Luz, Sao Paulo, May 2018

Figure 4.1 shows a street in Luz, in the city of Sao Paulo. I have been working in the city and the wider region for the past five years, in a range of collaborative projects with academics at two of the region’s major universities. As part of the (Re)Inhabiting the City project, we focused our work on Luz. Luz is a neighbourhood located just outside the city’s CBD. just a couple of stops on the Metro. Although not technically a favela (or slum), Luz is a very poor neighbourhood, which faces a number of intersecting problems. It is very densely populated, with a population of over 11,000 people (although in the 1970s it had a population of over 40,000 and has suffered rapid depopulation). There is widespread poverty, with many properties in a very' poor state of repair. Many apparently now-vacant properties in the rather-precarious-looking tower blocks are squatted; the city authorities take a rather ambivalent view until there is a problem (for instance, just before our visit in 2018, a large fir e killed dozens of residents of a squatted apartment block nearby).

Despite the poverty of many of its residents, this is one of the city’s largest commercial districts, with informal and semi-legal shops (some visible in Figure 4.1) selling a range of electronic merchandise, of dubious origin. The sector is male-dominated, employing twice as many men as women. The hundreds of business owners with a stake in this part of the city have huge commercial and political power, and have been resisting the regeneration of Luz, seeing it as a challenge to their businesses. Luz is also known as ‘Cracoldndia^, -‘crackland’ - and is seen as the crack capital of Brazil. This combination of factors means that Luz is, both socially and environmentally, a very challenging place to live. Crime rates are high, levels of school attendance are low, and the

Figure 4.1 A. typical street-scene in Luz

area is (despite the city being located in a tropical region) subject to increasing levels of desertification.

I want to tell the stoiy of our visit to Luz. I acknowledge, as I did in Chapter 2 when discussing critical race theories, that this act runs the veiy serious risk of seemingly mobilising a particular aesthetic or affect to make an apparently aloof conceptual point. To do so might be construed as an act of epistemological violence against the residents of Luz, casting them as destitute and de-humanised for the purposes of white, middle-class. Western scholarship. Yet my intention is the reverse, and anticipates my provocations about the connections and tensions between silliness (and related sensibilities) and trauma (and related effects/ affects) that are dispersed throughout this book and then drawn together in Chapter 9. It is to demonstrate how an apparently aloof analysis of material stuff is intimately entangled with/in particular geographical and social contexts; and it is to try to afford a sense - even if doing so is risky - of why such analyses are far from aloof and, rather, entrained in the kinds of questions of resource-power that I raised in Chapter 3.

We (a group of UK and Brazilian researchers) arrive in Luz by car, having been told that it is too dangerous to arrive by Metro at Luz station. We walk through the main commercial area of Luz, feeling immediately out of place -largely, it has to be said, because of the area’s reputation and the warnings we have been given. Nonetheless, the pavement is broken, with strange liquids limning along the side of the road, foaming as they enter blocked drains. It is hot, and humid, and the air smells of burning, and of fast food, and of rubbish, and tastes of dust.

On the street, very small children sit languidly; a pair of mothers lean outside a shop window, feeding their babies; gaunt men sleep in the middle of the pavement, even though it’s the early afternoon; and passersby simply step over or around them, hurrying about their business. As we walk on, the contrast between the poverty on the street and the relative wealth of the electronics companies becomes more evident - there are hundreds, if not thousands, of small stores with bright, colourfill electric lights, endless arrays of gaudy plastic mobile phone covers, shelves piled high with all manner of (largely un-boxed) electrical equipment, storerooms piled even higher and more chaotically with old circuit- and motherboards, wires, pipes, cables, batteries, and who knows what else. The sheer mass of stuff in such a small space - electronic, metal, plastic - is overwhelming.

Our presence is met in a variety of ways. Some people ignore us. Street sellers press up to us, singing at us, commenting on our skin colour, trying to sell us then-wares. The few women on the street watch us pass warily. Many people seem simply bemused that we are here.

Making our way past dusty vacant lots used for car parking, we arrive at the Mungunza Container Theatre (Figure 4.2). It is a theatre constructed out of several shipping containers: an initial, precarious and temporary attempt by a local theatre company (Compania Mungunza de Teatro) to change wider public perceptions of Luz and to provide a safe haven for the local population - especially children and young people, as the barrels and other equipment (not pictured in Figure 4.2) hint.

What is particularly striking is the juxtaposition of the theatre with its sunound-ings. As we arrive, we are greeted by a gr oup of men who flank the metal gates that are visible in this image. They are resting - some sleeping - under the shade of a tree. The smell of alcohol is overwhelming, and many of the men are clearly crack users. The men are wary, but friendly, and open the gates for us. As we enter, the contrast between the theatre’s grounds - with its colourful steel drums, plastic geodesic dome and other equipment for the local children to play - and the scene behind is stark. Across the road is one of the city’s many Centro Temporario de Acolhimento (Temporary Reception Centres), set up in 2017 to provide refuge and treatment for vulnerable populations living on the street. In Luz, the Centro also constitutes a mam drug rehabilitation station, staffed by muses, doctors and counsellors, occupying a large white tent, and catering for the large population of crack-addicted street residents.

We turn, walk past the theatre, and on our right see two boys playing football on a dusty pitch, with a rudimentary plastic goal. Behind them, the ground floor-covered in graffiti, is one of thousands of the city’s apartment blocks (Figure 4.3). Some are so thin, with crumbling walls and paint, that they look like they could topple over at any moment.

Figure 4.2 Muugunza Container Theatre (play)grotinds, with a Centro Tempordrio de Acolhimento (temporary reception centre) in the background

We enter the building - unsure as to how sound the structure really is - into a dark, windowless, stuffy ground floor space, littered with all maimer of stuff: bottles, clothing, boxes, wires, pots.

Heading further in, it becomes clear that the building was once (perhaps just 50 years ago) a fairly grand apartment block for the newly rich lower-middle classes who were moving to the city centre but has since been vacated and then squatted; today it is, as far as we can see, devoid of life, save the pigeons who fiercely protect their nests as we disturb them.

We arrive at a central stairwell, where plants grow out of the walls, whose railings have been removed for scrap and which barely resembles stairs. The building is crumbling constantly; piasterwork cracking away from walls and ceilings, lumps of brick littering the stairs and skittering downwards as we climb up. The building has taken on almost geological feel; the stairways could be scree slopes on a desert mesa.

With trepidation, we enter several of the apartments, each of which has a crudely painted number above the door. It would appear that the last residents -the squatters - were forced to leave in a hurry, perhaps just two or three years previously. I walk into one apartment, startling a nesting pigeon, which in turn causes me alarm. I back out, barely able to navigate my way over a heap of wooden

Figure 4.3 The exterior of a ‘vacant’ apartment block, next to the Mungunza Container Theatre

Speculative childhoods 61 boards, steep poles, dirty clothing, electricals and other indeterminable stuff. I enter the adjacent apartment, which is covered with layers of dirt, more wood, more clothing and all kinds of paraphernalia. My eye is caught first by an abandoned plastic doll, lying on its back, arms by its sides, its lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling (Figure 4.4). It sits at the entrance to the apartment; on its own, it almost seems to have been placed there (perhaps it has), to evoke a sense of uncanniness, loss or anger. Or perhaps it has been dr agged there by a pigeon, or carried by the torrential rainwater and drying winds that regularly penetrate the building's cracking walls and open windows, or fallen through the hole in the roof to the apartment above. Or, perhaps, it cannot be separated from the other matterin this room - clothes, pillows, a child's pink sandal, a splintered, faeces-covered plank of wood - objects that interact with one another, degrade with different speeds and slownesses, part of the generic sliding, rotting, oozing, dusty mass that this edifice is becoming. In mm, this doll, in this room, in this apartment block, is just one of thousands of dolls, of thousands of rooms, of thousands of apartment blocks in this area of the city, which are - hidden-in-plain sight just a couple of Metro stops from the city centre - gradually becoming ruinant.

From my vantage point as a privileged, British academic, this tour around Luz - and this building - and especially this doll, and the children’s sandals, and a plastic red toy car I found on a crumbling balcony - they all haunt me, as, I suppose, any ruinous, abandoned site might do. There are many ways in which we might respond to such a tour - many of them, I suspect, both fairly emotive and pretty questionable in ethical terms.

But this tour also brought to life (if that is the right phrase) something of what I have in mind in my intention in this chapter to push new materialist thought on childhood to(wards) breaking point. In fact, four more specific questions stand out. Firstly, in a conceptual context that seeks to acknowledge the role of nonhuman matter in the constitution of human lives: how to make sense of the pressing, massing, rotting, flowing kinds of materialities that struck us on this torn- (and which, perhaps, constitute further incantations of ‘resource-power’)? Secondly, what is the place of particular orders of materialities - sitch as woods, metals or plastics - within the ceaseless and apparently senseless circulation of material stuff in the apartment blocks, electronics stores and streets of a place like Luz? As I ask in Chapter 8, starting with plastics, how do different kinds of material stuff circulate, (dis)entangle, synthesise with and stick to one another? Thirdly, having spent nearly two decades working with children and young people, seeking actively to instil then presence - their voice, their agency, their rights - how to make sense of a space like the apartment block where childhoods seem (perhaps paradoxically) to have been evidently dis-placed? In other words, what to make of traces of childhoods, and of individual children - dolls, sandals, toy cars - that are entangled with the amorphous mass of this crumbling building? And, fourthly, how to balance what is a (perhaps immoral or at the very least distasteful) fascination with the materialities of this place with an attentiveness to the very real and very pressing problems facing the children who left those toys behind, as they gr ow up in a place like Luz?

Figure 4.4 The interior of one of the abandoned apartments, with a plastic doll in the foreground