Insurgent property relations and the spatio-legal work of housing the urban poor: the case of the Prestes Maia occupation in São Paulo

ABSTRACT

In São Paulo, squatting movements provide an alternative route to housing for members. At the same time, they highlight the city’s housing deficit and high rates of property vacancy. This article analyses the spatio-legal work at one of these squats, known as the Prestes Maia occupation, by one housing movement, the ‘Movimento Moradia, Luta e Justiça’ (Housing Struggle and Justice Movement) under the three rubrics of imaginaries, practices and materiality. The paper argues that the movement is not simply lacking property. Rather they are creating insurgent property relations by imagining property differently through slogans and key terms such as ‘luta’ (struggle) that permeated interviews with coordinators and residents at the occupation. They practice property differently by creating novel entanglements of private/collective life at the occupation and in seeking state recognition for the occupation. The movement exploits the building’s differential materiality to situate their community politically as well as physically. The discussion is based on semi-structured interviews with residents, coordinators, the support network of the occupation and local government officials over a six-month period. The study seeks to contribute to the understanding of property relations beyond narrow parameters of formal state validated property rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Property relations
• insurgency
• spatio-legal worlds
• urban squatting
• housing activism

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without divine assistance in securing financing and generous guidance of my supervisors Libby Porter and Wendy Steele. The final text has been greatly improved by the thoughtful suggestions of two anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Delaney uses the term ‘performances’ which has been exchanged for the term ‘practices’ in this article because of its more prominent use in literature on squatting (e.g. García-Lamarca 2017).

2 The term is from Barbosa (2014) and has been derived from Paulo Freire’s similar terminology of the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’.

3 She explained she started in the movement in 1996 when invited to bring her family off the streets and into a hospital occupied by MSTC. Her lack of timidity and productive organizational skills quickly took her into coordination roles. In 2014 she created MMLJ as a spinoff from the larger MSTC. Neti agreed to the use of her name in publications. All other names of interviewees have been exchanged for pseudonyms to protect their anonymity.

4 This quote originally contained the interviewee’s name. All names have been removed or exchanged for pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number DP140102851].