulation, and resistance The application of a policy mobilities framework offers important analytical gains for critical policy analysis and studies of territorial accumulation. On the one hand, it allows greater depth to single case studies by transcending the particular context that explains spatial transformation and by positioning such change in relation to wider processes, agency and networks well beyond the boundaries of the sites of study. On the other hand, the grounding of such processes enables an understanding of how (neoliberal/extractive) capitalism materialises and in turn shapes understandings, practices and resistances in future interventions. Although there has been a fruitful production of academic interrogation based on the former approach, it remains scarce the analyses of how each individual process of territorial accumulation is formative to consequential interventions while generating a new round of network formation and knowledge circulation. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 16 ● Longitudinal analysis in the circulation of ideas: history, failure and forward travels The policy mobilities literature has been criticised by its ‘presentism’ and ex-post analysis of ‘successful’ cases of policy and urban change. Recent studies have advocated the need for taking a longer view of the history of policy ideas (Baker and McCann, 2020; Ward, 2018) as well as for new rounds of circulation that can happen after they are grounded and mutate into strategies that can filter through wider territories (Silvestre and Jajamovich, 2022). This requires analyses of policy ‘failure’ to demonstrate the generative effects, incremental dynamics and ‘absent presences’ of policies that though may fail to materialise in the first instance, can steer policy debate and learning to open-ended pathways. ● Critical mapping of the circulation of ideas: coloniality, sites of production, agency involved Latin America is a key region for the study of how circulating ideas, policies and practices of territorial accumulation were (violently) implemented, refined and re-circulated as well as resisted by socio territorial movements envisioning alternative futures (Halvorsen et al, 2019). The critical mapping and genealogy of hegemonic ideas can expose dominant practices of territorial accumulation that are rearticulated, despite changes in institutions, networks or imperialist projects. At a moment when Latin American decolonial thinking is being rediscovered (Asher, 2013; Maldonado-Torres & Cavooris, 2017) it also provides a strategic site for theorybuilding that can connect decolonial debates with policy mobilities and point toward the potential of alternative projects to emerge as well as circulate. ● Systemic interrogation of networks: linkages, capital switch, flows Another fruitful area for intervention is the bridging between the urban extractivist turn and the policy mobilities literature. As described earlier in the text, cities have been increasingly targeted as sites for resource extraction as corporations switch their investment and expertise to new frontiers for capital and territorial accumulation. Mundane urban activities have also been reimagined as arenas for extractive practices by platform capitalism (Gago & Mezzadra, 2017). A systemic view of how the different circuits of extractivism operate and are integrated, require an analysis of their infrastructure (Arboleda, 2020) that can consider the informational infrastructures through which policy knowledge and templates circulate (Cook & Ward, 2012). ● Relational-comparative analysis between the networks of accumulation and resistance The circulation of knowledge and practices within networks of territorial activism and resistance has received far less attention than hegemonic policy ideas. Despite the marked challenges in sustaining a structure for circulation in the long-run – as is the case of volunteerism and limited resources discussed earlier – they can have a global reach and connect agendas of solidarity that are crucial when windows of opportunity are open for systemic change. New place-based political platforms such as new municipalism offer the opportunity to investigate how local interventions are shaping as well as being shaped by the emergent global municipalist movement. The analysis of the movement is also relevant for comparing the dimensions of divergence and convergence in relation to hegemonic networks. The points listed above inform the areas of investigation of the Working Group on Policy Mobilities of the Contested Territories project. Provisionally structured around hegemonic and counter-hegemonic networks of knowledge circulation it is analysing how neoliberal and extractivist projects have intensified in Latin America while examining more recent approaches of resistance and alternatives. 5.5. References Angelcos N., Pérez M., 2017, «De la “desaparición” a la reemergencia: Continuidades y rupturas del movimiento de pobladores en Chile.» Latin American Research Review, 52, 1. 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INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENTS: SUPPORTING TERRITORIAL ACCUMULATION OR ITS ALTERNATIVES Miguel Kanai. University of Sheffield. [email protected] Leon Felipe Telles Contreras. University of Leeds. lf[email protected] Michael Lukas. Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Departamento de Geografía, [email protected] 6.1. Introduction In the twenty-first century, the provision of infrastructure has turned into a more prominent mechanism for territorial accumulation (Castro et al., 2022). Whilst deemed essential for economic development, infrastructural investments require critical examination for their potential environmental impacts and the social upheaval that projects often stir. Furthermore, varying conceptions of infrastructure are key for alternatives to development and economic globalisation to envision how territories could be materially supported and connected to the world otherwise. Promoting ‘infrastructure-led development’ in emerging economies of lowand middleincome countries figured largely among state responses to the 2008 global recession (Schindler and Kanai, 2021). Mitigating bottlenecks in logistics to facilitate trade, for example by upgrading road networks and interconnecting them across national borders, was the fix from supra-national organizations implicated in jump-starting the world economy (ibid.). Infrastructure became an area of increased concern for governmental and private institutions, including the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the crisis-originated G20, and the World Economic Forum (Kanai and Schindler, 2022). In its unprecedented role as a major international lender for infrastructure projects, the People’s Republic of China also participated in this approach but following its own strategies, interests and modes of engagement (Apostolopoulou, 2021). Large-scale transnational corporations, particularly those involved in extractive fields, also engage in the provision and management of infrastructure and logistics operations as part of their vertically integrated activities (Lukas, 2022). Many national governments across Latin America, Africa and Asia have willingly engaged in the resulting “scramble for infrastructure” by creating or repurposing ministries to plan, build or contract, and operate large-scale projects (Kanai and Schindler, 2019). Meanwhile, local responses have featured prominent protests, everyday resistances, and demands for alternative infrastructure futures, which makes for a complex and contentious infrastructural politics. This section proposes an analytical framework and pathways to further examination for brickand-mortar projects (both those actually built and those failing), the legal infrastructures that frame them, and the infrastructural discourses of legitimation. We focus on Latin America and seek to learn from the region’s complex politics of infrastructure, which straddle across diverse geographies of territorial contestation, from mega-urbanised cores to remote regional peripheries. If Latin America’s contested transition from post-neoliberal to extractivist political economies (Svampa, 2014) has relied on the articulation of “infrastructural circuits of extraction” and national governments have embraced “the promise of connectivity” whilst aligning policies to global mandates articulated around “connectivity as conditioner” (Kanai and Schindler, 2019); a “popular infrastructural politics” (Téllez, 2020) has also emerged. This demands the making of “popular infrastructures” (Minuchin, 2021) and “popular logistics” (Minuchin and Maino, 2022) in support of social reproduction and everyday life. As grassroots infrastructural interventions, both are deeply rooted in the workings of local organisations and their struggles to secure the procurement of goods and services. The goal is to facilitate the reproduction and improvement of marginalised and vulnerable communities. By producing public and common infrastructures where solidarity structures can thrive, these material oppositions to territorial CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 21 accumulation animate a more “radical politics of infrastructure” (Vasudevan, 2015), that is supported by “technologies of liberation” (Rosati, 2019). The section first develops the analytical terms to make sense of mechanisms promoting territorial accumulation and those opposing it whilst creating alternatives. Secondly, the section provides a concrete example of a corporate-led infrastructure initiative in Chile and the production of social public infrastructures and commoning platforms in Ecuador and Brasil. Thirdly, and in conclusion, it suggests methodological strategies for further comparative policy analysis of the multiple possible relations between infrastructure and territorial accumulation and reflects on the challenge of linking urban and rural struggles, which oppose a global model of territorial accumulation even if specifically mobilising against its highly localised manifestations. 6.2. The Rise of Infrastructure-led Development The global discourse of the new structural economics has been highly influential in Latin America where infrastructure deficits are seen as a major bottleneck for economic growth and the state has been actively mobilised to fill this major ‘infrastructure gap’ (Lin, 2022; Hope, 2022). New or restructured state agencies have intervened at multiple levels to facilitate and promote foreign investments in large-scale infrastructure projects. For example, questions of infrastructure development have been included in both bi-lateral and multilateral free-trade and cooperation agreements, whilst national governments have re-engaged with regional planning and the long-forgotten attempt to connect ‘backward regions,’ which are now seen as valuable for extractivist networks (Kanai and Schindler, 2022). Whilst these plans are hailed as bringing new economic opportunity through improved infrastructure connectivity, they have also been shown to trigger socio-ecological devastation across various Latin American landscapes (Gordillo, 2019; Escobar, 2008; Arboleda, 2020); to introduce new threats for residents of conflicted-affected regions (Barrera et al., 2022); and to create peri-urban spaces characterised by their multiple precarities, which go unacknowledged in regional development plans failing to recognise the extended urbanisation effects of infrastructure corridors (Kanai and Schindler, 2022). Alternative infrastructural practices have emerged from social groups in their struggles for social justice and environmental protection that they see essential for their survival and the ‘defense of life’ (Luna Nemecio, 2021). By designing and finding ways to finance and implement such infrastructures otherwise, these social actors seek to mitigate the resulting effects of intensified uneven development over already impoverished, excluded and vulnerable communities, and have produced new concepts that help re-think the potential role of infrastructure in contesting the operations of territorial accumulation. These concepts highlight the emancipatory potential of material infrastructures put at the service of social needs other than capitalist imperatives and broaden our socio-spatial horizons for collective action. As explained below, notions of commoning and the popular are key to understanding these alternatives. When applied to infrastructure, commoning, or the co-creation of collective resources, can become a practice that forges and stabilises a set of new urban habits and habitats (Blok, 2016). For Amin (2014, p. 148), infra-commoning points to “an intricate play between the infrastructural aesthetic, social praxis and collective organization shaping the culture of the commons” in a particular locality. Thereby, infra-commoning foregrounds the collective work to consolidate a settlement by creating a communal landscape through agreed rules, public and shared spaces and environmental awareness. This is achieved through “services and spaces that are valued, summoning civic participation and care for the commons, and materially merging the private and the public” (ibid., p. 149). Solid waste, grey water and other sanitation plans, as well as lighting, greening and community centre and farm projects underpin a praxis that calls for solidarity, co-responsibility and a culture of knowledge sharing. Thus, infra-commoning produces infrastructural landscapes of “considerable symbolic power [that function] as a mnemonic of collective possibility” (ibid., p. 147). CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 22 Whilst processes of self-help or informal building take place around the world, the notion of the popular is of particular relevance for Latin America. Minuchin’s (2021) notion of ‘popular infrastructures’ points to “a repertoire of socio-material adaptations that serve to stabilize an integrated network of programs and associations” (p. 5). Popular infrastructures may emerge as delayed incomplete construction projects, but also as the incremental interventions that reveal the numerous actors (committees, private developers, NGOs, local representatives) and the constantly adapted regulatory layers that prefigure urbanisation in peripheral settlements. These infrastructures are mediums that organise politics, projecting on to the landscape not a planned but a prefigured urbanisation and other models of territorial organisation, including the “counter-models” to government and private agendas (p. 9). Based on the study of infrastructural practices in Monte Sinaí, Guayaquil, Ecuador, Leandro Minuchin advances the notion of “popular infrastructures.” These “illustrate the workings and traces of urban subjectivities and give consistency to local organizations that demand a voice and presence in the urban future of Monte Sinaí” (Minuchin, 2021, p. 8). As infra-commoning, popular infrastructures crystallise socio-political relations; however, in this case such infrastructures emerge from . While popular infrastructures sustain alternative socio-spatial configurations, they also materialise the overlapping and competing urbanisation agendas that characterise settlement management in Latin America. In Monte Sinaí, popular infrastructures emerge as delayed, incomplete housing projects but also as the incremental interventions that reveal the numerous actors (committees, private developers, NGOs, local representatives) and the constantly adapted regulatory layers that prefigure urbanisation in peripheral settlements. These infrastructures are mediums that organise politics, projecting on to the landscape not a planned but a prefigured urbanisation and other models of territorial organisation, including the “counter-models” to government and private agendas (Minuchin, 2021, p. 9). 6.3. Case study (I): a vertically integrated extractive and logistic chain in Northern Chile A fascinating example of the trend toward vertical integration and monopolistic control of infrastructure circuits of extraction can be found in Chile. Arboleda (2020) has shown in a landmark study that northern Chile’s copper mining territories are enmeshed in transnational extractive, infrastructure, and financial networks of the planetary mine, which has devastating impacts on the local level in terms of social, political, and environmental issues. An example of corporate participation in this field is the Luksic group, one of Chile's most powerful conglomerates. As a result of its diversification and global expansion in recent years, it controls companies in a wide range of industries, including mining, finance, banking, telecommunications, and transportation (Leiva 2021). The group extends geographically and extracts (infrastructure-mediated) rent from territories all over Chile and beyond. Its origin and one of its main centers of operation remains Antofagasta, one of the centers of Chile's copper industry. With Antofagasta as the bottleneck, Luksic operates an integrated logistics and production chain that includes extraction, transportation, loading and shipping activities, and extends from the heights of the Andean mountains to the Atacama Desert, through Antofagasta's urban fabric and the Pacific Ocean to those ports in North America and China where minerals are released (Lukas, 2022). Over 3000 meters above sea level, Luksic begins its logistic chain 180 kilometers from Antofagasta, where the group operates the copper and gold mines Zentinela and Zaldivar through Antofagasta Minerals, the largest private mining company of Chilean origin. From Zentinela and Zaldivar, minerals are transported through pipelines, highways, and Ferrocarril Antofagasta Bolivia (FCAB) to the Antofagasta port facilities after extraction. FCAB, founded in 1888 during the nitrate epoch and owned by the Luksic Group (through Antofagasta plc) since 1980, operates a rail network of over 900 kilometers that is exclusively dedicated to transporting mining inputs and products, such as sulfuric acid and copper cathodes. A major destination for the minerals is the ATI-port, controlled by Luksic, which also caters exclusively to the mining industry. The minerals are first stored at ATI and then loaded onto large container ships, mainly those owned by the Compañía Sudamericana de Vapores (CSAV). In addition CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 23 to taking control of CSAV in 2011, in 2014 Luksic acquired the German shipping company Hapag-Lloyd and has a fleet of 200 ships and is the fourth largest container shipping company in the world. Between 2003 and 2015 Luksic also controlled Aguas Antofagasta, the principal water company of the city. What becomes clear in this description of a vertically integrated logistic chain for rent extraction is that the big private corporations deserve more attention in the study of territorial accumulation in Latin America. They operationalize and strategically connect rural and urban spaces through all sorts of material and socio-political infrastructures and are some of the key players of infrastructure-led development. 6.4. Case Study (II): Commoning Platforms in Ecuador and Brazil Based on the study of infrastructural practices in Monte Sinaí, Guayaquil, Ecuador, Leandro Minuchin advances the notion of “popular infrastructures.” These “illustrate the workings and traces of urban subjectivities and give consistency to local organizations that demand a voice and presence in the urban future of Monte Sinaí” (Minuchin, 2021, p. 8). As infra-commoning, popular infrastructures crystallise socio-political relations, yet while popular infrastructures sustain alternative socio-spatial configurations, they also materialise the overlapping and competing urbanisation agendas that characterise settlement management in Latin America. In Monte Sinaí, popular infrastructures emerge as delayed, incomplete housing projects but also as the incremental interventions that reveal the numerous actors (committees, private developers, NGOs, local representatives) and the constantly adapted regulatory layers that prefigure urbanisation in peripheral settlements. These infrastructures are mediums that organise politics, projecting on to the landscape not a planned but a prefigured urbanisation and other models of territorial organisation, including the “counter-models” to government and private agendas (Minuchin, 2021, p. 9). Tracing the developments of three land occupations in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, namely, Dandara, Eliana Silva and Rosa Leão, Amin (2014, p. 148) defines infra-commoning as Eliana Silva, the locality where infra-commoning seems to be stronger, features a number of communal infrastructural projects whose “very aesthetic and functionality [...] help to maintain [a] collective ethos”. This is called infra-commoning (ibid.) 6.5. Concluding Thoughts The literature and examples reviewed in this section indicate that infrastructure is a contested policy field that may serve different economic, social and environmental aims. Whilst the desire for global market integration and extractive motive are clear in how roadways are being extended through multiple Latin American geographies, the region has also witnessed the rise of new logics and practices for the development and management of infrastructure. The challenge ahead for critical policy analysis in the context of contested territorial accumulation is to tease out both the discursive and material benefits that each infrastructural project brings abouts for its various proponents and challengers whilst also mobilising comparative and relational techniques of analysis to understand the broader regimes of infrastructure investment that condition the possibilities for territorial development. 6.6. References Amin, A. (2014) ‘Lively infrastructure’, Theory, Culture & Society, 31(7–8), pp. 137–161. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276414548490. Arboleda, M. (2020): Planetary Mine. Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. London, New York: Verso. Blok, A. (2016) ‘Infrastructuring new urban common worlds? On material politics, civic attachments, and partially existing wind turbines’, in Infrastructures and Social Complexity. Routledge. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 24 Escobar, A. (2008). "Territories of difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes" Duke University Press. Iossifova, D. et al. (2022) ‘Infrastructuring with care in cities of the Global South’, in D. Iossifova et al. (eds) Urban Infrastructuring: Reconfigurations, Transformations and Sustainability in the Global South. Singapore: Springer Nature (Sustainable Development Goals Series), pp. 309–319. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8352-7_19. Kanai, J.M. & Schindler, S. (2019) ‘Peri-urban promises of connectivity: Linking project-led polycentrism to the infrastructure scramble’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 51(2), pp. 302–322. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X18763370. Leiva, F. (2021): The Left Hand of Capital. Neoliberalism and the Left in Chile. New York: Suny Press. Lukas, M. (2022): Worlding the Atacama Desert: peripheral urbanization and transnational resource extraction urbanism in Antofagasta, Chile. In: Reis, N.; Lukas, M. (eds): Beyond the Mega-City. New dimensions of peripheral urbanization in Latin America. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 285-311. Luna Nemecio, JM (2021). "Conflictos socioambientales por la defensa del agua en México: un meta-análisis cartográfico conceptual." Revista Universidad y Sociedad 13.4 : 398-412. Minuchin, L. (2021) ‘Prefigurative urbanization: Politics through infrastructural repertoires in Guayaquil’, Political Geography, 85. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102316. Minuchin, L. and Maino, J. (2022) ‘Counter-logistics and municipalism: Popular infrastructures during the pandemic in Rosario’, Urban Studies, p. 00420980221118492. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221118492. Rosati, C. (2019). ‘Infrastructures of feeling and the right to the city’, Asia Pacific Media Educator, 29(2), pp. 251–258. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1326365X19896169. Schindler, Seth, and J. Miguel Kanai. "Getting the territory right: Infrastructure-led development and the re-emergence of spatial planning strategies." Regional Studies 55.1 (2021): 40-51. Téllez, L.F. (2020). Popular infrastructural politics: Trader organisation and public markets in Mexico City. PhD Thesis. The University of Leeds. Available at: https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/28209/ (Accessed: 5 April 2021). Vasudevan, A. (2015) ‘The autonomous city: Towards a critical geography of occupation’, Progress in Human Geography, 39(3), pp. 316–337. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132514531470. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 31 7.5. References Cavarero,A. (2019). Democrazia sorgiva, Cortina ed., Milano Choay, F. (1992). L’allegorie du patrimoine, Editions du Seuil, Paris Contin, A., Giordano, P. & Nacke, M. (2022). Training for education, learning and leadership towards a new metropolitan discipline. Inaugural book, CIPPEC. Buenos Aires. https://www.cippec.org/publicacion/tellme-inaugural-book/ Contin, A. & Galiulo, V. (2022). Methodological Guidelines for Metropolitan Cartography projects. Mapping the accumulation of Contested Territories in southern latitudes metropolitan cities, pp.117–133 in Ardeth#9: Race Magnaghi, A., (2008). Un urbanista alle prese con Françoise Choay, in F. Choay, Del destino della città, edited by A. Magnaghi, Alinea, Florence (p. 7-20). Corner, J.(2006). Terra Fluxus, in Waldheim, C. (ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press, New York. Harvey, D., (2004). The ‘new’ imperialism: accumulation by dispossession, Vol. 40: Socialist Register 2004: The New Imperial Challenge Gouverneur, D., (2014). Planning and Design for Future Informal Settlements. Shaping the Self-Constructed City, Taylor & Francis, Oxfordshire (UK) Lynch, K., (1960). The image of the city, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 32 8. THE PLACE OF POPULAR HABITAT IN THE PRODUCTION OF BLUE AND GREEN INFRAESTRUCTURE: CASE STUDIES IN THE PERIPHERY OF THE METROPOLITAN REGION OF BUENOS AIRES Jorge Blanco - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Instituto de Geografía [email protected] Ricardo Apaolaza - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Instituto de Geografía ricardoapaolaz[email protected] Juan Pablo Venturini - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Instituto de Geografía venturinijuanpabl[email protected] 8.1. Presentation This section addresses the dynamics and socio-territorial tensions inherent in the production processes of urban infrastructures and the management of popular habitat. The analysis is based on the comparative study of three self-management experiences located in the southern sector of the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires. (RMBA). In particular, it is interesting to analyze the processes of co-production of knowledge between local communities, grassroots organizations and public universities, aimed at socio-environmental intervention in areas of high vulnerability and urban precariousness. The approach of the case studies allows us to recover the debates on the environment as a transversal dimension to all public policies. At the same time, the notions of gray, blue and green infrastructures are taken, highlighting the differences in terms of the format of design and execution of policies, the place reserved for citizen participation and the way of managing environmental variables. 8.2. Background discussions The provision of infrastructure and the public policies associated with that production of space represent an area of debate, in which not only contributions on infrastructure policies emerge, but also on the needs of social reproduction, daily life and the change from demands to practices (Sitrin , 2014). Both popular infrastructures (Minuchin, 2021) and popular logistics (Minuchin and Maino, 2022), appear deeply rooted in the functioning of local organizations and their struggles to ensure the acquisition of goods and services that facilitate the reproduction and improvement of vulnerable and marginalized communities. By producing public infrastructures based on solidarity structures, these interventions appear as concrete material oppositions to territorial accumulation (Horn et al., 2021). In this way, policies “from above”, expressed through traditional plans, programs and projects, are beginning to be challenged “from below” by popular initiatives oriented towards the reproduction of life. These are perspectives that imply new logics, condensed in the idea of "distributive systems", based on decentralized elements that connect with broader networks and that operate in opposition to hierarchical systems from the top down (Escobar, 2019). These questions are posed by cases in which there is a certain articulation of initiatives in both directions, as hybrid forms of infrastructure co-production. Added to this tension is another one that originates from views on gray and green/blue infrastructures, so there is a double process of sociotechnical assemblage: on forms of production and on the environmental dimension. New urban transformations are required combining imagination and existing materials through "design strategies capable of creating new infrastructures for life" (Escobar, 2019:40). The debate must be situated, considering the particularities of the context of peripheral urbanization in Latin America, characterized by precarious conditions in infrastructure, services and housing, but within the framework of heterogeneous landscapes (Caldeira, 2017) into which in CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 33 tension with other urban production processes. This same author points out that residents are the main agents of space production, but the State is present in various ways, often late and after these spaces have been produced and inhabited (Caldeira, 2017). Amin (2014) refers to an infrastructure seen as “hybrids of human and non-human associations”, conceptualized as a “sociotechnical assemblage” (corporate interests, regulatory standards, social expectations, human-software-hardware-intelligence hybrids, historical legacies of organization and provision of services). Based on his analysis of cases of occupations in Brazil, he highlights the design, existence and culture of "the common", compared to classic cases of interventions in consolidated favelas, where design from above prevails, without popular participation, with the provision over the years, partial and conditional access, of low quality and with urban consolidation with risk of displacement. Kozak et al. (2021) state that blue and green infrastructures (BGI) refer to the recognition of the innate capacities of green space and the ecosystems in which they are immersed, to produce environmental benefits and quality of life. In the specific case of water management policies, the blue and green line is presented in opposition to the historical and conventional management of water surpluses, with emphasis on gray infrastructure (conventional rainwater, generally underground and impermeable), where the BGI “ responds both to a demand to improve the environmental quality of cities and to respond to the limitations of traditional solutions, by taking advantage of the geomorphic features of natural systems" ( Kozak et al ., 2021:12). According to these authors, the BGI would represent a model suitable for micro interventions and to be gradually scaled up to combined micro and macro projects, highlighting that the BGI and its maintenance require simple technologies and local development, having a greater incidence on the demand for local labor ( Kozak et al ., 2021). However, the debates on green and blue infrastructures also require reflection on the different levels of popular participation in the management of public resources. As in the debates around the self-management of housing (Pelli, 2001; Rodríguez, 2020), the production of infrastructures and interventions on the popular habitat at the hands of community organizations can be analyzed as a differentiated gradient according to the level of access to these resources, which may be “spontaneous”, “assisted” or “co-managed”, public-community processes. 8.3. The case studies The selected cases are located in the municipalities of Alte. Brown, Esteban Echeverría and Quilmes, in the South zone of the RMBA. These cases refer to processes of self-management of the popular habitat and environmental variables, based on knowledge co-production approaches between local communities, grassroots organizations and public universities. In all cases, the background of territories characterized by popular urbanization, of villas and informal settlements, with marked environmental problems, such as water pollution, floods or management of urban solid waste, is shared. 8.3.1. Case 1: Redefinition of environmental liabilities as an opportunity to improve the popular habitat The first case takes place in the La Victoria, Las Chacritas and El Triunfo neighborhoods, within the municipality of Esteban Echeverría. These are informal settlements formed in an area characterized by the presence of old properties with brick cellars, which are the subject of a strong real estate outpost for the construction of gated communities (Apaolaza and Venturini, 2021). These brick cellars, most of which are subject to flooding, have historically been seen as urban-environmental liabilities, on which it is necessary to generate targeted remediation policies. In this scenario, the possibility of converting these properties into closed neighborhoods such as countries or marinas is interpreted as a reasonable urban-environmental option. This has led to the favoring of permissive changes in land use regulations in various CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 34 municipalities (HCD Pdte. Perón, 2016; Esteban Echeverría, 2019; HCD Alte. Brown, 2020), often contrary to the recommendations developed by experts. in the matter (Garay, 2012). The emergence of the cumulative impacts of the successive floods and water diversions end up contributing to aggravate the flood events associated with the local stream basin (La Lucía, Ortega, Medrano streams, etc.). Faced with this model of privatizing reconversion , the initiative arose to think of these cellars as " new wetlands ", that is, portions of the territory that, despite their significant soil degradation, "fulfill a valuable ecological and social function, since they preserve islands of biodiversity (birds, lutrinos and amphibians mainly), protect strategic aquifer recharge areas of the headwaters and middle basins of local streams, and help to mitigate floods” (Apaolaza and Venturini , 2021:6). In this case, it is interesting to review some incipient experiences carried out by neighborhood organizations in association with chairs of the Geography career of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), which, based on social cartography workshops and popular surveys, precisely seek to reinterpret these liabilities as urbanenvironmental opportunities, based on popular habitat management practices. 8.3.2. Case 2: Popular management of urban watersheds and flood risk prevention The second case takes place in the neighborhoods located on the banks of the Las Piedras and San Francisco streams, in the municipalities of Alte. Brown and Quilmes, and involves the articulation between social and community organizations, and professional teams from the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the UBA, the National Technological University (UTN) and the National Water Institute (INA), with the support of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). This case is made up of two specific, though related, experiences. On the one hand, there is a project (in progress) for the community construction of a public park on recovered land (former garbage dumps), located on the banks of the San Francisco stream, where sports, recreational, education and environmental protection activities are carried out. These are 13.6 green hectares that constitute an area of great environmental value for the ecosystem, since they not only add green spaces to a vulnerable urban area, but also contribute to the absorption of excess rainwater, preventing the stream overflows and generates flooding in the surrounding neighborhoods. In turn, carrying out sports and recreational activities in these properties allows access to a public park with unique characteristics in the locality, integrating a body of water that has historically been seen as a problem, as part of the urban landscape, revaluing its existence as a fundamental socio-environmental element (Graziano et al., 2019; Graziano, 2021), following the line of green and blue infrastructures. On the other hand, this case has a second experience, represented by a flood early warning project. It was made from the installation of a network of pluviometric and fluvial gauging stations, with which the data collected over ten years were modeled, to establish correlated patterns between rainfall and behavior of water bodies, in terms of the timing of floods. This monitoring and prediction system works in flood risk situations as a popular early warning mechanism, capable of notifying dozens of community organizations located throughout the basin. 8.3.3. Case 3: Co-management of public funds in the urban and environmental design of the popular habitat The last case takes place in the 14 de Febrero, Las Lilas and Los Altos neighborhoods, within the municipality of Almirante Brown, and is represented by a set of popular design projects for infrastructures and green and recreational spaces. It is an experience promoted by community organizations, accompanied by the advice of professionals from the Faculty of Architecture of the UBA, in which a set of actions for the design and construction of a comprehensive green space is proposed, which includes community equipment, tree planting and provision of sports infrastructures, all framed within a perspective of environmental sustainability and direct community participation. The most interesting thing is that, unlike the previous cases, this project has state financing, through a line called "Early Works Projects" (POTs). This is one of the forms of intervention developed by the Secretary of Socio-Urban Integration, which allows the CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 35 allocation of resources directly to community organizations and cooperatives, in order to intervene on the deficient infrastructure and housing conditions of popular neighborhoods. Although it is an embryonic experience, it presents the potential to explore mixed public-community operation, when co-managing resources for neighborhood improvement. 8.4. Preliminary questions Some questions are proposed below that will guide the development of the cases and, in turn, can contribute to consolidating a comparative strategy with other studies that are carried out within the framework of Contested Territories. What is the relationship between public infrastructure policies and popular intervention initiatives in the habitat? What articulations and conflicts are registered? How are the various infrastructure production processes linked to the accumulation processes linked to public works? What are the devices implemented in both types of initiative in relation to the design, construction, appropriation of urban infrastructure and popular habitat? How is the environmental dimension incorporated into the imagination/production of infrastructure? To what extent do the green and blue infrastructure proposals contribute to the generation of improvements in the daily life of the communities? What particulars do these proposals have regarding collective construction? How are environmental liabilities visualized in territorial accumulation processes? What examples of cases and situations reflect a view of these environmental liabilities as a potential improvement in the conditions of social reproduction and daily life? What examples of cases and situations reflect a view of these environmental liabilities as a potential source for new modalities of territorial accumulation? To what extent does self-managed infrastructure become "identity" for popular neighborhoods? What scalar tensions are generated in the production of urban infrastructure and the management of popular habitat? How is the articulation of the infrastructure produced in micro interventions built with larger scale networks controlled and managed by other actors? What particularities do these processes acquire in the Latin American peripheries? What processes of territorial accumulation dispute access to land and the production of urbanization in these peripheries? 8.5. Bibliography Amin, A. (2014) Lively infrastructure. Theory, Culture & Society 31(7/8), 137-161. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276414548490 Apaolaza, R.& Venturini , JP. (2021). “Changes in land use in the periphery of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires. Contributions to a theory of the periurban rent gap”. Geographing , 17(1). https://doi.org/10.24215/2346898Xe087 Caldeira , T. (2017). Peripheral urbanization: Self -construction , transversal logics, and politics in cities of the global south. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space , 35(1), 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816658479 Escobar, A. (2019). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds . Durham, NC: Duke University Press . Garay, A. (2012) Strategic Plan for Territorial Development of the Esteban Echeverría Party of the Province of Buenos Aires . Monte Grande: Multisectoral Pre -investment Program III - IDB Loan 1896 OC-AR. Project 1.EG.215 Graziano, M. (2021). Environment, social classes and emancipatory power: contributions for a counter-hegemonic social intervention from academic spaces. +E: University Extension Magazine , (15), 4. https://doi.org/10.14409/extension.2021.15.Jul-Dic.e0001 CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 36 Graziano, M., GS De Groot, LD Pilato, ML Sánchez, I. Izaguirre, & HN Pizarro. (2019). Fostering urban transformations in Latin America: lessons around the ecological management of an urban stream in coproduction with a social movement (Buenos Aires, Argentina). Ecology and Society 24(4):13. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11226-240413 Esteban Echeverría (2019) Urban Planning Code of Esteban Echeverría - Ordered Text . Monte Grande: Municipality of Esteban Echeverría. HCD Alte. Brown (2020) Ordinance No. 11.819/2020 on the Creation of the Production, Preservation, Recovery and Country Clubs Zone in the Ministro Rivadavia Rural Park area . Adrogué: Honorable Deliberative Council of Alte. Brown. HCD Pres. Perón (2016) Ordinance No. 1.122/2016 on Territorial Planning of President Perón, delimitation of areas, zones and spaces. Guernica: Honorable Deliberative Council of President Perón. Horn, P.; DeCarli , B .; Habermehl , V.; Lombard , M.; Roberts, P. & Tellez, L. (2021) Contested Territories : Lessons desde Interdisciplinary Dialogues on Conflict , Resistance and Alternatives in Latin America . Sheffield, Contested Territories . Kozak, D.; Henderson, H.; Rotbart , D. & Aradas, R. (2021) “Towards a Blue and Green Infrastructure for the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires”. Magazine of the Professional Council of Architecture and Urbanism ; fifty; 12-2021; 12-13. https://www.revistanotas.org/revistas/50/2611-hacia-una-red-de-infraestructura-azul-y-verde-para-la-region-metropolitana-debuenos-aires Minuchin, L. & Maino, J. (2022). Counter-logistics and municipalism: Popular infrastructures during the pandemic in Rosario. Urban Studies, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221118492 Minuchin, L. (2021). Prefigurative urbanization: Politics through infrastructural repertoires in Guayaquil. Political Geography 85, 102316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102316 Pelli, V. (2001). Self-construction: the three versions. Popular Housing 8, 5-11. https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/20352 Rodriguez, M.C. (2020) "Challenging Residential Alienation: Self-Managed Social Production of Habitat and Urban Commons in the City of Buenos Aires". ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 19(3). https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/2000 Sitrin, M. (2014). Goals without demands: The new movements for real democracy. South Atlantic Quarterly, 113(2), 245–258. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2643594 CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 37 9. “GREEN” URBAN POLICIES AND TERRITORIAL ACCUMULATION IN THE METROPOLITAN AREA OF BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA Nela Gallardo Araya University of Buenos Aires. Faculty of Social Science (Research Institute GIno Germani). Faculty of Agronomy [email protected]ba.ar Romina Olejarczyk CONICET. University of Buenos Aires. Faculty of Social Science (Research Institute GIno Germani) rom[email protected] Marina Wertheimer CONICET. University of Buenos Aires. Faculty of Social Science (Research Institute GIno Germani) m[email protected]a.ar 9.1. Introduction This contribution reflects on the use of “the environment” in urban policies as a mechanism of territorial accumulation. The analysis focuses on the metropolitan region of Buenos Aires, Argentina over the past twenty years. For this, we attend to three different processes: the implementation of urban ventures on coastal spaces: riverside, flood-prone or wetland areas, where their proximity to road infrastructures is used to obtain extraordinary income (Abba, 2010; Wertheimer, 2019, 2020); the appropriations of urban spaces with agricultural experiences (Gallardo Araya 2015, 2017); and the execution of the Sanitation Plan for the MatanzaRiachuelo Basin (Carman 2017; Olejarzcyk 2021). The above are experiences from ethnographies (two recently completed, one in progress) developed in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, in the municipality of Vicente López and in that of Almirante Brown (Gallardo Araya, 2021; Wertheimer, 2019 and 2020), administrative units that, as a whole, make up what is called the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (hereinafter, AMBA). Based on these cases, we wonder how urban policies based on environmental arguments can favor, delay or even reverse mechanisms of territorial accumulation. With this purpose, first of all, we develop the main aspects of the anthropological and ethnographic perspective on urban-environmental public policies (Roseberry, 2002; Das and Poole, 2008; Asad, 2008; Shore, 2010). Secondly, we review academic debates that problematize the advance of "the environment" in multiple social fields of meaning and practice (Leite Lopes, 2004; Azuela, 2006). Finally, we seek to put these works in dialogue with the mechanisms of territorial accumulation, which "is inextricably linked to a general crisis of capitalism in its broadest sense (cultural, political and economic)" (WP Territorial Accumulation, 2022). 9.2. The ethnographic approach to urban-environmental policies The anthropological perspective for the analysis of public policies seeks to recover its intrinsic ambiguity and polysemy. Following Shore (2010), the aspects that make up a policy must be understood in the unique historical, political and socioeconomic context in which they are produced; with which it is highly relevant to identify the complex network of actors and institutions involved. They elaborate different interpretations of what politics is and what it should do, pro- CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 38 ducing “conflicting definitions” (Shore, 2010: 24). In this sense, any policy will present unforeseen and unexpected consequences, since its development and scope escape any pretense of measurement and control. Likewise, another very significant aspect for this type of approach is that public policies incorporate the classification systems involved in their formulation, while providing feedback on said systems. The classification systems produced by the State are linked, for Roseberry (2002), with the fact that "the State never stops talking" (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985 in Roseberry, 2002: 9). In an act of permanent enunciation, the State accepts certain activities and statements while discarding others. In turn, the protest repertoires adopt these official languages in order to be heard. Thus, “common discursive frameworks” are established, which are stressed, disputed and, on occasions, managed to break. However, as Das and Poole (2008: 22) point out, the capacity for action in subjects that interact with the State is not reduced to acts of resistance, but rather its conceptual limits are extended and reestablished in everyday interactions as such subjects struggle for their survival or the search for justice. The authors propose an anthropological analysis focused on the notion of margins understood as "sites that are not outside the State but, like rivers, cross its entire body", in which practices that simultaneously combine "an outside and inside the law"; “places where the State is continuously constituted in the recesses of daily life” (ibid., 15, 17 and 27). In this line, Asad (2008: 61) points out that the State is not a static object but an abstract structure and that "in its totality it is a margin". The last aspect to point out is linked to the moral effects of public policies. As Shore (2010) points out, all public policy produces subjectivities and political subjects. Certainly, in the process of its implementation, identities are not only assigned to the populations involved, but these identities are actively produced from the interactions between the actors involved. In this production of identities, a moral production is also put into play that involves certain "ranges of humanity" (Butler, 2006; Carman, 2017), as well as mechanisms of humanization and dehumanization (Fassin, 2016) that reproduce logics of precariousness, and that can amplify the violence involved in these processes. 9.3. The environmentalization of the social In the cases analyzed, we observed, a process of greening the urban and housing policies involved, a process that is part of the general trend of what various authors call the greening of the social (Balbi, 2007; Carman, 2011; Leite Lopes , 2006) that refers to the discursive and practical game in which the topics of environmentalism are strategically put into play by different actors involved in the course of conflictive social processes, since those topics are part of a valid language imbued with legitimacy in the local and international public agendas. In this context, different mobilized actors incorporate the environmental issue as part of their repertoire of interests and claims, while private individuals, the business sector and the political sphere also make strategic use of the environment. Thus, environmental topics can be translated and integrated into rival political projects, coming to be combined in situations as dissimilar as struggles for emancipation and equity in access to natural resources as well as in promarket practices. Environmentalism harbors several currents of thought and action, for which it is more appropriate to refer to "multiple environmentalisms” (Bebbington and Bebbington, 2009; Gudynas, 1992; Martínez Alier, 2009). From the multiplicity of typologies proposed by various authors, we will focus on the environmental currents predominantly present in the analyzed case studies, green marketing and eco-efficiency, elaborated from various contributions (Acselrad, Campello do A. Mello and das Neves Bezerra, 2009; Foladori, 2005; Gudynas, 1992; Harvey, 1996; Martínez Alier, 2009; O'Connor, 1994; Wagner, 2010). CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 39 (a) Green Marketing It is a set of discourses and practices that consider that environmental concerns should not interfere in the path towards capital accumulation, for which environmental care is subordinated to continuous economic growth and capital accumulation (Harvey, 1996). Concerns for the environment are only taken into account if they can be added as consumption preferences to be satisfied, in a scheme that does not question the accumulation of capital, efficiency and economic growth. Green marketing practices they focus on adapting nature consistently with profitability and capital accumulation. In order to build an environmentally responsible image, green marketing it has been disinterested in the scientific evidence of “environmentally friendly” practices and is concerned merely with presenting a credible “green” image to consumers (O'Connor, 1994). (b) Eco-efficiency Unlike green marketing, the sector identified as "eco-efficient" considers that environmental care is necessary and that it can be compatible with the goals of economic growth (Acselrad et al., 2009; Gudynas, 1992; Harvey, 1996). The “eco-efficiency” It is a current within environmentalism that starts from the premise that, although industrial activity causes environmental damage, with effective controls it is possible to coexist with economic growth and care for the planet and its preservation for future generations. Many companies found in environmentalism a stimulus to adopt superior, less polluting technologies –certified by scientific studies– that simultaneously generate greater efficiency in production and, as a result, make environmentally friendly products available, forming a growing segment from within the market. This conception of economic development and environmental care constitutes the dominant ecological thought in political, business and multilateral agencies, since it does not question the growth model, but rather naturalizes their assumptions regarding what is produced, how it is produced and for what purpose and whose benefit it is produced The concentration of development benefits in the hands of a few people, as well as the disproportionate allocation of environmental risks to the poorest remain absent from the discussion. In the works that have been developed within Contested Territories, at least three categories are recognized that explain the geographies of capital accumulation: a) accumulation by appropriation of unpaid work, b) accumulation by dispossession as an internal element, and external of the capitalist system; c) and accumulation in the fabric of life (WP Territorial Accumulation, 2022). The environmental currents mentioned here are related to this last axis, which develops extractivism (Gudynas, 2015, 2017) or neo-extractivism (Svampa, 2019; Gago and Mezzadra, 2015) and the theory focused on the ecological (Moore, 2020). More specifically our line of work aims to understand urban-environmental policies under the framework of an "extractive matrix" nourishing ourselves with various contributions (Gudynas, 2012; Seoane, Taddei and Algranati, 2013; Svampa, Sola Alvarez and Bottaro, 2009; Svampa, 2017). Likewise, we deepen the ideas associated with the “environmental turn” using political ecology as a perspective (O'Connor, 1988; Foster, 2000 and Smith, 1996). 9.4. “Green” urban policies and territorial accumulation In this section we seek to account for the relevance that environmental issues have acquired in urban policies based on three case studies located in the central, northern and southern areas of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. With different temporalities and particularities, in all three cases the State, business sectors and real estate agents promote conversions of spaces that are contested and negotiated by popular and media sectors; and they express, as a whole, how the greening of urban policies results in processes of territorial accumulation. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 40 (a) The urban renewal of a "waterfront" in the municipality of Vicente López Vicente López is a municipality located north of the City of Buenos Aires. In 2004, the authorities of the municipality of Vicente López modified the Urban Planning Code (hereinafter, COU) in order to enable the construction of dozens of high-rise buildings in the riverside area, in the vicinity of a large public park of 44 hectares. Among them, the "Al Río" mega-complex stands out, a monumental real estate project made up of a large shopping center mall, housing towers for a segment of high level of consumption and offices of leading companies. The foregoing represented the transfer of a total of 140 hectares for real estate projects, equivalent to 4% of the territory of Vicente López. The modification of the Vicente López COU responded, among other factors, to the depletion of construction capacity in the northern zone of the neighboring City of Buenos Aires around 2010, extending the demand for developable land to adjacent areas. Investors, developers and real estate businessmen have directed their attention, since then, towards the municipality of Vicente López, particularly towards its coastal area. The presence of the Río de la Plata and wide extensions of green spaces, added to a low construction density and proximity to the City of Buenos Aires are among the comparative advantages for real estate capital. Both the business discourse and the local and provincial state aimed to build an "environmentally friendly" image to legitimize urban interventions in the coastal zone, which at first were highly resisted by local citizens. Various actors participated in the construction of this green imaginary: market research companies, marketing agencies, urban planners, organizations that develop sustainability measurement systems, as well as the media, using green marketing statements as arguments. The particular case of the company Al Río holds a LEED certification (acronym for Leader in Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Design), which is granted to constructions that respect certain guidelines such as efficiency in the use of water, energy consumption and energy efficiency. use of materials that care for the environment . Notwithstanding the foregoing, residents mobilized against these urban renewal works denounce that the impact of Al Río and other constructions on the riverside environment is not so "environmentally friendly." Indeed, the municipality received numerous complaints about the incidence of new homes and offices in the saturation of local public services. Green marketing and the discourse of sustainability are not limited exclusively to the business sphere: they have also been gaining space in the communication strategy of the municipal government. In 2011, the General Directorate of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) was created, which rewards companies that contribute to the "common good" (Municipality of Vicente López, 2018), with which they regularly organize interventions in the coastal public space, with which the local government aimed to intervene the materiality and image of the coastal zone, as part of the urban renewal and regeneration process, which aspired to reconfigure the public space, questioning the citizens' need for green spaces. (b) Restoration of the Matanza-Riachuelo Basin - divergences regarding the uses for ‘cleared’ margins of the Riachuelo and contributors The restoration of the Matanza-Riachuelo basin in the AMBA arises from a ruling of the Supreme Court of Justice known as "Fallo Mendoza" . Based on it, a series of actions were established that the different governments involved had to resolve and which were established in the Matanza-Riachuelo Basin Sanitation Plan (PISA 2010), which was modified in 2016. Among the lines of action to develop is the relocation of populations settled on the margins of watercourses due to their exposure to environmental risk . These relocation processes brought a series of discussions. In the first place, what would be the distance from the water course that delimits those affected and not affected to relocation. In the case of the Riachuelo, in 2011 Judge Armella ordered the use of a figure present in the Argentine Civil Code known as "towpath" and which is that space intended for the descent of boats on the margins of the courses of navigable water. In the case of streams, the figure of the "riverbank line" was used, as that CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 47 10.1.1. Contesting territorial “fixing” through a multi-local perspective in Bolivia Bolivia is renown internationally for its 2009 constitution, which - as a response itself to insurgent indigenous uprisings - calls for decolonising society, and recognises specific indigenous rights for territorial autonomy, prior consultation, and socio-economic and cultural self-determination (Schavelzon 2012). Yet, tensions remain. While indigenous peoples are granted rights to collective tenure and territorial autonomy, Bolivia’s 2009 constitution declares ground and underground resources to be under public ownership, thereby providing a pathway for authorising resource extraction on and below the lands of indigenous peoples (Anthias 2018; Flemmer and Schilling-Vacaflor 2015; McNeish 2013). Meanwhile, urban policy and planning practice fails to apply collective indigenous rights in cities, assuming instead that indigenous people lose their identity through rural-to-urban migration (Horn 2019). Such efforts to “fix” population groups onto certain territories stand in sharp contrast with the lived reality of indigenous peoples which is characterised by continuous mobility. This a phenomenon that to some degree always existed – as is evident in historical research on discontinued territories and vertical archipelagos (Murra 1975) – but is further exacerbated and reshaped by contemporary dynamics of dispossession and displacement induced by territorial accumulation. In ongoing collaborative research with youth representatives from different indigenous nations in Bolivia the Bolivia and Sheffield teams of the Contested Territories network have begun to conceptualise indigenous territoriality through a focus on their mobility patterns. Contributing to conceptual work on multi-locality and multi-territoriality (Antequera Duran 2010; Haesbert 2013), our findings highlight that territory, from the perspective of indigenous mobility, should be understood as evolving fluidly along a continuum through multiple flows and displacements, whereby indigenous people circulate between rural and urban places, and move across boundaries and scales. Crucially, our findings suggest that urban and metropolitan spaces represent important support points (most indigenous peoples access public services such as healthcare and education, and engage in economic trade in these places) and central organisational and cultural nodes (most indigenous movements have their political seat in cities from where they engage in struggles affecting their extended territories) in the wider territorial network of indigenous groups. This is evident, for example, for the Qhara Qhara nation, an indigenous Quechua group, whose territories are located in rural, peri-urban and urban areas in the departments of Chuquisaca and Potosi. From their organisational seat in Bolivia’s capital Sucre, this indigenous nation engages in struggles against the dispossession and fragmentation of their territories, demanding instead their constitutional right for territorial autonomy and self-governance by creatively combining engagements with international organisations such as the Interamerican Court of Human Rights (involving mobilisation of Western legal models) and the revitalisation of ancestral knowledge on territorial governance. In doing so, members of the Qhara Qhara nation introduce a decolonial perspective towards territory that recognises the multiple and simultaneous presences of indigenous peoples in a diversity of places that transcend rural-urban as well as departmental boundaries in Bolivia. 10.1.2. The emergence urban indigenous territories in Ecuador’s Amazonia In Ecuador, issues of indigenous territorial rights must be understood in relation to land reform policies, with the first one being the 1937 “Ley de Comunas” that granted indigenous residents living and working on former colonial haciendas with land rights (Rayner and Mérida Conde, 2019). Further land reforms occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, and indigenous land rights have been granted in the Amazon region especially after large-scale mobilisations that culminated in the 1992 march from the Amazonian city Puyo to Quito (Cubillo-Guevara & Hidalgo-Capitán, 2015). Ecuador’s government, hence, recognised some of the territorial claims of indigenous peoples but in such a way that indigenous territorial sovereignty is confined to specific spaces while non-existent in other settings, especially in cities as these are considered to be non-indigenous spaces, centres of capitalist production, and governed along Western individual rights. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 48 Indigenous disputes that occur in or seek to claim urban space are branded illegitimate by national and local governments. An illustration of clashes between government authorities and indigenous communities is the case of Puyo. In this Amazonian city indigenous communities occupied territories. Here, they have established their own governance authority and collective land management regime; they also realise cultural activities that foreground ancestral knowledge and practices, and promote community-led tourist enterprises. Government authorities consider such indigenous urban territorial practices as illegal and declare local indigenous communities as invaders, despite the fact that these territories are situated on areas claimed illegally by the state itself less than 100 years ago (Bayón, 2021). The government certainly makes efforts to accommodate indigenous residents, for example by seeking to grant individual tenure rights to community members. Yet, such efforts are characterised by a colonial and Western logic of urban governance that seeks to dismantle or “whiten” indigenous governance logics through the logic of “integration”, often with the underlying aim to subsume community logics and foster territorial accumulation in areas considered to be viable for real estate projects catering for middle class people from Ecuador’s highlands interested in buying second homes (Bayón, 2021). 10.1.3. Planning for co-existence in urban Chile In recent years, urbanisation processes in Chile are characterised by complex contestations between different territorial ontologies that go beyond state forms of territorial planning and challenge dominant colonial urban-rural and indigenous-nonindigenous dichotomies (Mansilla & Imilan, 2020). In conceptual terms, the notion of "planning for coexistence" (Porter & Barry, 2016) opens the possibility of discussing territorial planning and the categories that sustain it to a perspective of coexistence of various models of land management based on histories, practices and future projects that go beyond the current frameworks of territorial planning. In this way, a series of daily practices are observed that produce spatialities that challenge territorial planning, either in the form of resistance or through formulation of alternative territorial projects. We are particularly interested in exploring spatial practices of Mapuche communities in the commune of Padre Las Casas, Araucanía Region, which have been besieged by urban expansion and associated threats of expulsion because of the construction of housing complexes. In the Region of Copiapó, settlements of the Chango people located on the edge of the sea must deal with the settlement of hundreds of houses of irregular form that use bays and beaches as places of recreation, besieging the residential habitat of Changos communities. In the same region, the formation of new Diaguitas and Collas indigenous communities occurs through land occupations and self-managed community projects in desert landscapes on the outskirts of the city. Such practices are viewed by state policies through the prism of informal occupations. These current situations highlight the narrowness of territorial conceptions of both urban and territorial planning policies, but also of indigenous policies themselves, that reproduce the colonial urban/rural binary. In future work, we are interested in critically and comparatively analysing housing policies and urban planning instruments and their implications for indigenous communities in urban or urbanising settings. 10.1.4. Public policies associated with nature conservation: exclusion, inequality and commodification in Southern Chile Under scientific rationalism, nature is understood as an external object and subjected to processes of domination. In the contemporary juncture we can note how discourses that advance nature conservation dominate public debate on a planetary scale. The historical roots of conservation have been based on moralistic and dualistic arguments in the scientific community about the intrinsic value of nature in terms of the rights and needs of future generations. In Chile, public conservation policies are linked to the creation of parks and nature reserves managed by the State in partnership with private capital, restricting and regulating their use and usufruct. These environmental policies privatize the commons, through concessions or transfer CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 49 of rights that often generate environmental damage and difficulties in accessing beaches, rivers and lakes. Many of these national parks are ancestral territories of indigenous peoples, with these groups often threatened by displacement. Public policy also encourages the creation of private reserves for conservation purposes. These processes are particularly intense in southern Chile, home to territories of high ecological value whose conservation is a priority for the planet. In many places we can observe the development of tourist enclaves and private conservation projects, often with the purpose of advancing territorial accumulation, leading to the displacement and social exclusion of indigenous and peasant communities. 10.2. Promoting policies that problematise Western legal traditions and confront territorial accumulation Especially in the Colombian context our group notes the emergence of alternative public policies, often the result of struggles by Afro-Colombian and indigenous groups, whose main aim it is to confront practices that justify territorial accumulation and resolve violent social conflicts around the inequitable redistribution of land and resources. Below, we briefly reflect on three of these policies as well as their strengths and limitations: 10.2.1. Law 70: convergences and contradictions with AfroColombian communities in the Pacific region In the wake of Colombia’s 1991 constitutional reform, which recognised for the first time the country’s multi-ethnic character, Law 70 was formulated in 1993. The law established a judicial process to provide collective titles to Afro-descendant communities for rural territories which they occupy and use for traditional productive activities. It was preceded by Transitory Article 55, which was passed in 1991 alongside the new constitution, promising Afro-Colombian collective land rights in the Pacific region, along with protection of their cultural identity and rights, and promotion of their economic and social development. The law recognized the historic tenure of Black communities over river basins in the Pacific region and established the figure of communal councils (consejos comunitarios) through which communities could organize and govern themselves. Amid the optimism of the early 1990s, Law 70 seemed to offer the possibility of visibility, rights and political recognition to Afro-descendant communities across the Pacific region and in Colombia more widely. Instrumental in and strengthened by this process was the Proceso de Comunidades Negras, a network of social organizations in the Pacific region based in Buenaventura, with more than 20 years of history of articulating Afro-Colombian communities’ demands for political, territorial, ecological and cultural autonomy (Escobar, 2014; see also Oslender, 2004, 2016). By 2008, 5 million hectares of land had been assigned via 132 collective land titles in the Pacific region (Agnew & Oslender, 2013). Importantly, this process of collective titling also granted consejos the right to consulta previa or consultation prior to permission being given for development on their land (alongside any other measures that might affect communities’ social, cultural or economic integrity), suggesting an important protective role against territorial accumulation processes. However, despite the historical achievement that Law 70 represents in Colombia, observers suggest that it has failed to live up to its promise, particularly relating to Afro-Colombian movements’ claims around identity and territory (Oslender, 2016). Between constitutional debates and the law’s formalization, these claims were diluted, and the category of territory was replaced by ‘collective land ownership’ based on the distribution of empty or unused land (tierras baldías) for collective titling, rather than redistribution (Restrepo, 2013, p. 95). Additionally, the incorporation of the local communities’ forms of organisation, framed as ‘ethnic-territorial organisations’ and recognised in Law 70, ultimately resulted in the diluted figure of consejos comunitarios, which are elected and are responsible for governing collective territory, but have ultimately become another actor alongside the state in contesting ‘overlapping territorialities’ CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 50 (Oslender in Cairo 2018). Finally, the right to consulta previa often remains an afterthought, and communities’ views are either overlooked completely, or subsumed to other interests. 10.2.2. Public Policy on Communication of and for Indigenous Peoples (PPCPI) This public policy, ratified in 2018, seeks to address the negative impact that traditional media has on the social valuation of indigenous peoples through the realization and promotion of practices of autonomous ccommunication defined as the creation, production and dissemination of content made by indigenous people. Its relationship with territorial accumulation lies in the fact that for Colombian indigenous communities the creation of alternative media constitutes a strategic complement to their territorial struggles (Tobar-Tovar and Rodríguez, 2020). For this reason, the dissemination of autochthonous content is proposed to make visible expectations of cultural recognition, economic redistribution and political representation, which are articulated with contemporary demands such as environmental justice and peacebuilding. Despite a series of difficulties (e.g., lack of training, limited access to equipment), some indigenous peoples have managed to advance in their communication efforts by taking a critical stance against discriminatory conceptions of the indigenous. Some emblematic examples are found in the department of Cauca through the processes carried out by the organization Tejido de Comunicación of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, ACIN (Nasa people). On the other hand, on the Atlantic Coast, the Zhigoneshi Collective of the Gonawindúa Tayrona Organization of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Wiwa, Kogui and Arhuaco peoples). In the case of Valle del Cauca, we find an initial community-led process that seeks to replicate lessons from other national and international indigenous communities and apply it to the local context. The Javeriana Cali University seeks to support these efforts. 10.2.3. Public Policy Cali Afro This policy issued by the municipal government of Cali focuses on the black, Afro-Colombian, raizales and palenqueras communities (hereinafter BARP) that inhabit this city. It aims to address specific problems (especially linked to violence) experienced by these groups, putting emphasis on their recognition and representation in public spaces (Agreement 0459 of 2019). It emerged in 2021 as a response to a series of events, including the national strike occurring this year but also neighbourhood campaigns in the barrio Charco Azul occurring since 2002 as well as the massacre of five young people from the Llano Verde neighbourhood in 2020 that brought into light the negative implications of forced displacement. Problems the policy seeks to address are lack of education, multi-dimensional poverty, precarious housing, and the failure to address the specific territorial and group rights of BARP. The relationship of this policy with territorial accumulation lies in the fact that the experience of the Colombian armed conflict has a special effect on the way in which the uses of the territory in the countryside and the city are signified. Many BARP communities inhabit the District of Aguablanca and identify themselves as victims of violence. While only recently ratified, the policy will provide a good case study to understand how the concerns of Afro-Colombian communities are addressed in practice. 10.3. Synthesis and next steps In this section we highlighted important tensions between public policies guided by Western legal discourses, and often promoting territorial accumulation, and indigenous and Afro-descendent epistemologies and lived experiences. We also highlighted how public policies are not static but often subject to resistance and modification. Our discussion on indigenous and Afro struggles against territorial accumulation and related public policies highlights two important, interrelated and often simultaneously applied, trends: First, some activist practices CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 51 seek to address indigenous and Afro claims within dominant governance systems, for example by developing laws and policies within the tradition of Western legal discourse, by aligning their claims to domestic or international indigenous rights legislation, or by suggesting inter-legal proposals that seek to combine insights of Western legal discourse with indigenous cosmovision. Second, other activist practices promote autonomous territorial governance systems and call for rights to co-exist with more conventional policies and governance configurations. What these different practices share in common is an effort to confront territorial accumulation and related threats to indigenous and Afro ways of living. While there exist similar trends in the countries in which our working group members are based and/ or work collaboratively with indigenous and Afro activists, there is a need for more crosscultural comparison, learning and exchange. As working group we therefore plan to develop a B1 project that focuses on facilitating a series of cross-cultural dialogues on coping with and confronting territorial “fixing”, “displacement” and “accumulation” through involving first and foremost youths (the future of indigenous and Afro descendant socio-territorial movements) from communities with whom we already have strong collaborative partnerships. As a preparatory step, and to inform our B1 application to be prepared in 2023, we will undertake a series of preliminary conversations in the coming months with selected young people to identify their priorities in relation to territorial accumulation and related policy responses as well as ideas on how to address these issues as part of a collaborative research project within the Contested Territories network. We will consolidate insights from these interviews into podcasts to be shared with youth participants based in different territories as well as network members. The proposed activities align with work packages 3 (Documenting and Visualising Contested Territories) and 4 (Connecting and Reclaiming Contested Territories) and will feed into relevant project outputs, including the Atlas of Territorial Accumulation. 10.4. Primary policy sources Bolivian constitution (2009): https://www.lexivox.org/norms/BO-CPE-20090207.xhtml Ley INRA (1998): https://www.lexivox.org/norms/BO-RE-DS24784.xhtml Ley de hidrocarburos (2005): http://extwprlegs1.fao.org/docs/pdf/bol52651.pdf Ley marco de autonomías y descentralización‘Andrés Ibáñez’ (2010): https://www.lexivox.org/norms/BO-L-N31.xhtml Ley de regularización del derecho propietario sobre bienes inmuebles urbanos destinados a vivienda (2012): https://www.lexivox.org/norms/BO-L-N247.xhtml Population census: https://www.ine.gob.bo/index.php/estadisticas-sociales/vivienda-y-servicIos-basicos/censos-vivienda/ Concip, Mpc, Onic, Opiac, Cit, Aico, Mintic, MinCultura y ANTV. (diciembre de 2017). Política pública de comunicación de y para los pueblos indígenas en Colombia. Recuperado el marzo de 2018, de Banco de contenidos del Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia: http://bancodecontenidos.mincultura.gov.co/Multimedia-DirCom/pdfs/comunicacion-indigena/proyecto-02/comindigena-proyecto02-doc01-politica-publica-com-indigena.pdf Ley 70 (1993) https://www.acnur.org/fileadmin/Documentos/BDL/2006/4404.pdf Política Pública Afrocolombiana, Negra, Palenquera y Raizal de Santiago de Cali, CaliAfro. https://www.cali.gov.co/bienestar/publicaciones/148058/politica-publica-afro/ Ley de Comunas, 1937, https://es.scribd.com/document/262627446/Ley-de-Comunas Ley de Reforma Agraria y Colonización, 1964, https://books.google.cl/books/about/Ley_de_reforma_agraria_y_colonizaci%C3%B3n.html?id=DMMZAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y Constitución del Ecuador, 2008, https://www.oas.org/juridico/pdfs/mesicic4_ecu_const.pdf 10.5. References CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 52 Agnew, J., & Oslender, U. (2013). Overlapping territorialities, sovereignty in dispute: Empirical lessons from Latin America. In W. Nicholls & B. Miller (Eds.), Spaces of contention (pp. 121– 142). Taylor and Francis. Antequera Duran, N. (2011). Itinerarios urbanos. Continuidades y rupturas urbano rurales. In Cielo, C. and Antequera Duran, N. (ed), Ciudad sin fronteras. Multilocalidad urbano-rural en Bolivia, La Paz: Pieb, 23-40. Anthias, P.,(2018). Limits to decolonization: Indigeneity, territory, and hydrocarbon politics in the Bolivian Chaco. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bayón Jiménez, M. (2021). Urbanización extendida y conformación de sujetos urbano-indígenas en la Amazonía de Ecuador (pp. 485-534). CLACSO. CEDLA. https://www.clacso.org.ar/libreria-latinoamericana/libro_detalle.php?orden=&id_libro=2392&pageNum_rs_libros=0&totalRows_rs_libros=1562 Cubillo-Guevara, A. P., & Hidalgo-Capitán, A. L. (2015). El sumak kawsay genuino como fenómeno social amazónico ecuatoriano. OBETS. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 10(2), 301. https://doi.org/10.14198/OBETS2015.10.2.02 Elden, S., 2013. The birth of territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Escobar, A. (2014). Sentipensar con la tierra. Ediciones UNAULA. Flemmer, R. & Schilling‐Vacaflor, A. (2016). Unfulfilled promises of the consultation approach: the limits to effective indigenous participation in Bolivia’s and Peru’s extractive industries. Third World Quarterly, 37(1): 172-188. Haesbaert, R., (2013). Del mito de la desterritorialización a la multiterritorialidad. Cultura y representaciones sociales, 8(15), pp.9-42. Horn, P., (2019). Indigenous rights to the city: Ethnicity and urban planning in Bolivia and Ecuador. Abingdon: Routledge. Mansilla Quiñones, P., & Imilan, W. A. (2020). Colonialidad de poder, desarrollo urbano y desposesión Mapuche: Urbanización de tierras Mapuche en la Araucanía chilena. Scripta Nova. Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales. Universidad de Barcelona, XXIV(630), 1–13. McNeish, J.A., (2013). Extraction, protest and indigeneity in Bolivia: the TIPNIS effect. Latin American and Caribbean ethnic studies, 8(2): 221-242. Murra, J., (1975). El control vertical de un máximo de pisos ecológicos en la economía de las sociedades andinas. Formaciones Económicas y Políticas del mundo andino. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Oslender, U. (2004). Fleshing out the geographies of social movements: Colombia’s Pacific coast black communities and the ‘aquatic space’. Political Geography, 23(8), 957–985. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2004.05.025 Oslender, U. (2016b). The geographies of social movements: Afro-Colombian mobilization and the aquatic space. Duke University Press. Rayner, J., & Mérida Conde, J. (Eds.). (2019). Las comunas del Ecuador: Autonomía, territorio y la construcción del estado plurinacional. Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, La Universidad de Posgrado del Estado.Restrepo, E. (2013). Etnización de la negridad: la invención de las ‘comunidades negras’ como grupo étnico en Colombia. Universidad del Cauca. Porter, L., & Barry, J. (2016). Planning for Coexistence?: Recognizing Indigenous rights through land-use planning in Canada and Australia. Routledge. Schavelzon, S. (2012). El nacimiento del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, etnografía de una asamblea constituyente. La Paz: Plural editores. Schilling-Vacaflor, A. & Flemmer, R., (2015). Conflict transformation through prior consultation? Lessons from Peru. Journal of Latin American Studies, 47(4): 811-839. Tobar-Tovar, C; Rodríguez, A (2020). Consumo de medios y tecnologías de información y de comunicación no indígenas en comunidades embera chamí del departamento del Valle del CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 53 Cauca (Colombia). En Orobitg, G (Ed). Medios indígenas: teorías y experiencias de la comunicación indígena en América Latina. Editorial iberoamericana-vervuert. ISBN: 978-849192-100-4. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 54 11POPULAR MARKETS, CONSUMPTION CIRCUITS AND FOOD PRODUCTION. Pablo Calegaris. Facultad de Agronomía, Universidad de Buenos Aires. [email protected] Héctor Grad. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. [email protected] Sara Gonzalez. University of Leeds. [email protected] María Florencia Marcos Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales (CEURCONICET). [email protected] Beatriz Nussbaumer Facultad de Agronomía, Universidad de Buenos Aires. FAUBACONICET. [email protected] Paula Rosa Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales (CEURCONICET). [email protected] The production, distribution, circulation and consumption of food and other goods is intimately linked to processes of territorial accumulation and dispossession that develop geographically and socially unevenly. The working group for popular trade and markets analyses processes that range from the commodification and neoliberalization of these circuits by the State and private interests to alternative practices and resistance that aim to decommodify and recognise their social value. In particular, we focus on how these uneven processes are territorialised creating injustices across rural and urban settings but also how alternatives emerge from these territories. 11.1 Main theoretical contributions Food is a contested arena in which different actors, capitals, interests, discourses, tensions and a diversity of strategies come together. Critical agri-food studies have focused in particular on how the production, distribution and access to food are part of a global capitalist regime (Bernstein, 2016) accelerating processes of industrialisation, standardisation and (neo)colonial relationships between countries and across other scales. Contestation has broadened to include not only access and distribution, but has also taken a turn towards quality; a concept that brings together aspects such as nutrition, the importance of food “provenance” and socio-technical processes of food production. Murdoch et al. (2000) explain that this shift stems from the effect of globalization on the food sector, taking as a reference its industrialization and commodification in parallel to a concentration of the capital that produces and distributes food. The changes in the circulation of food do not only have an impact on the economic dimension; but also on their general territorial relations. In Seale’s (2016: 12) study of marketplaces she conceives them as nodes where material and intangible flows – of people, goods, time, senses, affections – circulate, end, are transformed or directly pass. This relational approach puts the emphasis on the links and relations between participating agents; who are tied up in uneven networks of power. Thinking of food spaces and territories in a dynamic sense rather than as fixed, leads us to notice the circulation of food as contingent on these social relations. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 55 Debates within this field have also focused on the alternatives and resistance to the corporate and capitalist food systems. Within this framework, the emergence and articulation of consumer and producer organizations, allied with various institutions, has been documented, generating alternative circuits and systems for the production and circulation of food with distinctive quality traits that gave rise to "alternative food geographies" (Whatmore, Thorne 1997). In the Anglo-Saxon context, these networks (Alternative Food Networks - AFNs) were understood from their reactive nature to the conventional agri-food system (Murdoch, et al 2000) while other authors emphasized the influence of social movements in the promotion of local community experiences for the social and economic sustainability of families (Migliore, et al 2019). There are many other areas of debate and theoretical discussion linked to the ecological crisis, racism and feminism. The production and distribution of food and other consumption goods is a pillar of capitalism and as such it is a fundamental arena for territorial accumulation and dispossession. At the heart of the emergence of capitalism there was the land grabbing and expulsion of peasants from common land, where they could provision themselves with food. More recently, the expansion of soy production in Latin American land to feed animals and the production of superprocessed foods, can be seen as a new form of extractivism. Corporate-led food production and distribution is very energy dependent thus contributing to the current world-ecology crisis. The production and distribution of food and other consumption goods has at its center labor power: from slave labor in plantations, women unpaid farm work to precarious workers in the food industry, in bars and restaurants in gentrified neighborhoods or traveling through streets delivering fast food. In urban contexts we find that food access and distribution is another profit making frontier. Corporate retailers crowd out central urban spaces displacing small and often family-run neighborhood businesses. At the same time, boutique-style, high-end food businesses lead or reinforce processes of touristification and gentrification displacing or pricing out low income residents who have to rely on cheap and highly processed food or travel long distances to access food. 11.2 Mechanisms of territorial accumulation in the case studies The markets and popular retail working group aims to ask the following questions in their research: What role or roles do state agencies assume in the matter of food? Which subjects do they promote and which others condition? In which cases do they stay on the sidelines, intentionally omit regulations? What role do alternative food production have in the resistance or further commodification of food systems? Below, we present three cases that allow us to account for these concerns. In the United Kingdom, traditional retail markets emerged in the 19th c. as pioneering state municipal centers for food safety and also the disciplining of the working class food consumption and shopping habits. But by the 21st century various global and urban processes have led to their marginalization (Taylor and Gonzalez, forthcoming). In the UK, the supermaketization process has led to the absolute power of very few supermarket chains who control the grocery market and who have become financialised institutions investing in banking, insurance or housing. In the 1990s, neoliberal Thatcherite policies promoted out of town and car-based shopping centers which led to the decline of town and urban centers where most traditional retail markets are based. The mass incorporation of women to the labor market, particularly since the 2WW also changed home food provisioning patterns; relying more on highly processed foods provided conveniently by supermarkets who have long opening hours, based on cheap labor. More recently, the rise of delocalised internet retailers relying on cheap distribution, manufacturing, warehouse and delivery labor has further marginalized traditional retail markets. Added to these trends, these markets tend to be owned and managed by local authorities which particularly since the 2008 crisis have suffered crippling public fund cuts. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.2: Working Paper 2 – Critical Policy Analysis 56 In the UK, traditional markets are not considered, as in other countries, public services; Instead they are generally regarded as income generating commercial properties. There are around 1,000 of these markets in towns and cities across the UK. There is no national public policy regarding markets; at local level, markets are often linked strategically to public policies but their public role is fragmented nationally and hence diminished and overlooked. As public funding continues to be reduced, markets have become important tools for local councils to generate income. This seems to take two approaches: either selling or leasing out the market to private operators for a profit or investing public money in the market to regenerate it and attract new customers to generate further municipal income (Gonalez and Waley, 2013). In either case, the community value that markets generate in terms of access to affordable food but also as spaces of social interaction particularly for low income groups, tends to be forgotten or dismissed (Gonzalez, et al, 2021). This can lead to the displacement of these groups when markets become regenerated. But markets are contested urban spaces and there have been citizen and trader campaigns to save them from decline, demolition, privatization of gentrification. In particular, in London markets that served minoritised and working class groups have seen strong campaigns linking customers and traders and highlighting the community aspects of these spaces (Gonzalez and Dawson, 2017). In the case of Madrid, the transformations of the markets are part of the development plans that are committed to the insertion of the city in the global tourist and financial market, building a competitive image of Madrid with international projection. As a consequence of these local public policies, its municipal markets become disputed territories due to the processes of commercial gentrification and touristification in two spatial areas: the gentrified neighborhoods of the central almond of the city and, in general, in the food markets. municipally owned. In these processes, traditional retail stores are displaced by high-status gourmet establishments, aimed at serving the transient tourist population and competing for an urban middle class that has opted for supermarkets as the preferred supply modality. From the government and business perspective, supply markets are represented as deteriorated places. The generation of this discourse justifies its rescue and the subsequent rediscovery of its commercial and urban value. In this line, the reforms of the municipal markets carried out by the local governments of Madrid incorporate new functions under the premise of "modernizing and updating them". The interest in turning municipal markets into a competitive commercial format, integrated and adapted to new consumption habits, led to the implementation from 2003 to 2011 of the l Plan for Innovation and Transformation of Madrid Municipal Markets, (City Hall of Madrid, 2003). Said Plan, considered a success, was extended for the period 2012-2015, with emphasis on marketing and advertising of the Mercados de Madrid brand, on the modernization of the physical and commercial structure and finally on the search for professionalization and improvement of its management. Lastly, in the 2017-2021 period, the Madrid Municipal Markets Strategic Plan was developed, which focuses on the physical remodeling of buildings and applying management models typical of large companies with the aim of increasing profitability. These objectives are contradictory to the social function of the markets as centers of neighborhood coexistence and do not take into account social and cultural factors of their operation and their historical role in the urban environment. Another axis of municipal policy has consisted in modifying the regulations that govern the operation of the markets to allow new types of businesses, reducing the percentage of area that must be used for food trade from 65% to 35% (Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 2014 ), and establishing that up to 40% of the common space could be used for events, such as tastings. This regulation favors the reorganization of the stalls into a "traditional" part and an "innovative" part, and the gradual displacement of food product sales stalls in favor of restaurant spaces and gourmet stores that are much more profitable. In summary, the renovation model that is implemented in the municipal markets deepens the transformation of the material space, the type of business, the products they offer, and the public they are intended for, so that the function of the supply market is replaced by leisure, recreation and consumption activities similar to malls, in line with neoliberal commercial and