Sowing hope, harvesting justice: How Vila Nova Esperança transformed the environment into an ally to claim rights

Sammanfattning: The presence of informal settlements in large cities of the developing world is a concrete expression of urban poverty. The residents of Brazilian favelas are more likely to be exposed to environmental risks, lower life quality and risks of eviction. Additionally, there is a common generalization of associating favela residents with illegality, criminality and pollution. Using a political ecology and environmental justice perspective, I study Vila Nova Esperança’s community in São Paulo, whose residents actively resisted the state-driven ‘degradation narrative’ that blamed them for degrading the recently created Tizo Park. To claim their right to stay, residents of Vila Nova Esperança collectively created a counter-narrative, cleaning their neighborhood, planting vegetables and building living spaces with reused materials. I aim to understand how the environmental initiatives developed by residents support their struggle for staying in the area and getting access to public urban infrastructure. To understand what people are doing and what they take from it, I used participant observation, individual and focus group interviews. In addition, I conducted a quantitative online content analysis to assess the potential role played by online media in disclosing Vila Nova Esperança as a role model. I describe the factors that enable and legitimize the environmental initiatives, as well as the tangible and intangible benefits which improve residents’ life quality. By changing the space they live in, residents go through a selfrecognition process that shows them they are capable and empowers them. This process attracted external actors to collaborate as partners and caught attention from the media. Throughout the years, Vila Nova Esperança has successfully gotten the right to stay and achieved access to basic services and infrastructure, provided by the same state agencies that once were seen as enemies. Drawing on the study of Vila Nova Esperança, it is possible to understand how favela residents are active agents of change and able to overcome status subordination, counter narratives representing them as ‘secondclass’ citizens and, in the long term, achieve justice.