The Right to Dignity

Housing Struggles, City Making, and Citizenship in Urban Chile

Miguel Pérez (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

264 Seiten

2022
Stanford University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5036-3152-6 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

In the poorest neighborhoods of Santiago, Chile, low-income residents known as pobladores have long lived at the margins—and have long advocated for the right to housing as part of la vida digna (a life with dignity). From 2011 to 2015, anthropologist Miguel Pérez conducted fieldwork among the pobladores of Santiago, where the urban dwellers and activists he met were part of an emerging social movement that demanded dignified living conditions, the right to remain in their neighborhoods of origin, and, more broadly, recognition as citizens entitled to basic rights. This ethnographic account raises questions about state policies that conceptualize housing as a commodity rather than a right, and how poor urban dwellers seek recognition and articulate political agency against the backdrop of neoliberal policies.

By scrutinizing how Chilean pobladores constitute themselves as political subjects, this book reveals the mechanisms through which housing activists develop new imaginaries of citizenship in a country where the market has been the dominant force organizing social life for almost forty years. Pérez considers the limits and potentialities of urban movements, framed by poor people's involvement in subsidy-based programs, as well as the capacity of low-income residents to struggle against the commodification of rights by claiming the right to dignity: a demand based on a moral category that would ultimately become the driving force behind Chile's 2019 social uprising.

Miguel Pérez is Director of the Anthropology program at Diego Portales University (Chile) and Associate Researcher at the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (Chile).

1. Housing the Poor in a Neoliberal City

2. Peripheral Struggles for Housing: The Pobladores Movement

3. Mobilizing While Waiting: The State-Regulated Comités de Allegados

4. Performances of City Making

5. Politics of Effort: Urban Formulations of Citizenship

6. Toward a Life with Dignity: Ethical Practices, New Political Horizons

7. Conclusion: "Until Dignity Becomes Custom"

Erscheinungsdatum	28.03.2022
Zusatzinfo	4 tables, 10 halftones, 4 maps
Verlagsort	Palo Alto
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie ► Völkerkunde (Naturvölker)
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-5036-3152-4 / 1503631524
ISBN-13	978-1-5036-3152-6 / 9781503631526
Zustand	Neuware