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Waging Class Struggle With Plants: Intra‐class differentiation and greening labor in a public housing project in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Author(s) -
Burdick John
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
city and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.308
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1548-744X
pISSN - 0893-0465
DOI - 10.1111/ciso.12313
Subject(s) - gentrification , working class , context (archaeology) , greening , class (philosophy) , situated , competition (biology) , capital (architecture) , sociology , political science , economic growth , geography , economics , archaeology , law , politics , ecology , biology , artificial intelligence , computer science
Intra‐class differentiation needs to be brought back into the analysis of gentrification. In this article I argue that in the context of gentrifying pressures, greenspaces are an important site of struggle between segments of the working class. By paying attention to how different clusters of low‐income residents in a housing project in Rio de Janeiro deploy plants, we gain insight into differently‐situated working‐class life projects, and into how neoliberal capital exacerbates competition between them. Through the lens of greening labor we discover a working class that includes not just victims of the forces of gentrification, but active resistors and savvy collaborators with those forces.