and resources, including money and the use of armed violence.
We argue that a normative set of plural and coexisting regimes of action, structured by coexisting normative regimes, maintain urban order in São Paulo. Our approach is inspired by the idea of “coexistence of social orders” discussed in a long tradition of Brazilian and Brazilianist authors working on urban conflict and violence (Arias and Barnes 2017; Feltran 2010, 2012; Grillo 2013; Cabanes 2014; Machado da Silva 1967, 1993, 1999, 2004, 2016; Misse 2006, 2018; Stepputat 2013). For these authors, the hypothesis that urban conflict occurs between subjects who do not share the same plausible parameters of action is crucial. By extension, such subjects do not occupy merely different positions in a common urban order – they are distributed throughout different and coexistent urban orders.
Different analytical traditions discuss the same issue in political terms. Concepts such as hybrid sovereignty, hybrid orders or “governscapes” are called on to explain empirical challenges to modern states and to interpret fierce violent contexts (Arias and Barnes 2017; Das 2007a; Lessing 2017; Mbembe 2003; Stepputat 2013, 2015, 2018; Willis 2015). Alternative concepts such as “regimes d’engagement” (Thevenot 2006), “forms of life” (Das 2006), and “modes d’existence” (Latour 2005) gave us relevant insights, but they failed to inform the normative and relational dimensions we face within São Paulo’s urban conflict.
Urban theory has also been insightful (Inverses Collectif 2016; Parnel and Robinson, 2012; Simone 2013), although it does not address how violence theoretically relates to urban order and urban inequality. As in many other regions of the so-called Global South, large Brazilian cities are witnessing rapid transformations. They represent an extremely potent analytical object in the field of urban studies and also a theoretical challenge. Cities like São Paulo allow us to think about the new transnational geographies of urban informality as an ordering logic (Roy and AlSayyad 2004) that mobilizes interpersonal engagements that act as infrastructures (Simone 2004) as well as forms of popular politics (Chatterjee 2004). These forms can unveil conflicting rationalities vis-à-vis a planning and managerial rationality (Watson 2003). At the same time, they allow a problematization of certain central concepts in contemporary urban theory, such as modernity, development (Robinson 2006), subalternity (Roy 2011), and neoliberalism (Parnell and Robinson 2012). Such big concepts are usually associated with normative readings about cities, often shaped from large “global cities” of developed countries (Sassen 2007). According to this reading, the “megacities of the global South” would represent an “other” with respect to what cities should be (Roy, 2011). Literature requests us to study these marginal cities taking them as a locus of original production of urban theory (Parnell and Robinson 2012). Our contribution empirically demonstrates how stolen cars connect otherness, manifesting violent conflicts and forms of unequal regulation between normative regimes. The mechanisms through which this happens challenge normative definitions about the city and urban management. “Making the City” means producing local order and its ordinary contours. When fierce conflictive situations last for decades without any political synthesis, local sources of authority can reproduce relatively autonomous social orders, structured not by official institutions but by ordinary infrastructures.
Jacques Rancière, in his classic work La Mésentente (1995), pursues a related conceptual argument. For Rancière, the key conflict that helps us to understand contemporary power struggles does not occur when one says “white” and another says “black.” Black vs. white dispute would be only a secondary, sequential, and managerial dimension – what Rancière calls the “police” – of the original, essential, and political conflict that occurs when one says “white” and another also says “white” but they do not understand each other. Because between these subjects there is a radical and paradoxically “mutual” incomprehension about the criteria (Rancière 1995), the many plausible meanings (Wittgenstein 2009; Cavell 2006), and the pragmatic effects of whiteness, as they are understood by each ‘actant’ (Boltanski and Thevenot 1991; Thevenot 2006; Werneck 2012).
Let’s take an example. Three subjects – which we will call here Norris, Alvin, and Cumulus – born in the same city, a contemporary European capital, which we will call Saint George. All three don’t feel safe in Saint George, so they want more security in their daily lives. The first two, Norris and Alvin, present their arguments about what security means to them: they want to feel protected from ordinary urban violence, but especially from terrorism. Both agree that, although it is on the rise, ordinary crime is rare and generally without serious consequences in Saint George. Terrorism, on the other hand, is a real and potentially lethal threat.
For Norris, achieving security means more democracy and social justice. Norris believes in democracy, and insecurity is a structural problem for him, linked to the inequalities and social exclusions that have persisted since colonialism. If all interest groups, all ethnic, religious, generational or class groups really shared the same world, we would achieve something much greater, where everyone would have their place in security. Whether in the multicultural equation, in the republican or federalist equation, it doesn’t matter, subjects and communities can share the same public space. Norris sees many successful examples of this coexistence. The equation of differences takes place under conditions of political equality (the premise of citizenship, to be granted to all) and the quest for social equality (to be achieved through Saint George’s redistribution policies).
Yet, for Alvin, this same security can only be achieved by rehabilitating values that are now lost. It is the State that must guarantee security, and the active repression of the state against crime, through preventive actions towards the youngest, is necessary. Above all, the State must act against terrorist organizations. Alvin wants more cameras, more surveillance, and more State control. He wants more police and military intelligence, tougher laws against common crimes but especially against terrorist attacks. Alvin believes that defending his values has nothing to do with reducing social diversity or disrespecting cultural, ethnic, and national differences. He simply does not accept that the fundamental rules of civilized coexistence, which include respect for the law and other citizens, should be violated. The law applies to everyone. Since it has been repeatedly flouted, greater control over all people is needed. And this control must come from the State.
Until now, the conflict between the positions of Norris and Alvin has opened the way for sequential debates, which focus on shared diagnoses and divergent solutions. They defend quite different concrete policies or even global political projects of being in the world. They have divergent views on how to address the problem of growing insecurity. The difference between the positions of Norris and Alvin separates right and left, but both have a common understanding of security: they do not accept ordinary crime or terrorism. One says white and the other says black, one may dislike the other, but pragmatically both recognize each other as interlocutors. One says white and the other black, but both admit that white and black are categories of the same order, the palette of colors. Although they express different political projects, their positions are part of the same palette, the same political spectrum, the same normative regime. They are part of the structure of material regulations of the contemporary state, with its instruments, its techniques, and its bureaucracy. Elections will show which position will take precedence in the republic, in multiculturalism, or in any other universalist premise equation. The public debate between their positions aims at finding possible syntheses, plausible practices for both sides in a common world.
However, when Cumulus enters the scene, these syntheses are no longer possible without destroying the framework in which the previous debate was elaborated. Our third subject does not share with Alvin nor Norris a common base of ideas about the world; he does not consider security in the same way at all. He believes that there is no possibility of security for all, and that there never was. Cumulus says that Alvin and Norris think this way because they have always had everything, including security, while he, and especially his forefathers, have never had anything. Precisely because Norris and Alvin stole everything from them, from him, from his ancestors, from his community, in wars and barbaric invasions. Cumulus goes further and even says that Alvin and Norris continue to steal his land and kill his relatives, even without knowing it. Cumulus considers
