Waging Class Struggle With Plants: Intra-class differentiation and greening labor in a public housing project in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Intra-class differentiation needs to be brought back into the analysis of gentrification. In this article I argue that in the context of gentrifying pressures, greenspaces are an important site of struggle between segments of the working class. By paying attention to how different clusters of low-income residents in a housing project in Rio de Janeiro deploy plants, we gain insight into differently-situated working-class life projects, and into how neoliberal capital exacerbates competition between them. Through the lens of greening labor we discover a working class that includes not just victims of the forces of gentrification, but active resistors and savvy collaborators with those forces.