Abstract
We re-examine the relation between power and resistance by investigating the reconstruction of the Vila Rubim market, one of the established markets in the city of Vitória in Brazil. Following a fire that destroyed large parts of the market – probably the most significant event in its history – the market had to be fully rebuilt and the broader local area had to be redeveloped. Empirical materials were collected through ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and visual and archival research. The destruction and reconstruction of the Vila Rubim market unleashed a fierce struggle between the city council and the market’s traders. We argue that the traders’ resistance to urban management was most significant in shaping the outcome of this conflict by initiating a multiplicity of space-making practices. We reframe resistance as ontological, that is as the practice of creating a material position, of making a world that allows an alternative form of life to emerge beyond given power relations. Rather than in acts of protest, the stallholders of the Vila Rubim market engaged in mundane tactics which created alternative ontologies of existence in urban space.
Highlights
The paper re-examines the relation between power and resistance by investigating the reconstruction of the Vila Rubim market, one of the established markets in the city of Vitória in Brazil
Ontology here denotes that such everyday politics operate within the constraints of given material spaces and that its primary starting point is the transformation of the immediate material conditions of everyday existence
In the sections that follow we present and analyse the empirical materials that we have collected through our fieldwork on the history of the Vila Rubim market: we start with a discussion of how the market has evolved since its beginning, the events of the its destruction in 1994 and the subsequent conflict between the stallholders and city management over its redevelopment
Summary
There is significant scholarship on the emergence of non-oppositional ontologies, affective geographies and their complex material configurations (Braun, 2008; Clark, 2011; Tolia-Kelly, 2006; de Vries and Rosenow, 2015), there is less exploration of what this really means for an everyday politics of resistance within urban space This paper approaches this question through an empirical case study by simultaneously advancing a theoretical discussion of resistance driven by the work of de Certeau and Deleuze. How can we evade power relations in order to materialise transformative resistance? How can this be done within urban space?
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