Diane shared with us the method of the iceberg, that she learned from friends doing organizing work. It is a great method to question basic assumptions about our cases. It allows us to think first of all about the main assumptions on which our work relies. It then obliges us to deconstruct it and go to the roots of our way of framing it.

I decided to use the core statement of the Plan Abre as “an integral strategy of intervention sustained on the coordination of different areas of the Social Cabinet of the Provincia de Santa Fe and local governments, with the purpose of recreating social links in neighborhoods (barrios) of Santa Fe, Rosario and Villa Gobernador Galvez”.  How can this statement be rephrased?

The Plan Abre is an integral urban intervention recreates social links in the barrios

• Hidden assumptions:

The problem with the barrios relies on the deterioration of social links and their “enclosure”.

Social links depend on formal urbanization, which means opening the barrios.

Social links are deteriorated or inferior only in the barrios

• Image and metaphors:

Barrios are closed places with a lack of social connections.

Barrios as problematic spaces in opposition to other urban spaces

• Object: the barrio is intervened, its inhabitants are not active in the core statement
• Subject: the state is the one acting upon the barrios
• Verbs: recreate. There is a need to transform the social relationships happening in the neighborhood, either disappeared or not adequate

The barrios already have a vivid and complex social life going on due to the structural inequality they experiment in connection with the city. Urban interventions trying to act upon social relations obfuscate the material issue while rejecting existing possibilities implemented by the inhabitants

• Hidden assumptions:

The problem relies on material inequalities not culture.

Social life in the barrios is different because of the structural inequality their inhabitants experience. It is complex – not correct or incorrect.

The relations between barrios and other spaces is linked to structural inequalities.

• Image and metaphors:

The multiplicity of social relations in the barrios – mutual aid, organizing but also competition for resources, violence and informality.

Experience of the inequalities

• Object: the barrio, the action of the state
• Subject: the inhabitants
• Verbs: Go on – social relations are a continuous process, they do not disappear or appear but are transformed through time and space.

Act upon and reject – the state tends to try to organize social space disregarding inhabitants knowledge and experience.

This method has been helpful to analyze the narrative about opening – the hidden assumption is that neighborhoods are closed, separated from the rest of the city. So far I was focused on questioning the action of opening asking how? For who? With what purpose? The Iceberg exercise made me realize that there is a previous question to address which is why does the state consider that these neighborhoods are closed? It also brings me back to Gago’s analysis about the multiplicity of the links between the villas and the rest of the city. She indeed shows how much of the work realized in the villa or by the villeres sustains social production and reproduction in the city. This work also has a lot to do with the work of care that is produced within the city, inscribing the villa as specific places within the urban infrastructure of care. In that sense, the conception of a dual city with open territories as opposed to closed villa is absolutely untrue.

Another element that I started paying more attention to thanks to the iceberg is the focusing on the idea of “recreating social links” in the barrios, hence centering the problem on a social issue rather than a material one. This is also contradictory with the idea of an integral approach to develop public policies. Why does the State promote the idea of the absence or inadequation of social links in the barrios while it is very obvious that networks of solidarity, alternative economy and care are so central to their social reproduction for instance? Other kinds of social relations also exist under the form of political affiliation and activism, as well as violence or conflicts of course. Why is it then that the State seeks to “recreate” social links? What kinds of links are imagined here to be more desirable?

These are definitely questions I will have to pay attention to while developing my research questions. Thinking about these new interrogations through sovereignty, territory and security, I would say that I am now focusing on how problematic social relationships are spatialized through this Plan and its narrative, creating territories with lack of social relations or unacceptable social relations. Security is reduced to a social problem, not a material one. Sovereignty is expressed through the action of opening – implying that the closeness of the neighborhood is a problem for the State while completely ignoring its role in the so-called separate status of these territories. IN contrast, we could problematize around the forms of security produced by the community in Barrios that suffer from abandonment by the State. These networks organized by the population itself speak about a counter-sovereignty, or rather a competing sovereignty.

Jah presented to us the method of Poetry From The Future, showing us different examples. The presentation was very fluid and not as structured as what Miranda did. I learned about M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and was very touched by this way of approaching research.

It is very hard for me to incorporate creative elements to my research. Of course, my research interests, the way I formulate the questions incorporate some elements of creativity. However, I very rarely engage with artistic processes and it is very difficult to do so. I have repeatedly been the one to try and organize the group process through summarizing what we could do in parallel with our cases, to try to sew our parts together and find some feeling of coherence. In that sense, this project has really challenged me to open to the unknown – in terms of method and doings, as well as in terms of not wanting to be permanently understanding where I was going. This is the kind of consideration I speak about when I mention the permanent contingency of the process. It has also been -yet again- an excellent reminder of how much the academy tends to restrict us in the way I approach research, paying no attention to how I feel, restraining myself to a strict way of doing, and I have been thinking a lot about my French cartesian training.

This method has been really a dive into the unknown and uneasy. I sat down and started re-reading our iterations about sovereignty, territory and security. I did not think I could create anything poetic about it, however I decided to note down the words or expressions that caught my attention from everyone’s reflection. In order to avoid going back to my classic “academic analysis”, I handwrote those words, using a color code for the different terms. I decided to try to create sentences using one word of each column in order to think through the associations that could be made.

The result, if not poetic, is surprising. Some sentences seemed to work really well and to even sometimes open new ideas! One of them would be to do a registry of the security theater in specific places of urban intervention. Another was to think more about unsuccessful sovereignty and territories filled with holes (I explored the idea of territory holes with the popular mapping method later on).

Here are the sentences that appeared from this exercise:

• Territory is an imagined claim that exists through signs.
• The situation reflects the territory.
• To signify a territory means to project collectively a sense of sovereignty.
• Sovereignty is an ideal that never existed even through the security theater.
• Unsuccessful and inadequate sovereignty creates territories filled with holes.
• Sovereignty requires visbilizing the appropriation of the territory.
• Sovereignty needs the definition and materialization of a certain security to evolve from imagined to real as an effect.
• Sovereignty implies to establish an intelligible claim over a territory.
• Security materializes and desbords territory as a defensive shell.
• Security is anticipating the perception of sovereignty as an empty categorization over territory.
• The destabilization of security within a territory will affect the image of sovereignty.
• A decolonial future might need to be detached from sovereignty but will be mediated through territory.

I was surprised and amused to learn during our last week of group work that Jessie had created an online sentence generator from our initial iteration exercise, and that Laura had also realized the same kind of word gymnastics! It was also very pleasant to be able to work using handwriting, this semester has been heavy on screens and it felt very liberating to write on a “real surface”.

Test Jessie’s sentence generator about Sovereignty, Security and Territory:

https://botnik.org/apps/writer/?source=885306dff1fb0860fd96b0b0359d0665

Miranda presented the method of inductive visualization as her last participation to the group work. Her generosity in sharing the method with us reflects the sense of care we had decided to locate at the center of the group dynamic.

From that presentation, I decided to focus on the narrative of Plan Abre trying to categorize the actions and goal through the dichotomy oppression/liberation. What seems to be reinforcing oppressive logic? What on the contrary might support liberation? It allowed me to analyze the action of the state – and in this case at several scale and through different institutions – and to look more carefully at its contradictions.

It also allowed me to think further about the permanent tension around sovereignty and self-determination, as discussed several times during the semester. Sovereignty as used by the Nation-State might legitimate the development of certain activities with some kind of impunity. Sovereignty used by organized groups of people fighting for liberation has a different meaning, closer to self-determination. This contradiction is linked to the notion of absence-presence that all of us have been considering in our cases: the state exists as much as it doesn’t. In La Razon Neoliberal, Veronica Gago speaks about the so-called “informal settlements” (from now on I will refer to them as they are called in Argentina by its inhabitants, villas) as places where State sovereignty is expressed through “exclusion by inclusion and inclusion by exclusion”. These territories have a special place in terms of absence-presence of sovereignty. In that sense, we have to think about State sovereignty as the capacity of the State to organize or disorganize people in a specific place. A possible reaction – so frequently referred to as resistance – could be understood as an intent to build a people sovereignty, understood here as we explained before as self-determination.

To go back to my case, what does the State try to organize in the targeted neighborhoods and villas? How does it try to organize or disorganize people? How does it include and how does it exclude? Do the inhabitants of the villa feel that they have agency in the process? How do they organize to feel some sense of self-determination?

The Plan Abre has been organized around 4 goals:

1. Improve the quality of life in the neighborhoods through the creation of strategic infrastructure linked to habitat improvement, local equipment, sanitation, access to safe water and electricity.
2. Strengthen social networks of the neighborhood promoting encounter, participation and coexistence in the public space, as strategies to prevent violence and guarantee citizen security (la seguridad ciudadana)
3. Impulse the constitution of Neighborhood Roundtables as spaces for citizen participation and dialogue with local and provincial authorities, in order to prioritize the problems to be addressed.
4. Approach the families from an integral perspective ensuring access to fundamental rights.

These goals have been materialized through 3 axes of intervention: i) Infrastructure and habitat; ii) coexistence and participation; iii) Abre Family. Infrastructure and Habitat is explained as seeking “to build a better accessibility, to connect the neighborhoods to the urban grid, to recover and recondition strategic public spaces and organizations and social institutions’ buildings”. Coexistence and participation actions are defined as promoting strategies to inhabit public space with collective activities. Abre Family is aiming at ensuring access to rights such as identity, social protection, education, health, work, culture, habitat and decent housing.

By contrasting these 2 maps, we can observe what territories the State is trying to reorganize. Indeed, most of the Plan Abre interventions are located within areas that are characterized by high level of unsatisfied basic necessities. A household is considered to have unsatisfied basic necessities if presenting the combined following characteristics: indecent/precarious housing, no bathroom, overcrowded household, children between ages of 6 and 12 not attending school, head of household with low level of education. Are these interventions targeting the specific basic necessities of the inhabitants through its “integral approach”?

In order to try and visualize the kind of intervention through a lens based on the tension between liberation and oppression (to reflect logic of carceral or abolition geographies) based on different understanding of the meaning of those interventions, I did a survey of all the actions developed or planned within the territory of Rosario. Even though the Plan Abre is supposed to rely heavily on the inhabitants’ participation, there is actually very little information regarding the process of definition of the interventions.

It is a very arbitrary and incomplete process. Indeed, while certain kind of interventions such as the one aiming at creating infrastructure to evacuate rainwater seem to really improve the life quality of the inhabitants and would hence be categorize as liberating, other are much more contradictory. It is for example the case of the interventions defined as “Safe Light” (Luz Segura – which names relates directly to the concept of security). In these cases, the State plans the extension of the electric grid in order to provey formal electricity to neighborhood that generally rely on “pirate connections”. However, this means that the inhabitants will have to pay the service, which is in many cases a source of economic stress. The electricity company, owned by the Provincia, generally implements a social fare, a fixed fare, supposed to be “affordable’ for the families living in the villas, in order to promote formal connections. While studying the interventions, I discovered that for those territories, the formal connections and social fare were tied to a limit of use: the household are equipped with a regulating device: if they use more electricity than what they are allowed to at a certain time, the power is shut down until they decrease their consumption. The household is supposed to be able to use one stove, an electric heater, a TV, a refrigerator and the basic lighting of the home. What if they need more devices? These household are generally numerous, so system seems to enter more in a policing logic than a liberating one – indeed through the pirate connections, the inhabitants did not have to limit their consumption.

In other cases such as the creation of a police precinct or in the case of the creation of the Territorial Complaint Centers, “designed to establish a more direct relationship with the community to guarantee the effective exercise of their rights and facilitate the access of citizens to the relevant public institutions. The general objective is to contribute to the timely handling of complaints for illicit acts, contraventions, or other procedures and certifications. The centers work in coordination with a Specialized Police Force” (Provincia de Santa Fe). In both cases, the definition of security does not necessarily seem to correspond to safety or life improvement for the inhabitants but rather of control of determined territories. Both of the centers planned as part of the Plan Abre are located in villas, were the basic necessities are highly unsatisfied.

Keeping in mind those contradictions, I tried to organize the interventions in 3 axis divided in different categories, knowing that reality is more blurry and contradictory:

Liberation	Oppression
Education	Commodifying
Health	Privatizing
Social clubs	Relocating
Commoning	Policing
Decent habitat	Controlling
Decent housing
Mobility

Many new questions emerge.

How does the consolidation of a street increase the community engagement towards its members? Does the connection to the water/energy grid imply more connectedness to the rest of the city? Who is more connected and whith what result? How much do the inhabitants participate to the definition of the interventions, and how do they feel about them? How can we analyze their feeling of self-determination over their neighborhoods? How can we visualize those elements?

While our group started discussing and shaping the project, we shifted our approach.  Our initial reflection on the links between Territory, Sovereignty and Security through the analysis of very different cases shifted more towards a collective reflection on methods that could be used as experiments to think the different ways the three terms relate, with a fourth concept so tightly linked, mobility. Quickly then, the project shifted from a detailed study towards an open experimentation, investigating about alternative method to visualize complex phenomena that we could all try out on our cases.

This allowed me to feel a lot freer regarding the case, the neighborhoods I wanted to observe, the level of detail I would try to unveil. Rather, I became interested in asking different questions to interrogate what was assumed or hidden within the Plan Abre narrative.

While we kept meeting once a week, we changed our organizing. We defined that every week, one of us would present a method they liked in order to try and see what would come out of our cases. We also explicitly decided to change the pace. We are still living a pandemic, not able to physically meet, laugh and be together to work. Some of us were going through extremely difficult personal circumstances.  We also decided that we would take in consideration how we felt during the meetings and throughout the process. I consider that our second meeting was fundamental in that sense. As explained in our collective iteration, we changed our pace, in order to include emotions in the process. This sense of collective care has been implicitly at the center of our intent. I was not surprised to hear all the member of the team expressing it while telling the class about our progress during the last encounter of the semester. Laura stated that the process had relied on “thinking collectively and caring for each other”; Jessie said that “we try things and we support each other”. The first disruption of the research process and incorporation of our emotions took place when Jah sensed our frustration and invited us to turn the cameras off to write down individually what we thought the definitions would serve for. It was liberating and also gave us a better sense of what we were doing: collective inductive research, trying to center care as the pace-giver of our progress and contingency as a method to maintain permanent openness.

This set of flashcards reflect some of the group movements and decisions we made to find new paths and avoid traps, while always centering care:

http://www.obliquemethods.space/

The initial plan

The Plan Abre is a public policy from the Provincia of Santa Fe in Argentina. It is a very interesting urban program to think through the different understandings of sovereignty, territory and security.

Rosario is the principal city of the Provincia of Santa Fe, at the center-east of Argentina. It is the third provincial with the most population in the country. The population of the Provincia is estimated to be 3.509.113 inhabitants or a little more than 7,8% of the total population of the country (Instituto Provincial de Estadísticas y Censos – IPEC, 2019).

The Metropolitan Area of Rosario itself has an estimated population of 1.400.000 inhabitants. The city is at the heart of the biggest port complex of Argentina, from where more than 65% of cereal exports exit the country. Rosario and its metropolitan area is one of the 6 cities that were established as zones of intervention for the Plan Abre.

The analysis of the declared goals of this plan and the targeted territories is the starting point of my reflection. I want to see what vision of the intervened territories is constructed, what kind of answers are articulated and how we can interrogate them thinking through the dialectics of carceral and abolition geographies. My questions evolved with the collective process of the group, leading me to open the kind of questions while looking at very specific territorial cases.

Since our group has  been trying to think through the complex and contradictory configurations between Sovereignty, Territory and Security, one of my first intention was to analyze how a program called the Plan Open was defining its territories of action, how it was framed and what actions were planned in order to “open up” those spaces. What made them seem closed? What actions were part of an opening action?

From its initial definition, the Plan Abre is “an integral strategy of intervention sustained on the coordination of different areas of the Social Cabinet of the Provincia de Santa Fe and local governments, with the purpose of recreating social links in neighborhoods (barrios) of Santa Fe, Rosario and Villa Gobernador Galvez”[1]. What is interesting here is that the idea of opening up is directly linked to “opening up” barrios (as opposed to central areas, the terms generally carries a peripherical/marginal imaginary in Argentina) to regain social links – as if social links were absent of those “closed” barrios. Those barrios are also targeted as part of three of the major cities of the Provincia, Rosario, Santa Fe and Villa Gobernador Galvez, excluding rural areas. Thus the core statement of the program targets specifically certain spaces considered to be peripheral, to reintroduce social interactions creating a narrative of closed space deprived of social interactions.  This foundational mission already frames the question of openness in a certain way. Indeed many gated communities exist within the Provincia of Santa Fe, where private gated communities have flourished since the 90’s, mainly in suburban areas around Santa Fe and Rosario. One of their characteristic is that they are surrounded by walls or fences and have a restricted access, they are also often situated close to “villas” or precarious settlements (Daverio, 2020). These real estate projects are not ate the center of my interest in this work, nevertheless I think it is important to question the name and goals o the Plan Abre, knowing that it targets spaces of life considered to be in need of openness while these territories coexist -sometimes contiguously) with other territories that are actually physically enclosed.

What are the territories that have been targeted by the Plan Abre? What kind of intervention have been planned in those spaces? Who defined the nature of the needs and the kind of policies to be implemented? Why were they considered as closed and how did they get open? What reactions did these interventions spark? Who benefits from this specific kind of openness?

Through this reflection about openness, I would like to interrogate the notions of territory, sovereignty and security grounding the provincial and municipal interventions in those specific neighborhoods. I will focus more specifically on the interventions within the city of Rosario where 35 neighborhoods have been included in the program, corresponding to approximately 25,3% of the population (Langou and Aquilino, 2019).

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[1] “El Plan Abre propone una estrategia de intervención integral sustentada en la coordinación entre diversas áreas que conforman el Gabinete Social de la provincia de Santa Fe y gobiernos locales, con el fin de recuperar vínculos sociales en barrios de Santa Fe, Rosario y Villa Gobernador Gálvez.” (Langou and Aquilino, Integralidad, territorio and politicas sociales urbanas, Santa Fe, 2019)