ENTRE A GENTRIFICAÇÃO E A MILICIALIZAÇÃO:

Abstract

This article examines the contemporary urban crisis as a political crisis of territory rather than merely a consequence of socioeconomic inequality. Its objective is to demonstrate that gentrification and militia control, although operating through distinct rationalities, the mercantile-financial and the coercive-armed, structurally converge in eroding the democratic capacity to govern urban space as a common good. Methodologically, the article develops a conceptual and normative analysis grounded in political philosophy, mobilizing categories from Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Rancière, Hannah Arendt, and Iris Marion Young in critical dialogue with Brazilian urban sociology and anthropology. Its central argument holds that the city undergoes a double dispossession of its public dimension: on the one hand, through the financialization of land and housing, which functions as systemic expulsion and prior censorship of the political participation of vulnerable subjects; on the other, through the armed capture of territory by fragmented sovereignties of a necropolitical nature, which destroy the material conditions for democratic dissent. As its main result, the article argues that both processes thrive where democratic urban planning retreats or becomes corrupted, which is why recovering planning requires unmasking it as a biopolitical technology of power and refounding it as a democratic praxis. KEYWORDS: Political philosophy of the city. Urban planning. Necropolitics. Financialization. Right to the city.