UC Berkeley

This paper argues that new understandings of rights associated with right to the city movements in many cities around the world are subverting special treatment rights (understood as privilege) and the systems of differentiated citizenship that support them.  To make this case, the paper examines the Brazilian formulation of differentiated citizenship as a telling historical example of a politics of difference based on a combination of universal membership and special treatment rights.  It argues that by denying the expectation of equality and emphasizing that of compensatory equity in the distribution of rights, Brazilian citizenship became an entrenched regime of legalized privileges and legitimated inequalities.  The paper then analyzes the insurgence of an urban citizenship in the poor peripheries of Brazilian cities since the 1970s that promotes new kinds of contributor rights, text-based rights, and right to rights.  The paper ends with a discussion of the entanglements and contradictions of these formulations of citizenship and rights.