Resisting eviction: the polymorphy of peripheral spatial politics in Brazil

ABSTRACT

Struggles against eviction are key moments in the (re)production of informal housing in Brazilian cities, as they contest the uprooting and displacement of generally low-income families. While recent research has focused on displacement due to the World Cup and Olympic Games mega-events, this paper explores struggles against eviction that are less high profile, underscoring the distributed nature of evictions in processes of urban change. Drawing on long term fieldwork, this paper examines three cases of struggles against eviction in different cities in the southeast of Brazil. This comparison highlights the everyday contestations that take place across varied geo-political terrain; the morphological constraints and opportunities for collective action of building as opposed to land occupations; the punitive and cooperative state logics with which threatened communities must engage; and drawing on recent attempts in geography to combine theorisations of territory, place, network and scale, contributes to understanding the polymorphy of spatial struggles in contemporary Brazil.

KEYWORDS:

• Brazil
• evictions
• urban occupations
• favelas
• squatting
• social movements

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gabriel Feltran and Marta Arretche at the Centre of Metropolitan Studies-USP for their support of one part of this research; Jorgetânia Ferreira, Marcos Campos, and Igino Marcos Oliveira for their time, assistance and cooperation in Uberlândia; Liam Magee for his generous help while I was at RMIT University, Elizabeth Kath for several productive discussions and staff at the UN Compact Cities Program at RMIT for introducing me to staff and community members in Porto Alegre. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and Andreza de Souza Santos for putting this volume together.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names in this paper have been anonymised.

2 This account derives from interviews with residents and legal documents analysed by the author.

3 See: https://www.facebook.com/OcupaCMJ/, Accessed 28 July 2018.

4 See: Manifesto do Congresso Nacional do Terra Livre. https://terralivre.org/wp-content/uploads/Manifesto-Congresso-Terra-Livre-2011.pdf, p. 2, Accessed 2 May 2017.

5 See: https://citiesprogramme.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/livro-tspoa-pdf-1.pdf, Accessed 12 May 2018.

Additional information

Funding

This project was partially funded by grant no. 15/14474-0 from the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo Research Foundation) and RMIT University International Research Nodes Travel Support.

Notes on contributors

Victor Albert

Victor Albert is an Assistant Professor at the Public Policy Department, School of Politics and Governance, HSE University, Moscow. His research interests include social movements, participatory democracy and urban policy and change. He is the author of The Limits to Citizen Power: participatory democracy and the entanglements of the state (Pluto, 2016).