From the right to the city to the right to the periphery: changes in the struggle for citizenship on the margins of the city

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research in two neighborhoods situated in São Paulo’s peripheries, the aim of this article is to analyze the conceptions of citizenship and “right to the city” from a peripherical perspective. The text argues that citizenship should be understood as a political strategy and as part of a struggle for the “right to have rights”. Therefore, it will be promoted a historical reading on the struggle for citizenship and how it has changed recently in Brazilian urban peripheries. In the end, will be introduced the idea of “right to the periphery” as a way to understand the “right to the city” from the perspective of urban peripheries’ contemporary political activists. The idea of “right to the periphery” emerges from the strengthening of identity and cultural movements that seek to value the peripheral belonging as a fundamental part of the political formation of the inhabitants of these areas. In this way, the political mobilization in the urban peripheries points to a struggle that seeks to assure the right to equality as much as the right to difference. Thus, the “right to the periphery” seeks to articulate both political and cultural struggle in order to recognize an intrinsic and non-opposing relationship between equality and difference.