ABSTRACT

This is an article about what urban informality means when it is understood historically. In particular, it explores the relationship between urban informality and three vital threads in Brazil’s contemporary history: the evolution of racialized governance and inequality, the tense coexistence of private and public forms of power, and the complex contradictions embedded in Brazilian social struggles. Paying special attention to the way in which regulation creates informality from everyday life, I argue that Brazil’s modern urban law, from its very inception, has naturalised a version of urbanity that was both out-of-step with Brazil’s urban realities and economically unfeasible for many urban residents. By compounding poverty with the stigma of illegality, and especially by disproportionately channelling Afro-descendants into systems of urban power relations that denied them both citizenship and resources, Brazil’s urban legal and regulatory practices perpetuated racial inequality, undermined the legitimacy of liberal institutional governance, and channelled social activism in directions that, while often locally emancipatory, ultimately perpetuated Brazil’s deepest inequalities.

摘要

这是一篇关于从历史上理解城市非正式性意味着什么的文章。特别是，它探讨了城市非正规性与巴西当代历史上三个重要线索之间的关系：种族化治理和不平等的演变、私人和公共权力形式的紧张共存以及巴西社会斗争中的复杂矛盾。我特别关注监管在日常生活中创造非正式性的方式，我认为巴西的现代城市法从一开始就已经自然化了一种与巴西的城市现实脱节且经济上不可行的城市化版本。许多城市居民。通过将贫困与非法的污名相结合，