The Inconsistent City, Participatory

Planning, and the Part of No Part in

Recife, Brazil

Pieter de Vries
Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands;
pieter.devries@wur.nl

Abstract: This article engages with the trajectory of urban participation in Recife, Brazil,
from its start as a governance system aimed at ensuring the right of the poor to the city, to
the introduction by the Workers Party of participatory budgeting. I argue that participa-
tion is used by the state in order to include populations within governmental structures
while the poor struggle for the right to belong to the city. Drawing on Alain Badious
ontology of multiplicity I contend that the urban situation is grounded in inconsistency, as
manifested in the existence of a category of people who sit at the edge of the void, that
neither is included nor belongs. I conclude that the popular mobilizations in Recife in the
1980s constituted a true emancipatory event that exposed the divisions of the city, the exis-
tence of a fundamental wrong, and that proclaimed the right of the excluded to the city.

Keywords: Recife, favelas, participatory planning, Badiou, ontology, liberation theology

Introduction
Recife city has been lauded for having developed a highly participatory governance
system for informal settlements that provides tenure security to slum residents and
resources to improve the built environment known as PREZEIS (the Regulatory Plan
for Special Zone of Social Purpose). The PREZEIS was the outcome of a broad pop-
ular movement that surged during the military dictatorship (19641986) and that
encompassed slum dwellers, the Catholic Church, political activists and progressive
urban planners. Along with this participatory planning experience Recife has also a
long tradition of planning directed at creating an attractive urban environment for
investors and higher income groups (Assies 1994; Donovan 2007). The Grand Re-
cife project, funded by the World Bank and implemented in the 1970s was a good
example of technocratic urbanism that privileged a hygienic high-modernist vision
of the city. It is therefore possible in Recife to distinguish two different urban plan-
ning traditions, one participatory and bottom-up that builds upon local experiences
and popular struggles for the right to the city in informal settlements (or as plan-
ners call it the informal city), and another managerialist, top-down and techno-
cratic for the formal city that represents the interests of the economic elite
(Melo 2010). In 2001 the Brazilian Workers Party (Partido de Trabalhadores) won
the municipal elections and introduced its battle-horse, Participatory Budgeting,
so as to promote forms of democratic participation that would foster an inclusive
city. This new form of urban governance tried to conciliate the PT principles of par-
ticipatory and inclusive development with middle-class and elite aspirations to

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2 Antipode

create a modern, competitive, and prosperous city. The result was a hybrid plan-
ning approach that combined neoliberal aspirations for urban beautication with
strong participatory elements.
Many leftist authors have decried this neoliberal turn as a betrayal of the social-
ist principles of the Partido de Trabalhadores (PT), a bow to business interests and
global capital.1 Yet, PT politicians, urban planners and policy-makers take a less san-
guine view. For them participatory urban development has been a real advance in a
neoliberal world and the challenge is that of deepening forms of participatory de-
mocracy so as to defend the conquests of urban popular movements. As Baiocchi
(2003) notes, the PT found itself in the paradoxical situation of being a governing
socialist party in capitalist cities.
The article draws upon longitudinal research among politicians, planners, NGO
representatives, street level bureaucrats (mostly social workers), and community
leaders in Recife, from 2001 onwards. It engages with the trajectory of urban partic-
ipation in Recife, in relation to popular struggles for the right to the city. It pays
special attention to the PREZEIS, an urban governance system that provides tenure
security and a participatory structure for negotiating infrastructural improvements.
It documents the history of participatory budgeting in Recife and its use by the
Workers Party from 2001 through 2012 as a governmental instrument for creating
an inclusive city in a neoliberal context. Special attention is paid to PROMETRPOLE,
a participatory slum upgrading project that aimed to combine the Workers Partys
aims of conciliating the participatory tradition of Recife with neoliberal aspirations to
valorize the city. I conclude that the popular mobilizations in Recife at the end of the
dictatorship constituted a true emancipatory event that exposed the divisions of
the city, the existence of a fundamental wrong, and that proclaimed the right of
the excluded, the uncounted, to the city.
Theoretically my aim is that of contributing to the debate on urban participatory plan-
ning drawing upon Alain Badious (2003, 2005) generic ontology of multiplicity. In the-
orizing participation, I apply Badious ontological distinction between inclusion and
belonging as two fundamentally different ways of counting individuals and popula-
tions. Whereas the poor struggle for the right to belong to the city, the state aims to
include individuals and populations within governmental structures. As against pre-
scriptive and poststructuralist theories of participation, I conceptualize urban participa-
tory planning as a disjointed process that manifests itself in the disjuncture between
belonging and inclusion. I also contend that the urban situation is grounded in inconsis-
tency, as manifested in the existence of a category of people that sits at the edge of the
void, that neither is included nor belongs, a group Badiou names the part of no part.
Although Badious theorizing helps us to shed a different light on participatory plan-
ning, hardly any analyses of specic participatory projects employ Badious perspective,
which is what I will do in this article. Given the high level of abstraction of Badious work
and for purposes of clarication, I start by summarizing the theoretical argument.

Urban Participatory Planning as a Disjunctive Process

Currently there is a generalized consensus that participatory planning is a necessary
complement to any form of state intervention that aspires to foster citizenship rights

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The Part of No Part in Recife, Brazil 3

and promote emancipatory processes. This prescriptive approach sees participation

as a set of principles that promote transparency and accountability, while providing
public policy processes with high levels of legitimacy (Cornwall 2011).2 This ap-
proach has been critiqued by poststructuralist thinkers who argue that in spite of
all good intentions participation persistently tends to degenerate into forms of ma-
nipulation with specied effects, amongst whom we can name the production of
dened social identities (e.g. the beneciary, the deserving citizen), and the exten-
sion of the reach of government. Participatory planning in this view has become
part and parcel of the workings of an institutional apparatus, a form of power-
knowledge that silences the voices of the subaltern and expands the capacities of
intervention of development agencies (Cooke and Kothari 2001; Escobar 2011).
Badious positing of an ontological disjuncture between inclusion and belonging
enables us to develop a different perspective. Within this view participatory plan-
ning rather than a set of prescriptions to be followed, or a set of technologies of
government aimed at controlling local populations, consists of an attempt to foster
a synthesis between the desires of people to belong and the will to power of gov-
ernmental agencies. Such a synthesis, however, is impossible given the inconsistent
nature of the urban situation. Participatory urban planning thus is a compromise in-
volving two opposed worlds, one that is driven by the desire to belong to the city
and the other that is animated by the will to govern. The result of attempts to bring
these two forces together through participatory planning is a synthesis that is not
dialectical, nor connective, but a synthesis that keeps open the disjuncture of be-
longing and inclusion. In other words, a disjunctive synthesis.
Urban participatory planning, within this Badiouan perspective, therefore, en-
gages with the disjuncture between belonging and inclusion, not as a contradiction
to be overcome, neither as a binary to be deconstructed but as a disjunctive synthe-
sis that provides the coordinates within which struggles for the right to the city take
place. A synthesis is disjunctive when instead of connecting it separates. In Dikens
(2009:34) denition: two opposite tendencies juxtaposed to each other in the
same social space, connected and disconnected at once, paradoxically united in a
non-dialectical synthesisa synthesis whose binary poles are mutually exclusive
but nevertheless presupposefeed upon each other and are interlocked within
the same classicatory scheme .
How does this perspective differ from the prescriptive and the poststructuralist cri-
tique of participation? My argument is that, in spite of the deep divergence between
advocates and sceptics, both camps agree that participation is about minimizing the
gap between inclusion and belonging as much as possible. For advocates true
participation, by involving people in policy making and implementation, renders
possible legitimate and accountable forms of intervention by which local popula-
tions can develop a strong sense of belonging (to the city or the nation state as in
the case of democratic citizenship). Poststructuralists, in turn, argue that participa-
tion, despite all good intentions, is about including populations in governmental
structures in such a way that they come to feel part of such structures, an effect
reached through neoliberal mechanisms of individualization and responsibilization
(Rose et al. 2006). Indeed, for governmentality thinkers participation is about shap-
ing the conduct of individuals and populations so as to include them in new social

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structures that expand the ethos and possibilities of government. The point not to be
lost is that here also a close correlation between inclusion (through governmental
mechanisms) and belonging (through the creation of social identities) is assumed.
The difference between prescriptive and poststructuralist views on participation,
then, can be conceptualized in terms of the relative importance they assign to one
of the poles of the inclusionbelonging disjunctive synthesis. For advocates of par-
ticipation the challenge is that of creating inclusive structures that are compatible
with notions of belonging, of which deliberative notions of participatory democracy
are exemplary (Avritzer 2006; Fung and Wright 2003). Poststructuralists, on the
other hand, start with the other pole and view inclusion as animated by the will
to power of governmental bodies, thus engaging in the deconstruction of the good
intentions of participatory processes. A Badiouan perspective, rather than prioritiz-
ing one of the poles, takes the disjunction itself as its theoretical object. This differ-
ence is not merely theoretical but has also signicant political implications, as it
enables us to think about participatory planning in relation to the capacity of ex-
cluded populations to bring about dramatic social transformations, by engaging
in struggles that expose the inconsistency of the urban situation, bringing into
the open the disjunction between inclusion (the governmental will to power) and
belonging (peoples desires to be part of the city). The question that then can be
posed pertains not to the degree in which participatory planning contributes to
the creation of just and equitable governmental systems and emancipatory pro-
cesses, nor to the kinds of subjectivities that participatory governmentality fosters.
Within this Badiouan perspective participatory planning is conceived as a disjunc-
tive process, providing the space in which struggles for the right to the city take
place and wherein a new kind of subject emerges; a supernumerary subject who
neither belongs nor is included, who sits at the edge of the void.
Summarizing the argument developed below I draw upon the work of Alain
Badiou to argue that inclusion is always excessive in regard to belonging, and that
urban participatory planning is a form of government that operates through gov-
ernmental mechanisms of inclusive exclusion that produce dened constellations
of inclusion and belonging. In the empirical analysis I dene four such constella-
tions of inclusion and belonging: (1) deserving citizens (residents of informal com-
munities who belong and are included in governmental structures); (2) social
categories by which people are included in governmental structures (inclusion
without belonging); (3) maladapted elements that need to be normalized so as
to be included; and (4) the part of no part, a spectral set of people that does
not exist to the eyes of the state and that neither belongs nor is included.
This approach differs from poststructuralist works that focus on forms of insur-
gent citizenship or counter-hegemonic subjectivities as emerging out of deter-
mined trajectories of governing (Chatterjee 2004; Holston 2008), hence seeing
popular politics both as derivative from, and constitutive of, governing processes.
Attending to the part of no part provides the possibility to detect forms of politics
that are uncompromised with actual structures of power (what Badiou calls the
state of the situation) and hence capable to herald something entirely new
(Badiou 2005; Johnston 2007). It also opens up new possibilities for thinking about
forms of radical transformation as alternatives to the present neoliberal hegemony.

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The Part of No Part in Recife, Brazil 5

Redening Governmentality in terms of Constellations

of Belonging and Inclusion
As argued, local populations struggle for the right to belong to the city while the
state strives to include them in governmental structures. Accordingly, there is an ex-
cess of inclusion over belonging, an idea whose full signicance will be elucidated
in the course of this article. The next analytical step therefore is to redene the con-
cept of governmentality in terms of relations, or constellations, of inclusion and
belonging.
In Foucaults succinct denition governmentalitya concept he coined referring
to mentalities of governingis the conduct of conduct, that is, the fashioning of
mechanisms aimed at shaping enabling conditions for social subjects to govern
each other and themselves.3 Governmentality, the mentality of government, is thus
concerned with the creation of objects of government as much as governing sub-
jects. The art of governing is about creating subjects who internalize the ethos of
government, yet who stand in an independent relation vis--vis the apparatus of
government. Thus governmentality continuously problematizes the limits of gov-
ernment as part of its aim to extend the possibilities of governing; too much
governing may stie peoples creativity in bureaucracy, too little may keep them
enchained to oppressing structures of domination (i.e. patronclient relations). It
is this dialectic between inside and outside that underpins the will to govern and
thus grounds its potential to expand the realm of the social. The subject of
governmentality is both inside and outside of the apparatus of government, it al-
ways-already belongs to a different realm outside that of government while being
included in it. Hence, we can say that governmentality is about accomplishing as
much proximity as possible between inclusion and belonging while bolstering
the distinction.4
This re-denition of governmentality in terms of spatially constituted constella-
tions of inclusion and belonging is in my view particularly apt for the subject of par-
ticipation. It is possible to distinguish two meanings of participation that come
together in the case that I elaborate below. Political participation is broadly about
the inclusion of citizens in governmental decision-making processes, while partici-
pation in development projects is about the involvement of the target group in
the planning of development interventions. The rst meaning of participation con-
cerns citizenship making and democratic governance, while the second is more con-
cerned with issues of ownership and transparency and hence the production of
legitimacy (Hickey and Mohan 2005). A key question, however, is always that of de-
termining who may be represented and who not, an issue that is usually resolved by
designing eligibility rules. In effect, participatory programs always go together with
organizational structures aimed to ensure effective forms of representation.
However, there will always be elements that belong to the situation but cannot
be represented. This may be the case of individuals and groups who lack the social
skills to behave as responsible citizens and need therefore to be educated, but also
of individuals who do not qualify, who to the eyes of the state do not exist (illegal
aliens, non-eligibles). Participation is thus about including people as parts of repre-
sentative structures and not as individuals per se. As I show below, inclusion occurs
through a variety of knowledge-producing technologies such as the census,

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poverty mapping, social characterizations of community and digital participatory

technologies that aim to deal with the disjuncture between belonging and inclu-
sion in urban situations that are highly inconsistent.
In the next section I describe the trajectory of urban participation in Recife by
focusing on the disjuncture between belonging and inclusion. In short, it is argued
that the state seeks inclusion, whereas slum dwellers ght for belonging, thus
exposing the existence of an excess of the state over the urban situation. In the third
section I develop an alternative theoretical framework drawing on Badious set-
theoretical conceptual apparatus that enables us to understand politics in non-
identitarian, universalist and radical egalitarian terms. In the concluding section I
chart out the implications of Badious approach for Recife and argue that a true
emancipatory process demands delity to the great popular mobilizations that
exposed the divisions of the city: the existence of a fundamental wrong that
proclaimed the right of the excluded, the uncounted, to the city.

Urban Planning in Recife

Recife is the capital city of the State of north-eastern state of Pernambuco. It was one
of the most penalized cities during the military dictatorship (19641986) on ac-
count of its credentials as a city with strong leftist movements and charismatic pol-
iticians. After the military coup, the Catholic Church under the leadership of
Archbishop Dom Dom Hlder Cmara played a key role in defending popular strug-
gles for the right to the city. In 1965, Recife was struck by a heavy ood which left
thousands of residents homeless. Subsequently, a housing reconstruction program
was set up called Operation Hope (Operaao Esperana). The Catholic Church par-
ticipated in this program and played an instrumental role in the creation of resi-
dents councils that would function as the deliberative body of the community
(Assies 1994:115). This was the rst step in a long history of popular struggles
aimed at ensuring the poors right to the city, which eventually would result in a
highly innovative system of participatory urban governance, the PREZEIS, that has
been replicated all over the country.5
In 1979, Dom Helder founded the Commission of Justice and Peace (Commisso
Justia e Paz, or CJP) to defend both political prisoners and the rights of poor settle-
ment dwellers, or favelados, to live in the city. A year later he commissioned a study
of informal housing to be presented during the visit of Pope John Paul II. This study
revealed that 823,000 people lived in mocambos (shacks) in the metropolitan re-
gion of Recife (Donovan 2007:126), and was used as evidence of urban poverty
and the need to improve the living conditions of the poor in Recife. The result
was an unprecedented form of popular mobilization that contrasted starkly with
previous forms of informal squatting. The scale of popular mobilization was unpar-
alleled: as many as 250,000 people were involved in 80 invasions from 1978 to
1981 (Assies 1994:122). The state, I argue next, reacted to these struggles for the
right to (belong to) the city by creating a governmental apparatus of inclusion.
Supported by the neighbourhood mobilization programs of the Catholic Church
and various City Hall programs, numerous resident associations were established.
An unforeseen alliance was established between the progressive Church and the

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The Part of No Part in Recife, Brazil 7

major of Recife, Gustavo Krauze (19791982), to attend to the needs of the infor-
mal slum dwellers. Krauze had been appointed by the military, yet he was able to
convince them that there was no way that the poor could be evicted from the city.
In doing so he appropriated part of the discourse of the left in order to do politics
for the right. Both the Church and the City Hall promoted the Sistema de Aao
Communitria (system of communal action) which from 1979 to 1982 funded
the construction of kiosks in low-income neighbourhoods where staff collected tes-
timony of residents complaints.
The rst democratically elected major, Jarbas (19861989), initiated a participa-
tion program in informal settlements, named the City Hall in the neighborhoods
(prefeitura nos bairros), an incipient structure that later would be institutionalized
and renamed as a program of participatory budgeting. In addition, a system of
tenure protection was installed that enabled communities to register as Special
Zones of Social Purpose, or ZEIS, which were institutionalized in 1987 in the ZEIS
Regulation Plan, the PREZEIS. The PREZEIS served as the legal instrument for the
legalization of favelas. In addition, a representative body was created, responsible
for coordinating projects with government authorities in each ZEIS: the COMUL
(the Urbanization and Legalization Commission). Each COMUL sends a delegate
to the Forum of the PREZEIS which operates as a legal interlocutor with the munic-
ipality regarding issues of tenure legalization and slum development.
Much has been written on the PREZEIS. Donovan (2007) presents it as an exam-
ple of a citizen activist model in terms of procedural planning style and argues that
its accomplishments in terms of coverage and provision of tenure protection are
impressive. Yet, other authors (e.g. Leal 2003) are quite sceptical about the accom-
plishments of the PREZEIS and argue that in spite of its progressive and emancipa-
tory aims and its effectiveness in defending land tenure rights of the poor, it soon
became fraught by the ailments of populist patronclient politics, so typical in
the north-east of Brazil. The result was the conversion of the PREZEIS into an
electoral machine, a bureaucratic structure in the service of a political system
underpinned by an unsavoury alliance between populist politicians and opportu-
nistic community leaders. In this view participatory governance, in practice,
degenerated into a game of manipulation, a fetish that concealed various political
agendas, a perverse game of bureaucratic inclusion that stied forms of popular
contestation.
Seen from the theoretical perspective expounded above it can be argued that the
PREZEIS was a specic constellation of inclusion/belonging consisting of govern-
mental technologies of inclusion that set out to extend the inuence of the state
throughout the informal city while fostering notions of community belonging, that
over time lost its impetus and was captured by the political and bureaucratic logic
of patronclient relations.
A fact that cannot be stressed enough, however, is that PREZEIS above all was the
outcome of a popular movement that grew strongly during the dictatorship
consisting of an alliance between favelados, civil society organizations and the
Archdiocesis of the Catholic Church under the leadership of bishop Dom Helder
Camara. I argue later that this was a truly political event in the sense that it exposed
the existence of a wrong by people who demanded their right to equality in the city.

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8 Antipode

As Swyngedouw (2010:302) puts it, a demand that calls the political into being,
renders visible what is invisible, and exposes the wrongs in the present order.

The PT Assumes Municipal Power

After winning the municipal elections in 2001, the PT introduced its battle horse,
Participatory Budgeting (PB). PB was not new to Recife, already in the 1980s, dur-
ing the Jarbas administration a form of participatory budgeting existed. The differ-
ence between PB under Jarbas and under the PT major was that the latter copied
the Porto Alegre experience. This is not the place to discuss the PB, but it should
be noted that its scale of operation is much wider than the PREZEIS/COMULs. The
COMULs cater to informal settlements and deal mainly with tenure legalization
and improvement of basic infrastructure such as sanitation, waste management,
roads, etc. The PB is much broader and deals with topics such as health, education,
sports and cultural issues in addition to infrastructural development, and has more
funds at its disposal than the COMULs and the PREZEIS.6 It relies on a mix of partic-
ipatory and representative bodies at the level of the city, whereas PREZEIS was de-
signed for what planners denominated the informal city (more about this later).
Finally, the PB presents itself as a democratic program of inclusive citizenship, in
stark contrast with the PREZEIS approach that relies on the representation of com-
munity leaders.
The discourse of the PT in Recife has changed strongly over the years. As argued,
it was impelled by the circumstances to accommodate to the new neoliberal reali-
ties. The PT, from being an oppositional party with a socialist ideology and a large
mobilization capacity among the poor has moved to the centre aiming at creating a
broad alliance between the middle classes and the poor, with a view of making the
city attractive to (inter)national business interests. This reveals itself in the branding
of Recife as having the most multicultural carnival of the country, a kind of ecumen-
ical class-neutral discourse by which the PT has directed its efforts to show that it
represents the interests of the entire city as a whole, arguing that it is able to mod-
ernize it and integrate its poorer sections under programs of social inclusion. This
was basically a depoliticized view of the city that denied the existence of fundamen-
tal contradictions, thus investing in post-democratic images of the city as a consis-
tent and non-antagonistic whole (Swyngedouw 2010).
The most important projects initiated since 2000 in Recife were the
PROMETRPOLE and the Capibaribe Melhor projects. Both projects are mainly in-
frastructural projects aiming at canalizing the rivers, making an end to ooding
and improving transport circulation so as to make the city more attractive for capital
investments. World Bank funding was conditional on the use of neoliberal project
mechanisms such as privatepublic partnerships and international procurement
procedures. At the same time, the City Council governed by the PT made sure that
a strong participatory component be included by linking the project with the PB
program. The result was a hybrid urban planning approach that combined
neoliberal market mechanisms and participatory technologies of government.
PROMETRPOLE was meant to become a showcase of the PT approach of participa-
tory urban development.

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The Part of No Part in Recife, Brazil 9

The Planning and Implementation of the

PROMETRPOLE Project
The planning of the PROMETRPOLE project was very much inuenced by the pro-
poor, participatory, poverty alleviation agenda of Recife urban planners. Project
preparation started in 1996 with the design of a participatory poverty map and a
series of thematic panels on health, poverty alleviation and housing issues. The ac-
tual project design started in 1999 and lasted until 2001. A large-scale census was
conducted which served to make an estimate of the number of families to be
resettled (1780 families or 5% of all families deemed to benet from the project),
to create family socio-economic proles and to set eligibility criteria for those to
be relocated.7 Gradually it became clear that the actual design of the project dif-
fered from the pre-design. To begin with, one of the core components of the pro-
ject, that of poverty alleviation through micro-credit provision was eliminated.
The reason for this modication was the devaluation of the US dollar vis--vis the
Brazilian real. This became a moot point in all meetings with the communities as
residents accused the project team to have embezzled money that had been aimed
for the communities. Those involved in the preparatory phase of the project felt
betrayed when they realized that their expectations of place-based community de-
velopment were not represented in the nal design.
Participation during project implementation, in fact, became the joint responsi-
bility of the subcontracting companies and the project participation unit. In the
view of the planners there existed a lack of legitimate social representation, which
provided opportunities to opportunistic community leaders to mobilize vulnera-
ble members of the slum population, an euphemism for what is also denominated
the marginals (marginais), slum dwellers (favelados), or miserables. It was the role
of the PB to create such channels of democratic participation through the use of dig-
ital technologies that enabled residents to participate in the decision-making pro-
cess by prioritizing investment choices. Hence, an entire governmental structure
was created composed of PROMETRPOLE staff, social workers employed by the
subcontracting companies, PB municipal assistants, PT activists and coopted com-
munity leaders.
Koster and Nuijten (2012) describe very well the use of participatory methodolo-
gies for purposes of social control. They present us with a detailed analysis of the
project that point to its perverse effects (see also Nuijten et al 2012; Nuijten
2013). To begin with, the participatory commissions created by the social workers
led to the establishment of a truly system of social control exemplifying what Cooke
and Kothari (2001) denominate a tyranny of participation. Thus, much time was
spent on matters such as the use of toilets, the payment of electricity and water
bills, learning how to become a good neighbourhood, etc. This kind of normalizing,
disciplinary, power, in effect, served to demarcate the border between those who
were considered to be a part of the project (and therefore rightful participants)
and those who did not; between the deserving and the undeserving, between nor-
mal citizens and the troublesome who should be included as a special category
that had to be normalized.
This is not to say that normal citizens did not have an important say in the pro-
cess of implementation of the project. Much time was reserved to present the

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project in the comunidades (communities) and to make sure that it was supported.
This was not always easy though as residents felt empowered by the inclusive citi-
zenship discourse of the PT. As the project director asserted:
There was this comunidade where the better off resisted being relocated and demanded
better compensation conditions. The World Bank rules stipulated specied compensa-
tion amounts per house, but some of these people had houses with garages with remote
control devices. Thus we adopted a case for case approach. This was a very time con-
suming process that led to a delay of the project and increased costs, but we had to
do it as we were committed to proceed in a transparent and accountable way.

At the same time, a constant fear existed of invasions by a category of people who
had not been registered in the census and thus did not qualify for benets. As said,
one of the premises of PROMETRPOLE project was that in certain areas appropri-
ate conduits of social participation had to be created. This reected the distrust of
community leaders who threatened to wreak havoc by mobilizing this group. Much
time was therefore spent on dis-activating possible insurgencies by the participa-
tory team in collaboration with the municipal police. A case in point was the cana-
lization of the most congested part of one of the side-streams, that of Jacareizinho
(Koster and Nuijten 2012). The population living there was considered the poorest
and most marginal. The resettlement of this group was left to the end after the sup-
port of the rest of the comunidade had been ensured. In engineering terms this strat-
egy was not rational, but it did respond to the expediency of the social situation.
The PT participatory urban approach thus comprised a mixture of deliberation,
paternalistic repressive tolerance, and outright manipulation. It had to deal with a
highly unstable situation composed of normal citizens, marginal beneciaries who
had to be normalized and a group of squatters and non-eligibles whose very existence
had to be denied in order to keep up a semblance of order. In effect, keeping the ap-
pearance of harmony was a central element in the PT inclusive participatory approach.
How did the beneciaries respond to the situation? Nuijten (2013) points to the
paradoxical fact that many residents were highly positive about the results of the
project. This was particularly the case of those considered deserving, but also
individuals who had been subjected to the regime of social control surprisingly ap-
proved of the results of the project. They were particularly proud of the modernist
aesthetics of the renovated canal, the roads and the square. Moreover, as she argues,
many slum dwellers established affective ties with the social workers, hence
undermining the disciplinary intent of their practices. The project had been trau-
matic but they did not contest the results. Rather than resisting it, slum residents ap-
propriated the project and its history as an achievement for the community.
However, as we will see, the case of those labelled in-eligibles was quite different.

The Limits of Governmentality: The Disjuncture of

Belonging and Inclusion
It could be argued that the PROMETRPOLE project was successful in creating a
new constellation of inclusion and belonging that bridged the world of ofcialdom
on the one hand and that of informal settlement dwellers on the other, thus

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The Part of No Part in Recife, Brazil 11

expanding the governmental possibilities of progressive planners in a neoliberal

world. For one thing, there was a huge difference between the paternalism of the
tyranny of participation and past urban policies that aimed at slum eradication.
Resorting to overt forms of repression and authoritarianism was never an option.
Progressive policies such as granting residents houses in the neighbourhood were
consistently upheld. Furthermore, the PROMETRPOLE staff was continuously
forced to render accounts to the beneciaries and to the media, and had to defend
themselves from accusations of embezzlement. In effect, PROMETRPOLE was
portrayed as a good example of the PT style of participatory government: transpar-
ent, accountable and participatory in the process of decision-making. It did also
lead to enhanced feelings of inclusion and belonging amongst a considerable seg-
ment of the population.
However, as we saw, this success was accomplished through the creation of a
semblance of order that concealed the basic instability of the situation. Gillian Hart
critiques governmentality studies for the reason that they tend to see politics mainly
in terms of mentalities of rule, thus emphasizing the programmatic and textual
dimensions of governing. As she argues, [d]eliberate distancing from messy pro-
cesses of implementation means that the constitutive role of contestation drops
out of sight, and what remains is an insular and episodic vision of rule (Hart
2006:23). Indeed, we encounter here a sanitized view of the art of governing that
conceals the existence of all sorts of fears and anxieties that haunt the imagination
of planners (Hillier and Gunder 2003). This was overly apparent for the case of
PROMETRPOLE where the project staff had to battle on various fronts. They had to
deal with empowered citizens ready to resort to the media in order to discredit the
project, but also with marginal beneciaries who had to be educated/normalized.
As a result, a veritable apparatus of inclusion was created in order to deal with the
situation, epitomizing what Badiou calls the excess of the state over the situation.
There was also a continuous fear of invasions in areas that had been cleared for
infrastructural development by a category whose existence had to be disavowed,
a singular group whose common characteristic resides in not being part of the ur-
ban situation, the part of no part. This is the case of the homeless who wander
from favela to favela, unable to show proof of residence. As Koster (2014) shows,
for people who live on stilts obtaining and conserving identity papers is not easy.
At the same time, the state is suspicious of any element that is not ofcially repre-
sented. Since being able to show identity and residence documents is a condition
for being eligible for state services these people inhabit a stateless world. They
are non-eligible and ofcially non-existent.
The importance of this group for our understanding of the social order is crucial.
Thus, contrary to a governmentality approach that is premised on the assumption
that the order of things is accomplished through governmental technologies that
ensure as much proximity as possible between inclusion and belonging within
changing elds of power and knowledge, I argue that the gap between belonging
and inclusion is never sutured. In other words, there is always already a multiple
that neither belongs nor is included. The social, in effect, is grounded by a founda-
tional multiple whose subtraction enables the social situation to become consistent,
a multiple that is inexistent to the eyes of the state. This is a multiple that in-exists

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12 Antipode

and in-consists (Badiou 2007, 2008), that sits at the edge of the void. This incon-
sistent, absolutely singular, multiple functions as the return of the repressed, what
Lacan calls the Real, that which cannot appear in reality as part of the count, yet is
ever present in the fears and anxieties of governmental actors. Paying attention to
this multiple impels us to venture into Badious generic ontology of multiplicity.

Badious Generic Ontology of Multiplicity

Badious ontology of multiplicity is aimed at thinking of change as absolutely dis-
continuous, as an ontological disrupture of the order of things. The social, in his
view, is grounded in inconsistency. However, inconsistency should not be thought
of simply in negative terms, but dialectically, as that which heralds the possibility of
something radically new; in other words, a true event that renders possible the con-
stitution of a new world. To put it programmatically, an Event occurs, a Subject is
constituted, and a Truth is announced through delity to the event. This is Badious
sequence of EventSubjectTruth. In short, an event takes place when an abso-
lutely singular multiple subtracts itself from the count of the state. Badious ontol-
ogy is important because it helps us to understand politics in non-identitarian,
universalist and radical egalitarian terms, indifferent to any kind of identity politics.
Subjectivity comes into being through a subtractive process of dis-identication and
is universalist since it is grounded in delity to a TruthEvent. Egalitarianism for him
(as for Rancire) is not a goal to be pursued but a founding axiom of a true politics
(Swyngedouw 2010; van den Hemel 2008).
Next, I present a broad outline of Badious generic ontology of multiplicity as ap-
plied to the urban situation in Recife. In the conclusion I make the link between the
notion of absolutely singular multiple and the Event, as manifested in the popular
movements that erupted in the 1980s. For reasons of space I will be extremely
succinct.8

Being is pure or inconsistent multiplicity; that is the being of things stripped

of all their qualities (being qua being). Badiou asserts that ontology, the sci-
ence of being, is mathematics and is best understood through set theory. Set
theory counts multiples, whereby every multiple is always a multiple of
multiples.
The One is not; this is Badious way of proclaiming himself a materialist,
there is no God that guarantees the One. Likewise, there is no set of all sets
(this is the power-axiom in set theory). In short, there is no totality. Being is
pure inconsistency.
Since there is no One that gathers all multiples, there is no positive founda-
tion to being; in other words, the foundation of any multiple is the void
(the null set in set theory).
In order for being to appear situations must be discernible; a situation is a
structured presentation of a multiplicity predicated on relations of belong-
ing, and belonging only. This is what Badiou calls the rst count, producing
a consistent multiplicity. The rst count, therefore, creates situations com-
posed of sets (also called elements or members) on the basis of belonging.

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The Part of No Part in Recife, Brazil 13

However, since being is pure multiplicity and therefore indifferent, or re-

sistant, to presentation the structure of the situation is haunted by inconsis-
tency. Therefore, a second count, effected through the (state) logic of
inclusion, is necessary in order to re-secure the structure of the situation.
This is what Badiou calls the meta-structure, or state of the situation.
The state of the situation is a re-presentation of what is presented in the sit-
uation. It re-composes all the sets/members of the situation into subsets or
parts. So parts or subsets are included, whereas members belong. There is
an immeasurable excess of parts over members, of representation over pre-
sentation (this in conformity with the power axiom).
Since being is inconsistent, something totally new can arise. An ontology of
subtraction thinks pure multiplicity as the foundation of the Event by explor-
ing breaks, cuts, ruptures or withdrawals; in short subtractions.

Abstract as it may be, Badious subtractive ontology helps us to understand the

trajectory of urban participation in Recife as a response to the popular mobilizations
of the 1980s. Badiou, as said, conceives of every situation as a presentation of pure
multiplicity, dened solely by relations of belonging, whereby every multiple is al-
ways a multiple of multiples (Prozorov 2008:188). Thus Recife, as any other city
can be conceived as a structured multiplicity whose members (multiples in them-
selves) share relations of belonging to the urban situation: we can think of humans,
cats, dogs, the ora and fauna, etc., the urban situation as a multiple of multiples.
But, in order for the urban situation to appear, to be intelligible, it must be struc-
tured through a counting for one, what Badiou calls the structure of the situation,
for our purposes the social situation of the city of Recife. Recife, like any multiple, is
grounded in inconsistency, which is expressed in what planners and policy-makers
denominate the informal city, composed of a multiplicity of informal settlements,
also called favelas (slums), on account of the lack of infrastructure and poverty that
characterizes them. In effect, Recife has traditionally been presented as the city of
favelas, where very rich neighborhoods co-exist with slums were the very poor live,
an urban situation that requires a whole array of development interventions aimed
at making the city livable (i.e. consistent).
Thus, the structure of the situation, whereby a multiple is presented as a set be-
longing to another multiple must be re-secured by a second count that Badiou,
in an explicit analogy with the political realm, terms the state of the situation or
its metastructure. The point not to be lost is that there is a fundamental difference
between the rst and the second count. The rst count structures relations between
multiples on the basis of belonging, thus making the situation visible in all its incon-
sistency. The second count imposes a state order on the situation on the basis of
relations of inclusion.
In Recife, this second count can be discerned in the way the state sets out to ren-
der the informal city consistent by creating an apparatus of participatory gover-
nance that counted a variety of institutions such as the PREZEIS/COMULs, the PB,
the PROMETRPOLE slum upgrading project, etc. The need for re-securing consis-
tency through a second, re-presentative, count permits us to understand Badious
characterization of the metastructure in political terms as an excess of the state over

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14 Antipode

the situation. The state, Badiou argues, is not concerned with individuals belonging
to a situation, but with parts that can be represented in the state of the situation or
metastructure. In effect, the best way to grasp the operation of the metastructure is
to conceive it as the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. As he puts it:

This [statist] coercion consists in not being held to be someone who belongs to society
but as someone who is included within society. The state is fundamentally indifferent
to belonging yet it is constantly concerned with inclusion. Any consistent subset is im-
mediately counted and considered by the state, for better or worse, because it is a matter
of representation. Despite the protestations and declarations to the contrary, it is always
evident that in the end, when it is a matter of peoples lives the State is not concerned
(Badiou 2005:107108).

The disjuncture between belonging and inclusion can be illustrated further by in-
terrogating the difference between the notions of comunidade and favela. In Recife,
favela is a derogatory term, used to designate locations were the very poor live,
characterized by criminality and promiscuity. The favela in Recife is seen as a non-
place, and the state has historically developed diverse strategies for dealing with
it, ranging from eradication to upgrading, pacication and abandonment.
The comunidade, on the other hand, is the consistent counterpart of the favela. It
is an authorized entity receiving state protection and as such it operates as a legiti-
mate part of the city. In Badiouan terms, it forms part of the state of the situation,
set in place to avert the ghost of inconsistency that haunts the urban situation. The
comunidade is both a product of technologies of governing intended to deal with
problems of informality, poverty, criminality and marginality, and the expression
of desires of belonging by the poor. It is a double-sided concept aimed at bridging
the gap between inclusion and belonging, a way for the state to engage with squat-
ters and vice versa. While residents are proud of the achievements of their
comunidade, which confer them a degree of respectability, the comunidade always
carries the stigma of the favela, on account of having evolved out of it, or of includ-
ing favelas in parts of its territory. Applying Badious distinction between inclusion
and belonging it can be said that residents of the comunidade represent a multiple
of people who both belong and are included, who are presented in the situation
and represented by the state. This is a normal multiple.
Further, the comunidade (community), counts numerous organizations such as
the COMUL, project implementation committees, the PB, housing associations,
schools, NGOs, etc., through which residents nd representation in the state. Thus
sets/members that belong to the structure of the situation are counted in multiple
ways as parts of the metastructure (as voters, beneciaries of state services, as reg-
istered residents, etc.). Henceforth, there is an immeasurable excess of inclusion
over belonging. Subsets that are included in the state of the situation, but do
not belong to the (original) situation are called by Badiou excrescent multiples. The
importance of the concept of excrescence is that it pinpoints the ways in which
the state imposes an order on the situation through the construction of regimes
of representation as attested by all kinds of classicatory schemes.
The favela, in turn, stands for the poorest, most inaccessible and dangerous sec-
tors of the comunidade, as it counts among its members favelados, also called

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The Part of No Part in Recife, Brazil 15

miserables (the very poor) or marginais (i.e. criminals, the undeserving, the undesir-
ables), in short non-citizens. The favela belongs to the urban situation but cannot
be included in the state of the situation, since the state does not count non-
citizens as parts of the metastructure. The favela is an inconsistent multiplicity or
as Badiou puts it a singular multiple; a multiple that must be normalized (in plan-
ning terms upgraded) in order to create parts that can be counted by the state.
Thus, the favela in-consists.
The census designed for PROMETRPOLE presents us with a good example of a
technology of governing epitomizing the excrescence of the state, the excess of in-
clusion over belonging. The census counts normal residents and maladapted
elements who belong but who must be normalized so as to be included. But the
census also creates a supernumerary category consisting of uncounted elements:
the non-eligibles. The census, thus, is a good example of a counting of parts
through inclusion, indifferent to the fate of individuals. As argued, the census was
contested as it was always claimed that there were (family) members who had
not been registered, and thus were not eligible for compensation. These claims
were seen by the state as acts of utterly opportunism and the reaction of project
staff was simply to deny the existence of these relatives. Thus a multiple was cre-
ated, that of the non-eligibles, whose members did not exist to the eyes of the
state. In Badiouan terms, a part whose content cannot be counted, an empty part.
This category represents well the dilemma of the state, the impossibility to suture
the gap between inclusion and belonging, hence impelling it to deal with a multi-
ple, none of whose elements is presented in the situation.
To summarize, applying Badious views on the disjunction between inclusion
and belonging to the urban situation in Recife, we can differentiate four multiples:

A normal multiple is a multiple that both belongs and is included in the state of
the situation. Residents of comunidades characterized as not troublesome belong
to the situation and are included by the state apparatus as deserving citizens.
An excrescent multiple; a multiple or subset that is included in the state of
the situation but does not belong to the (original) situation. This is the case
of groups, associations, project organizations, but also the PB and the
PREZEIS, NGOs, etc. These are subsets that serve to include individuals, not
according to relations of belonging, but following the classicatory, inclu-
sionary, logic of the state. Excrescence points to the excess of inclusion over
belonging, of representation over presentation (Badiou 2005:104111).
A singular multiple is a set that is presented in the situation without nding
representation in its metastructure. It cannot be included in the state of the
situation, or grasped as a part, because it contains, as a multiple, individuals
who are not accepted by the state count. This is the case of the favela, featur-
ing marginal elements, among whom there are criminals and miserables. But
some can be educated, normalized and thus nally be included as deserving
citizens. A singular multiple is denitely a one-multiple of the situation, but it
is indecomposable (Badiou 2005:99).
An absolutely singular multiple is an inconsistent multiple that belongs to
the situation in a virtual, ctive way as it is composed by spectral, inexistent,

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16 Antipode

elements. This is the case of the non-eligibles. Do they belong to the

comunidade, to the favela? In the view of slum dwellers, yes, in that of the
state denitely not. The project acknowledged the existence of this multiple
as a problem to be tackled through repressive measures, yet, no possibility of
inclusion existed, since what in-exists cannot be included. As Badiou puts it,
[w]ithin the situation this multiple is, but that of which it is the multiple is
not. Paradoxically, such a multiple belongs to the situation whilst what
belongs to it in turn does not (2005:173). In set theoretical terms this is
an impossible multiple,9 and for Badiou therefore the source of the new.
Absolutely singular multiples are foundational multiples, on the edge of
the void (Badiou 2005:175). They constitute what Badiou (2005:173) calls
evental sites; that is, multiples which, without guaranteeing the eruption of
the event, condition its possibility.
It is easy to understand why the category of non-eligibles constitutes in Recife an
absolutely singular multiple that sits on the edge of the void. They are the miser-
ables, wandering throughout the city, from favela to favela, the part of no part, the
foundational void that stands for the inconsistency of the urban situation. Badious
most important contribution perhaps is the thinking of this pure inconsistent mul-
tiple as the site of the event. This is the subject of the conclusion.

Conclusion: Thinking the Event

The famous Pernambucan geographer Josu de Castro (1970) depicts in his famous
novel Of Men and Crabs the relationship between swamps and the poor in what he
calls the amphibious nature of economic survival in Recife. He compares poor
Recifeans with crabs who live in, and off, the swamp in what he names the cycle
of the crab. De Castro describes the underside of Recife, the history of the poor
who survived on the riversides and swamps of the city, in Badiouan terms at the
edge of the void. As de Castro shows, the swamp dwellers of Recife had neither
a historical nor social existence to the eyes of the state. This is not to say that it
was not known that the swamps were inhabited by human beings that lived in dis-
mal conditions, but as individuals they did not count. Yet, in the 1980s, during the
popular mobilizations, they suddenly irrupted into the political scene of the city
with fateful consequences. This was a truly political event setting forth a political se-
quence by rendering visible what was invisible, and exposing the wrongs of the
present order (Swyngedouw 2010). This resonates with Badious view that an
event takes place when an absolutely singular multiple, subtracted from the count
of the state, irrupts in the public sphere and recongures the political scene. The
question I end this article with is how to think the Event in Recife that rendered pos-
sible the constitution of a new kind of subject, the poor, who proclaimed that they
belonged to the city.
Badiou (2005) is famous for assertingcontrary to poststructuralist thinking
that something truly new is possible, what he calls the taking place of place, an
event that irrupts and that transforms, from within, the very parameters of the situ-
ation, and whose existence becomes incarnated in a TruthEvent. After the Event

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The Part of No Part in Recife, Brazil 17

nothing is ever more the same for those who hold delity to it. What distinguishes
the subject from the human animal is its capacity to constitute itself through delity
to an Event. As against Foucault who saw Truth as a historical construction pro-
duced in relations of power and knowledge, and thus always-already immanent
to a given a discursive regime, or Deleuze who theorized the event as a form of
becoming, Badiou is emphatic in seeing Truth as springing up from a subtraction
by a pure inconsistent element that ruptures the order of things (Hallward 2003).
In this regard Badiou reverses the poststructuralist doxa which sees knowledge as
productive and Truth as static. For him it is the contrary; Truth changes everything,
creates subjectivity, while knowledge is the doxa enshrined in what he calls the
encyclopaedia.
Dom Helder Camara arrived in Olinda in 1964 to become Archbishop the day
that the military coup took place. He soon became involved in the organization of
the popular movement for the right to the city. The magnitude and signicance
of the unfolding squatter invasions cannot be underestimated, converting it into
a truly Event that was accompanied by the irruption of a new kind of subjectivity,
that of the poor as the Children of God. This in Badiouan terms accords with the se-
quence EventSubjectTruth. The Event exposed the Truth of the city, the fact that
its history is that of the poor, those who were deprived of the right to belong to the
city.
But an event is not something that just happens; it is something that has to be
declared. For an event to take place, a decision is needed on account of which a
subject is constituted through delity to the Event. Such a truth declaration refers an
Event to another Event and this is what sustains the innity/eternity of a Truth. The
history of the popular mobilizations in Recife in the 1980s and the subsequent
establishment of a structure of representation aimed at giving voice to the poor
has not been widely documented in the social science literature. Drawing upon a
Badiouan perspective, I set out to engage with it as an Event that created a Subject
that stands for the Truth of the city; a subject who sits at the edge of the void,
what Badiou names the part of no part. In documenting this history I aim to show
delity to this Event.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the South Africa Netherlands research Programme on Alternatives in De-
velopment (SANPAD) and its Dutch host WOTRO Science for Global Development of the
Netherlands Organisation for Scientic Research for partial funding. Martijn Koster and
Monique Nuijten have, as always, been encouraging and critical commentators.

Endnotes
1
Francisco de Oliveira (2006) is a good exponent of the disenchantment of the PT by critical
intellectuals.
2
The literature on participation is huge and this is not the place to review it. I do lump very
different perspectives under the heading of prescriptive for the reason that irrespective of
the level of theoretical reection they aim to contribute to better practice. For a good
discussion of the debate on participation from a critical realist perspective, see Hickey
and Mohan (2005).

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18 Antipode

3
See Lemke (2001) and Rose et al. (2006) for good expositions of Foucaults governmentality
theory.
4
Philosophically this position is called correlationism, dened by Quentin Meillassoux as
the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking
and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other (2008:5).
5
For its efforts, PREZEIS has received international recognition; UN-HABITAT acknowledges
PREZEIS Good Practice in its Best Practices project. In 2001 the Brazilian Congress ap-
proved this land policy in the Statute of the City, making it available to any municipality
in the country (Donovan 2007:18). PREZEIS was particularly innovative in its prioritization
of shelter over legal land right and in its prohibition of building above a certain number of
oors within the ZEISa regulation which rendered these areas less attractive in terms of
land speculation.
6
See Biaocchi (2003) for a number of good analyses of the PB Program.
7
Citing the project document: The PROMETRPOLE Program will take steps to avoid non-
eligible people and those who install themselves in an area with the intention of taking ad-
vantage of the Program, beneting improperly from supportive measures of resettlement.
For this reason, all the families and their goods within an area subject to relocation will be
registered right at the start of the participative planning process with the community. The
date registration takes place will be the date limit to determine eligibility for consideration
for resettlement. On this same date, the responsible administrative body will apply legal
steps to freeze new unplanned housing constructions in the intervention area of
PROMETRPOLE for the period stipulated for elaboration and approval of the Urban Plan.
Squatters arriving after the freeze, contrary to the intentions of the local intervention, will
not have the right to demand compensation for loss or resettlement. See http://www2.
prometropole.pe.gov.br/web/prometropole (last accessed 22 October 2015).
8
I draw on Protevis (2009) lecture notes on his blog.
9
Such a set would in terms of set theory belong to itself, something which is strictly
prohibited by the axiom of foundation (Badiou 2005:185187).

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