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Journal of Change Management


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Changing La Chureca: Organizing City


Resilience Through Action Nets
a b
María José Zapata Campos & Patrik Zapata
a
Gothenburg Research Institute (GRI), School of Business
Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg , Sweden
b
School of Public Administration , University of Gothenburg ,
Sweden
Published online: 18 Jun 2012.

To cite this article: María José Zapata Campos & Patrik Zapata (2012) Changing La Chureca:
Organizing City Resilience Through Action Nets, Journal of Change Management, 12:3, 323-337,
DOI: 10.1080/14697017.2012.673073

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Journal of Change Management
Vol. 12, No. 3, 323– 337, September 2012

Changing La Chureca: Organizing City


Resilience Through Action Nets
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MARÍA JOSÉ ZAPATA CAMPOS∗ & PATRIK ZAPATA∗∗



Gothenburg Research Institute (GRI), School of Business Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg,
Sweden, ∗∗ School of Public Administration, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

ABSTRACT This article aims to contribute to the literature on city organizing, an important yet
under-researched area in the intersection of organization theory and urban studies. The concepts
of the city and change, translation and action nets are fundamental to this analysis. The study
takes as its object the collective process of organizing the change of La Chureca, the rubbish
dump of the city of Managua, Nicaragua. Through its translation into a global spectacle of
degradation, La Chureca has become a flagship for urban change projects. La Chureca is
referred to as an example of an ‘uncanny place’. In association with urban social movements,
these uncanny places are strong catalysts for mobilizing urban change and resilience. The article
concludes by discussing the revival of the local in Latin American cities and the permeation of
the historical role of urban movements as agents of change in the processes of urban governance
and managing resilience.

KEY WORDS : City management, translation, action nets, city resilience, urban movements

Introduction
With this article, we aim to contribute to the literature on city organizing
(Czarniawska, 2002; 2010; Clegg and Kornberger, 2006; Czarniawska and
Hernes, 2005; Kornberger and Carter, 2010; Vaara et al., 2010). The article is
based upon a case study of the collective process of organizing the change of La
Chureca – the rubbish dump of the city of Managua, Nicaragua. Around 2,000
scavengers work there daily in extremely unhealthy conditions, collecting,
sorting and selling recyclables and valuables they recover amongst the rubbish.
Years ago, a squatter settlement was spontaneously constructed in the proximity

Correspondence Address: Patrik Zapata, School of Public Administration, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Email: patrik.zapata@spa.gu.se

1469-7017 Print/1479-1811 Online/12/030323–15 # 2012 Taylor & Francis


http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14697017.2012.673073
324 M.J. Zapata Campos & P. Zapata
of the dump, and is now a rubbish slum where almost 300 families live (Grigsby,
2008). In the La Chureca slum, prostitution, sexual exploitation, drug abuse,
child labour and school absenteeism are all prevalent. Residents of La Chureca
live in extreme poverty, earning less than US$1 per person per day (UNDP,
2000). Moreover, the conditions at the dump, such that the rubbish is mismanaged
(or rather un-managed), are causing heavy contamination of nearby Lake Xolotlán
and thus affect the health and environmental safety not only of La Chureca’s dwell-
ers but of the whole metropolitan area of Managua.
During the 1990s, national and international non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) and other Nicaraguan civil society organizations started a number of
development programmes in La Chureca. These were designed to repair the
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slum-dwellers’ evident material needs, related to health, food, shelter and the era-
dication of child labour. These organizations succeeded in problematizing La
Chureca in the mass media, constructing it as the embodiment of extreme
poverty in Managua and, by extension, in Nicaragua (Zapata Campos, 2010;
Zapata Campos and Zapata, forthcoming). La Chureca symbolizes the worst of
the faces of poverty in Nicaragua, a country that rates as the second poorest in
the Americas (Programa para las Naciones Unidas al Desarrollo [PNUD], 2010).
Since 2008 the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation
(Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo; AECID)
together with the Managua local government (Alcaldia de Managua; ALMA)
has run an urban regeneration project, the Acahualinca Development Project,
that aims to shut down the dump and change the physical, economic and social
conditions in the rubbish slum as well as at the dumpsite. However, this is not
the focus of this article. Instead, the article investigates the previous collective
process of organizing the change of La Chureca, which resulted in the Acahua-
linca Development Project.
The significance of the study of La Chureca can be related to urban issues of
broader concern, such as the dynamics of spontaneous settlements, processes of
over-urbanization and the organizing of urban change in the context of Latin
American cities, and/or cities of the global South. These issues are presented in
the next section. The theoretical approach and methods used to gather and
analyse the data are given, followed by presentation and analysis of the main find-
ings, which are then discussed by connecting the literature on city management,
urban studies and change. The article concludes with reflections about the pro-
cesses of organizing change in spontaneous settlements elsewhere and the role
of agents of change such as urban social movements, NGOs and governmental
organizations.

Spontaneous Settlements, the Informal City and Urban Disaster


During recent decades the process of urbanization in the global South, whereby
city growth has been decoupled from urbanization (Davis, 2006) and has
evolved towards processes of favelization (Browder and Godfrey, 1997) or
over-urbanization (Gugler, 1997), has been transformed by globalization. The
effects of neoliberal policies, agriculture deregulation, structural adjustment pro-
grammes, shrinkage of the national governments and the liberalization of
Organizing City Resilience Through Action Nets 325
international trade have all played a role in precipitating massive rural migration
resulting in the growth of spontaneous settlements in cities. Not by chance, most
mega city-slums have emerged and grown since the 1960s: in 2005 it was already
estimated that there were more than one billion slum-dwellers in the world, repre-
senting a third of the global urban population (UN-Habitat, 2003).
In Nicaragua, although the process started in the 1950s, the intensification of
migration rates towards the city of Managua were accentuated during the 1980s
and 1990s, both motivated by massive rural migrations and people displaced
from the war against the US-funded Contras (Parés Barberena, 2006). The over-
whelming majority of this urban growth occurred in the over expanding informal
settlements in the inner city as well as in its periphery, such as the La Chureca
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rubbish slum. Informal settlements mushroomed after illegal land invasions by


squatter communities. With the support of some populist national governments,
such as the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s, Latin American
squatting took the form of land invasions in which land occupiers targeted under-
developed public land or the estates of a single large landowner (Davis, 2006,
p. 38). As a result, tens of millions of Latin Americans have participated in
illegal land invasions during the second half of the twentieth century (Dosh and
Lerager, 2006). Whilst land invasions were the result of illegal squatter commu-
nity action, there were also pirate urbanizations that were the result of illegal sub-
division of land lots usually sold with a minimum of services (Gilbert, 1981).
As in many Latin American cities, rapid and unplanned over-urbanization has
resulted in 30 –40% of Managua consisting of spontaneous settlements (Parés
Barberena, 2006). As in other parts of the world, the formal city, with legal and
standard services, has often been reduced to an island in an ocean of slums
(Abbott, 2004). The institutionalization of the informal city (also called urban
informality; Roy and Alsayyad, 2004), has become an intrinsic characteristic of
Latin American cities in which the formal and the informal city are intertwined
(Hernández et al., 2010).
The story of La Chureca is not so very different from that of spontaneous settle-
ments elsewhere. Tragic as it is, La Chureca is ‘not the worst of the informal settle-
ments and poverty pockets in the city of Managua’ (Interviewee). Albeit highly
stigmatized, the inhabitants of La Chureca have an income from scavenging,
which is much more than many other poor urban residents can claim. In
Managua, as in other cities of the global South, ‘neither all poor live in marginal
conditions, nor all the illegals are urban poor’ (Parés Barberena, 2006, p. 7).
Although spontaneous settlements are ‘anything but homogeneous’ (Gilbert,
2007, p. 69), they do have some common features: their dwellers often live in
overcrowded settlements with high levels of insecurity, poor or informal
housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and they often lack
legal title to illegally acquired land (UN-Habitat, 2003).
The rapid growth of the informal city occurs through the fast and uncontrolled
multiplication of spontaneous settlements. In some respects, these settlements
have resemblances with the landscape of urban disasters, whether natural calami-
ties such as earthquakes or hurricanes (Campanella, 2006; Graham, 2006); tech-
nological apocalypses, such as those related to nuclear accidents; the collapse
of critical urban infrastructure, such as major power outages causing black outs
326 M.J. Zapata Campos & P. Zapata
(e.g. Graham and Thrift, 2007), or choreographed spectaculars, such as terrorism
attacks (e.g. Clegg and Courpasson, 2007). Economic, political and other disasters
often result in ‘a cluster of traumatic episodes, rather than a single disaster’ (Vale
and Campanella, 2005, p. 7). In Nicaragua, it was the joint effects of agricultural
crisis and war that displaced Nicaraguans from the countryside towards the city of
Managua and led to over-urbanization. When cities experience disasters, includ-
ing rapid over-urbanization, questions of their resilience come into play: urban
resilience refers to the capacity of cities to withstand and recover from disasters
(Campanella, 2006). In other words, having urban resilience entails organizing
change and recovery in the city under critical stress.
A number of institutions are involved in the process of managing resilience,
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including public, private and non-governmental organizations. Which of these


various organizations enact the organizing of change varies. In cities in demo-
cratic and wealthy societies, public organizations are usually strong actors;
however, in such as agricultural crisis or the war that displaced Nicaraguans
from the countryside towards the city of Managua, governmental organizations
are often weak or absent. The silent encroachment of globalizing processes in
the cities of the South has hampered local control of city management (Castells,
1996). Rather than urban authorities predominantly organizing change, multina-
tional corporations, international financial programmes, NGOs or aid agencies
are the main actors; a tendency, which, in its extreme, has been called city govern-
ance without government (Rosenau, 1992; Davies 2000).

Studying La Chureca’s Change


For Barbara Czarniawska (2002), city management can be conceptualized as a
complex action net, comprising collective actions connected to one another
according to an institutionalized pattern at a given time and in a given place (Czar-
niawska, 2004). From this perspective, city management can be understood as ‘a
set of actions accomplished within a seamless web of interorganizational net-
works, wherein city authorities constitute just one point of entry’ (Czarniawska,
2010, p. 420). In the city arena, a multitude of actors coexist, coming from differ-
ent levels, areas of policy, sectors and industries. They often have different and
conflicting interests, do not share long- and short-term approaches, and have
different visions of how urban development is induced. As a hybrid space for
diverse organizational projects, organizing the city brings together a multiplicity
of cultures, reflected in the construction of multiple action nets regarding the ques-
tion of city management and change, as Czarniawska (2010) puts it: ‘Organizing
the city means connecting actions to one another’ (p. 420).
Using an action net permits us to understand, analytically, how connections
between actions, often loosely coupled, eventually create actors at a given time
and in a given place: for instance, it is collecting recyclables that make one a sca-
venger, not that she is known as one. The action net is the analysis’ starting point,
as Czarniawska (2004) writes: ‘Action nets are (. . .) a way of looking at things
(. . .) studying action nets means answering a dual question: what is being done,
and how does this connect to other things that are being done in the same
context?’ (p. 784).
Organizing City Resilience Through Action Nets 327
The notion of translation applies not only to linguistic translations – from the
language of aid development organizations to the language of journalists – but
also to objects, images and actions. Translation is ‘the mechanism whereby con-
necting is achieved’ (Lindberg and Czarniawska, 2006, p. 295) or, expressed dif-
ferently, the process whereby collective actions are connected to each other. In the
city of Managua, a large number of translators turned events into words, pictures
and numbers. In the process, La Chureca was translated by a local action net from
a local blight into a global representation of urban distress. In the La Chureca
action net, politicians, slum-dwellers, journalists, bloggers, volunteers, aid devel-
opment workers or public officers working for the waste municipal service are
some of the key translators. Some of their translations connect actions that contrib-
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ute to the organizing of change in the city. In the translation process, as elaborated
by Czarniawska and Joerges (1996, p. 46), an idea is disembedded from its insti-
tutional surroundings, packaged into an object, translated and unpacked to fit the
new context, and translated locally into a new practice, and re-embedded.
The study of organizing rather than organization (Weick, 1969) implies the
study of ongoing processes and not temporal reifications of them (as organiz-
ations). In organization studies, change has traditionally been seen as either a
planned action or a reactive adaption to the environment. For us, however,
change should be conceptualized as the materialization of ideas through trans-
lation processes: which ideas and what they lead to is what constitutes the
action net (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996). In this article, our interest is in the
collective actions that become connected to one another in logical successions
of translations, contributing to the process of organizing the change of La Chureca.
The data analysed in this article was gathered during a field visit to Managua
from December 2009 to March 2010. The research was qualitative in nature
(Silverman, 2006) based on semi-structured interviews, observation of meetings,
participation in workshops, and analysis of project and mass media documents.
During fieldwork personal interviews were conducted with 40 key actors related
to La Chureca and the Acahualinca Development Project; the authors took part
in non-participant observation over a multitude of meetings and events during
the implementation of the project, and wrote a field diary. Of special interest
for this article were the interviews conducted with actors such as the director of
the Nicaraguan NGO Dos Generaciones and other NGOs operating at La
Chureca, the AECID Nicaragua CEO, and journalists who had been covering
the story of La Chureca during the last years, as they could provide stories
about how La Chureca became a project.
Press coverage about La Chureca from 1990 to 2010 in the largest Nicaraguan
(Nuevo Diario and La Prensa) and Spanish (El Paı́s, El Mundo, ABC) newspapers
was followed using online search engines. Using Google a number of blogs, social
networks, webs and video-sharing websites on YouTube were identified, captur-
ing photos, films and texts about La Chureca. Most of the field material was
textual (interviews, interview notes, pieces of news, observations and field
notes) although photos taken during the fieldwork were also used, as well as
photographs and images found in the mass media analysis. The material collected
in the mass media has been analysed and presented elsewhere (Zapata Campos,
2010) with a focus on the collective process of branding La Chureca. This
328 M.J. Zapata Campos & P. Zapata
article makes use of some of these findings when reconstructing the historical
chain of translations leading to the organizing of the change of La Chureca.
The language spoken during the fieldwork was Spanish, which was also the
language of most of the documents and news media. Spanish is the mother
tongue for one of the authors and the other speaks it fluently. The material was
transcribed and analysed in Spanish; all quotes used in this article have been trans-
lated into English by the authors.
Although the authors had open access to interview key actors without restric-
tions, the initial intention to shadow some of the organizations and attend some
meetings was not always permitted. In projects of extreme public visibility,
such as the Acahualinca Development Project, researchers and other observers
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are often distrusted. However, triangulation of the data from the numerous inter-
views, together with observations and the study of texts and other data, contributed
to bridging the trust gap (Silverman, 2006). The focus of the research was very
much on observing collective actions; through the connections they were able
to construct the authors traced the organizing of change of La Chureca, then
related the data categories to the concepts of the translation process and to theories
concerning city management and urban studies (e.g. Castells, 1983, 1997; Roy and
Alsayyad, 2004).

La Chureca, From Urban Disaster to Slum Project Millionaire


This section explores the organizing of change of La Chureca in terms of the con-
struction of an action net (Czarniawska, 2004) in which collective actions are con-
nected to each other in a sequence of translations (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996;
Callon, 2001; Latour, 2005), which transformed La Chureca from an urban disas-
ter into a particular action net known as the Acahualinca Development Project,
designed as a multimillion dollar intervention. The creation of this and its stabil-
ization in a durable net of connections through its projectification (Lundin and
Söderholm, 1998; Sahlin-Andersson and Söderholm, 2002) was a first step in
the change of La Chureca, which is described and analysed next.

From a Natural Disaster to a Man-Made Disaster of Waste Overflow


The story starts on 23 December 1972, when an earthquake hit the city of
Managua, killing 20,000 people, destroying 75% of the city’s housing, leaving
300,000 people homeless and blowing away most of its central districts and land-
marks (Rodgers, 2007). To clean up after the earthquake, the debris had to be
moved somewhere. La Chureca, on the shore of Lake Xolotlán, an area close to
the city, yet with no productive value, was chosen. The debris was dumped suc-
cessfully in La Chureca and was soon followed by rubbish of all other kinds: in
this way the city dump, although informal, was born.
Over the years, the escalating arrival of rural immigrants to the capital increased
both the production of waste and provided a surplus population seeking work. One
result was that the wasteland of La Chureca and the search for work came together
to provide labour opportunities. A settlement was spontaneously constructed in the
proximity of the dump on which almost 300 families now live (Grigsby, 2008).
Organizing City Resilience Through Action Nets 329
Because the rubbish mountain kept growing, the slum settlement became trapped
within the expanding space of the rubbish dump. A dump born from a cluster of
traumatic episodes induced by a natural disaster became, as a result of its misman-
agement, a man-made disaster for those who had settled in its proximity.
The waste produced in households, companies, shops or hospitals is collected
and dumped by the municipality at La Chureca without any kind of presorting
of the materials. There was no previous recovery of recyclables, no separation
of dangerous material and hospital waste from any other type of waste, and no cre-
ation of sanitary landfill: there was just rubbish dumped near a population in need
of economic survival. As a result, the flows of rubbish underwent a number of
transformations, or translations, once disposed at La Chureca as their adjacency
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to the informal settlement generated novel attachments: the rubbish became


recyclables with an economic value, was seen as a social problem, and then
became an environmental disaster.
Scavengers recovered much of the recyclable part of the waste that came to La
Chureca, thus forming flows of raw materials composed of plastics and metal that
were reinserted back into the economy there to be transformed into new objects.
Waste was also translated into social and public health problems as diseases
caused by the ingestion of insalubrious food, the breathing of contaminated air
or exposure to noxious substances at the dump. Child labour became directly
and indirectly associated with the recycling process. Disease attached itself
and flourished as dengue, malaria and other plagues caused by poor housing
conditions at the slum settlement spread through the 300 families. Child abuse,
violence, prostitution and drug and alcohol addiction were also related to the
socio-environmental conditions of the city slum. Yet another silent translation
was the continuous contamination of Lake Xolotlán by the permanent flow of
leachate from the dump.

The Multiple Churecas: Urban Spectacular Disaster, Aid Object, Mass Media Item and
Development Project
The concentration of ill health and rubbish in La Chureca contributed to its trans-
formation into a spectacular urban disaster (Debord, 1967; Clegg and Courpasson,
2007). ‘La Chureca is wow, the latest thing!’, one of the interviewees burst out, it
is ‘the desired object of any international cooperation agency’ said another,
reflecting on how the place represented both the problems of municipal solid
waste management and extreme poverty in one package. Unlike the millions of
unseen or unreported urban disasters existing in the world, the accessibility of
La Chureca was partially responsible for its transformation into a spectacular
urban disaster – spectacles need an audience and the dump’s closeness to the
city of Managua provided one. Managua became host to a number of institutions
and organizations committed to the alleviation of the situation of poverty of the
people working and living at La Chureca. One of the most influential of those
organizations was the Nicaraguan NGO Dos Generaciones. The NGO started
working in Acahualinca in 1991 with the specific purpose of eliminating child
labour and exploitation in La Chureca.
330 M.J. Zapata Campos & P. Zapata
Over the years, Dos Generaciones succeeded in visualizing La Chureca and its
social problems both in the media and in the agenda of other international and
national NGOs: La Chureca became (in)famous. As a result of the myriad local
and international NGOs, Christian organizations, international agencies, such as
the International Labor Organization, research centres including universities, free-
lance journalists, voluntourists and travellers, many sources of organizing were
visiting and operating at La Chureca. As a consequence, the social and environ-
mental problems at La Chureca and its inhabitants experienced yet another trans-
lation as they travelled outside the rubbish dump embodied in photos, statistics,
life-stories or films produced by those that provided aid or visited the dump.
NGOs active at La Chureca became producers of reports and statistics, broadcas-
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ters of news and images, storytellers, events managers and filmmakers, producing
the necessary material, or objects, to continue the process of translation and
change. The inhabitants of La Chureca were translated into media items and aid
objects. Processes of objectification and commoditization of the poor constitute
a common practice in the aid development community (Escobar, 1995). Despite
the development aid being ‘offer-driven’, La Chureca’s dwellers also attempted
to back-translate these global events in order ‘to make project activities suit
their own needs’ (Rossi, 2006, p. 28).
These representations of La Chureca travelled in words, images and sounds, via
a variety of media such as email, newspapers, social networks (e.g. Facebook), tel-
evision channels or travel blogs. The increasing international connectedness and
the globalizing network society (Castells, 2009) contributed to the fast and inten-
sive spread of a diversity of representations of La Chureca. The mobilization of
civil society organizations in this process of collective branding might well rep-
resent a case of cyber politics, as described by Escobar (1999) or Castells
(1997, 2009); in particular this applies to the case of international NGOs that
could tack back and forth between cyber politics (or cyber-voluntarism), political
activism and social engagement centred on the place of La Chureca. La Chureca’s
interface with a variety of issues that were simultaneously global and local, related
to sustainability and development (e.g. child labour, extreme urban poverty, spon-
taneous settlements, environmental protection), attracted these local and inter-
national NGOs like flies to dung. In order to raise awareness and funds, these
NGOs succeeded in spreading the representations of La Chureca to a wide
range of audiences in Spain, the USA, especially the Latin American community
in the USA, as well as the international aid community.
The symbiotic relationship between NGOs and journalists was crucial for the
translation of La Chureca into a mass media item. NGOs provide trustful data
and good stories to the media. These stories, numbers and events were especially
valued for being distant from the highly partisan politics of Nicaragua. The NGOs
and media jointly succeeded in branding La Chureca as the face of child labour
and extreme poverty rather than it being seen as a result of political decision.
The production of facts involves ‘an intensive co-production between journalists
and other collective actors’ (Czarniawska, 2002, p. 59), such as NGOs. The treat-
ment of La Chureca presents considerable resemblances with the way that
environmental movements, by creating ‘events that call media attention, are
able to reach a much broader audience’ (Castells, 1997, p.128).
Organizing City Resilience Through Action Nets 331
The journalists continued this chain of translations of La Chureca by filtering
social problems (that had already been constituted as such by the transformation
of everyday life into numbers, photos, stories) and selecting facts that they con-
sidered to be interesting for the audience and the interests of global media corpor-
ations. As Czarniawska (2002) puts it, ‘an enormous number of potential facts are
produced daily (. . .) but a great number of them are refuted daily’ (p. 59). Journal-
ists and mass media corporations have specific criteria for transforming facts into
news, and in doing so they were spreading La Chureca and its various represen-
tations via a multitude of media, as newspapers, TV, websites and news blogs.
The collective process of communication and translations resulted in
La Chureca, in Nicaragua, being branded internationally as the embodiment of
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extreme poverty, which led to yet another transformation. In August 2007,


La Chureca became part of the agenda of the first vice president of the Spanish
government during a tour to the region. When she visited the dump she understood
the visibility of the place and committed to changing La Chureca there and then. In
2008, AECID and ALMA signed an agreement to implement the Acahualinca
Development Project. The project involves the construction of a new sanitary
landfill, a recycling station, housing, primary and vocational education for the
neighbourhood dwellers, as well as other actions related to issues of gender
equity and care of children. Since 2008, La Chureca has officially entered the
political agenda of the Managua city management, as a development project.

Discussion
This section discusses the findings by connecting the literature on city manage-
ment, urban studies and change. La Chureca and its action net are shown as an
urban social movement contesting globalizing forces. The urban spectacular dis-
aster of La Chureca is then explored as a catalyst for city resilience and change.
The section ends with a discussion of the potential effects of categories acquired
as a result of processes of change and resilience on people and organizational prac-
tices, such as ‘slum’, ‘disaster area’ or ‘development project’.

Action Nets of Urban Movements and NGOs in the Organizing of Change


As shown, a sequence of translations were carried out by a diversity of civil
society organizations and organized groups, mainly lead by Nicaraguan NGOs,
in the context of global cyber politics (Escobar, 1995). Although their actions
were individually oriented towards organizing the change of La Chureca, they
were often loosely coupled, and not necessarily coordinated in a deliberate collec-
tive strategy to change this place, until the connections were stabilized in the Aca-
hualinca Development Project, forming an action net.
La Chureca and its action net are an expression of the urban social movements
that support poor communities around the world through networks of solidarity
and reciprocity. In these actions, they have been assisted by internationally
funded NGOs or churches, especially from the 1980s and 1990s onwards (Cas-
tells, 1983, 1997). The comedores (communal kitchens) that flourished in Santiago
de Chile or Lima during the 1980s, or community associations organized by the
332 M.J. Zapata Campos & P. Zapata
Catholic Church in Sao Paulo in the 1980s (Gohn, 1991), and by internationally
sponsored NGOs in Bogotá in the 1990s (Espinosa and Useche, 1992) illustrate eu
the same phenomena (Castells, 1997). Organizing urban change that is led by
civil society organizations, where the public sector is absent, responds to a city poderia
management model where cities are governed without government. In this pensar a
urban regime, official authorities are just one more entrance point in the city
action net and not necessarily the most relevant one.
UCCN
Globalization ‘happens as the result of translation’, which implies that ‘acts of como
translation make globalization possible’ (Czarniawska, 2002, p. 132). La Chureca uma rede
and its projectification in the Acahualinca Development Project show the globaliz-
ing city as ‘an arena of globalization, rather than a simple outcome’ (Short, 2006, de action
nets?
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p. 76) of development aid organizations and other global actors. In organizing the
change of La Chureca, local organizations actively engaged in collective actions
and translations. Cities are sites of empowerment and resistance rather than simply
top-down policies or development programmes (Forrester, 1989); as Appadurai
(2000) terms it, there is globalization ‘from below’, pointing out the possible
implications of globalization for citizens and local communities, such as slum-
dwellers, translated into the global sphere of representations as a result of the
actions of national and international NGOs, civil society organizations and
other community groups that have increased access to information. In line with
these results, recent research also concludes how, in Latin American cities, as a
consequence of the globalizing processes, ‘the lives of city dwellers . . . have
become inextricably bound into a web of relations that are local, national and
international’ (Roberts, 2005, p. 120).
poderia abordar
The Uncanny Role of Spectacular Disasters in City Resilience and Change em algum
momento a
La Chureca came to be represented as a space of abjection inhabited by abject resiliencia dos
beings defined by being poor people living off and on waste things. According profissionais
to Kristeva (1982), since that which is abject is situated outside the symbolic criativos?
order – it is neither an object nor a subject, yet something alive but also not –
being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic experience. The abject can
also be uncanny in that we can recognize possible aspects of what it was before
it was cast out in the abject, yet be repulsed by what made it outcast to begin
with. The uncanny is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can
be familiar yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncom-
fortably strange. The contemplation of waste at La Chureca, both of humans and
things, in a pure impurity of wildness and chaos, had the capacity to provoke trau-
matic experiences, uncomfortable feelings and adverse reactions in both visitors
and consumers of its representations. Visitors, readers, bloggers, citizens, poli-
ticians, journalists and aid workers could not remain impassive in the face of
La Chureca; they were moved to organizing change in different forms, actions
and directions.
Closely related to the role of urban social movements in the analysis of La Chur-
eca’s organizing of urban change is the power of spectacular disasters as a catalyst
for such change. The spectacular nature of La Chureca as a man-made disaster
contributed to the city’s resilience and the organizing of change. A spectacular
Organizing City Resilience Through Action Nets 333
disaster representationally broadcast is one that makes claims for equally specta-
cular and profound change. As Clegg and Courpasson (2007) write ‘spectaculars
may be the only means capable of mobilizing sufficient energy and social
vibrations to foster collective social dynamics’ (p. 145). Uncanny places or
spaces of abjection represented as spectacular disasters, such as La Chureca,
are, in association with urban social movements, strong catalysts for urban change.

Classifications and the Organizing of City Resilience and Change


The translation of La Chureca into the Acahualinca Development Project was
another step in the process of change. Its projectification implies the city
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dump’s end as the epitome of extreme poverty through the acquisition of a new
status: it became an international development project.
Classifications are not natural. They are the product of negotiation and or enfor- posso usar
cement (Bowker and Star, 1989). Classifications of people affect the people classi- para escrever
fied (Hacking, 2006). Categories, as social roles, constitute a set of expectations sobre a rede
about a given behaviour but also contain expectations about the rights concerning UCCN? que
what the individual can expect from the others. Accordingly, the acquisition of the classifica as
category of international development project provides the necessary legitimacy cidades?
and resources for organizing change. In the face of natural and man-made disasters
the status of disaster area is one of the first steps that local authorities take. The
official declaration of a disaster area will open up citizens, business and public
institutions for national and international aid. The same processes are also appli-
cable to urban regeneration programmes, such as slum rehabilitation projects.
In India, slum declaration has had direct implications for the spatial allocation
of funds under poverty and housing schemes since the 1970s (Richter et al., 2011).
These improvement programmes rely on the identification and declaration of the
areas, the slums, as spaces to be rehabilitated. However, labels not only provide
resources and right to recovery, but they can also be highly stigmatizing
(Goffman, 1963). Although the acquisition of the label of poor qualifies the com-
munity, the neighbourhood, the city or the country to obtain development aid or be
forgiven external debt in order to overcome deviation from normalcy, what is
meant to be a temporal status can become more or less fixed. The label of
being a disaster area during a resilience phase might remain chronic, especially
in countries and cities with decades of history of aid development dependency.
As such, development project labels can be highly stigmatizing and strengthen
a consciousness of poverty, reinforcing passivity, dependence and inability to
recover and change – rather than the opposite (Escobar, 1995; Schech and
Haggis, 2002).
Latin American urban scholars have raised concerns about labelling. Labels,
such as ‘slum’, might risk recreating ‘many of the myths about poor people that
years of careful research have discredited’ confusing ‘the physical problem of
poor quality housing with the characteristics of the people living there’ (Gilbert,
2007, p. 697). For Gilbert, ‘it is this association between slums and the supposedly
evil character of those who live there that is the most worrying aspect of
our renewed use of the term’ (2007, p. 702). As a consequence ‘slums and
slum-dwellers are viewed as constituting one undifferentiated problem with
334 M.J. Zapata Campos & P. Zapata
never a redeeming feature’ (2007, p. 703). Regardless of the fact that language
matters, and the polemical discussions about the word slum and its application
and usage, further research is necessary to understand how the acquisition of cat-
egories or labels such as slum or development project affect people and how they
are entangled with issues of the reconstruction of collective identity and urban
change.

Conclusion
Change is a constant flow, a never-ending process, as is resiliencing – more accu-
rate than resilience, more a permanent process with larger if less intensity than a mudança de
fortaleza para
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static characteristic. Accordingly, the resilient city implies ‘an ongoing recovery
fortaleza
process that, for many people, will never quite end’ (Vale and Campanella,
cidade do
2005, p.14). Similarly, the translation of La Chureca into the Acahualinca Devel- design, e
opment Project, with plans for social interest dwellings, is a further step in the mudança de
process of change. The continuation of the Acahualinca Development Project is praia de
a story for future articles. There are, however, already a number of consequences iracema para
of La Chureca’s projectification separate from the larger programme of aid. distrito
Apart from the potential effects of categories on people and organizational prac- criativo?
tices, the Acahualinca Development Project, and the urban social movement of La
Chureca that lies behind it, has a more positive reading. Regardless of its future
achievements or failures, La Chureca’s very existence has produced meaning
not only for the organizations behind its projectification, but also for the commu-
nity at large. These achievements live ‘in the collective memory of the locality
(. . .) this production of meaning is an essential component of cities, throughout
history, as the built environment’ (Castells, 1997, p. 331). One of the interviewees
wondered ‘When looking back, fifty years from now, how will La Chureca be
remembered, how will the city of Managua reconstruct its identity as a result of
the Acahualinca Development Project? Villa El Salvador in Lima used to be an
area of sterile dunes. Poor farmer communities illegally invaded this land.
Today it is the industrial park of Lima. Why not La Chureca?’ As this interviewee
points out, the power of urban social movements might go beyond time and space
and nurture ‘the embryos of tomorrow’s social movements within the local utopias
that urban movements have constructed’ (Castells, 1983, p. 331).
Although La Chureca travelled well and became a million dollar project, it is not
likely that other slums will have the same luck trying to replicate the process.
Slums are common, the audience wants spectacular shows, repetition is boring,
no matter how spectacular the first version might have been. Programmes for
improvement, rehabilitation or upgrading of informal settlements are being
carried out with different variations in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The situ-
ation of city governance without government is similar to many local governments
in the global South. The shrinkage of the public sectors in the last decades has
reduced the already minimalist role of national and local governments in develop-
ing countries especially in reference to city management, particularly housing
supply (Davis, 2006). The Managua local government has strengthened its pres-
ence and its public policies in and around La Chureca as a result of the formulation
of the Acahualinca Development Project.
Organizing City Resilience Through Action Nets 335
The recent revival of the local in Latin American cities and the promotion of
decentralization trends (Roberts, 2005) might indicate that the historical role of
civil society organizations and urban movements as agents of change has perme-
ated processes of urban governance in Latin American cities (Castells, 1997).
Although these participatory trends might only be superficial, top-down policies posso usar
‘are constrained’ by ‘the words and symbols that recognize citizens as participa- isso para
tive and rights bearing’ (Roberts, 2005, p.120). But then again, the planet is big, justicar que
there are more than 200,000 slums on earth (Davis, 2006) and the growth rates of mesmo que a
slums are vertiginous. If cities are not able to recover and organize change, the prefeitura
dystopia of a planet of slums will become a reality and the future cities will be tenha
far away from utopias ‘made out of glass and steel [and will] instead [be] iniciado o
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largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, projeto, isso
and scrap wood’ (Davis, 2006, p. 19). aconteceu
por conta da
participacao
popular?
Acknowledgements
This article has benefited greatly from the critical comments we received from
participation in the subtheme ‘Organizing and Disorganizing Resilience in the
Globalizing City’ during the 26th EGOS Colloquium, Lisbon. We would also
like to thank the Wallander Foundation for funding.

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