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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
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
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.
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).
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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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’.
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.
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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