Standby urbanization: Dwelling and organized crime in Rio de Janeiro.

This paper conceptualizes dwelling as an analytical lens to study the effects of combined human-made and environmental threats on the governing of peripheral urbanization. I call this grounded and phenomenological-analytical approach to dwelling dwelling in limbo to highlight the improvised and always uncertain nature of low-income populations' forms of residence. As such, dwelling will be explored as a temporal, political, and more-than-human process: as residents' exposure to, endurance while, and ways of navigating towards urbanization. Combining three data sources - semi-structured interviews with residents, politicians, state attorneys; own observations/ fieldwork notes, and local media reports - the paper situates this approach in the northern periphery of Rio de Janeiro. I present cases of once promised, yet suspended resettlement and highlight the role of organized criminal actors in the partial implementation of the Project Iguaçu - a disaster prevention program financed by Brazil's Federal Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). The paper identifies such dwelling in limbo, that is, residents' exposure to criminal actors' dominion, enduring (non)resettlement, and navigating amidst uncertainty, to illustrate the effects of standby urbanization. Standby urbanization, I argue, is characterized by an active passivity of marginalized residents: To secure future dwelling, low-income populations are forced into supporting structures that perpetuate their marginality. In other words, dwelling in limbo is not an accidental side-effect of urbanization, but a form of political violence inherent to the governing of urban peripheries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]