The normalization of precarity: an ethnography of energy spaces and life at risk in Vila Nova Esperança (São Paulo, Brazil)

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the intersections between the spatial configurations of disaster risk and its political, social, and cultural consequences. The article presents the results of the first phase of the field research, carried out between September 2021 and March 2022 in Vila Nova Esperança, a low-income community in the western periphery of São Paulo. The research originated from the ethnographic analysis of the access to energy infrastructure and services, defined as the object of study through the notion of energy space, ensuing from Setha Low’s work on ethnography of space and culture. The precarity marking the energy space extends to other dimensions of the inhabited space and its social relations, encompassing other fragilities related to disaster risk and the impacts of climate change. Emerging from the systematization of the histories of people and place is the permanent and intertemporal character of precarity, which despite the achievements of the community and the residents, presents itself as a political fact. The results combine the analysis carried out with data on urbanization in the periphery of São Paulo, being the ethnographic work based on the narratives of community members, together with the study of the spatial configurations of energy access. From this triangulation emerges the combination of the social construction of biophysical and social risk as a transversal element that shapes the main result of the article: the multiplication of forms and dynamics of the social production of risk as a process that goes beyond disaster risk and the impacts of climate change. In this sense, the phrase “normalization of precarity” in the title is a provocation, an invitation to look into the intertemporal permanence of precarity in the periphery of São Paulo.