ABSTRACT
The chapter aims to analyze the relationship between the rise of an authoritarian neoliberal right-wing, setbacks in urban politics, and, more generally, regressions in urban everyday life. We argue that these contradictions have intensified since the mid-2000s, when there was still a period of economic growth. This argument is based on three reasons. First, since 2009 large cities have seen an increase in the cost of living, driven largely by a real-estate boom. Second, in this same period there has been reproduction of the historical urban tendency of sprawl and “highway-structured” cities, which launches popular layers for the urban borders, bringing diverse burdens, especially in urban mobility. The population loses part of their lives in transport. The difference is that this segregation has not only occurred in irregular outskirts, as since the mid-twentieth century, but also now in a new niche of the formal popular market. The third important element concerns violence with black, poor, and peripheral youth. Such basic rights – the right to housing, mobility, and the integrity of life – converge to a regression in the Right to the City and, in this sense, one can speak of a “de-democratization” in urban life.
