Rightful squatting: Housing movements, citizenship, and the “right to the city” in Brazil

ABSTRACT

Rights-based urban social movements have proliferated since the mid-1970s, but our understanding of their real impacts remains insufficient. Using the housing movements in São Paulo as an example, the article demonstrates both the limits and the strengths of the rights-based approach. It argues that housing movements in São Paulo must be understood in the global context of the coexistence of two contradictory trajectories: the neoliberal urbanism and the rights-based movements. While the rights-based approach has yet to bring fundamental changes to the unequal housing distribution in Brazil, it provides the housing movements with new legal and institutional devices to justify their actions and influence the policy process, thus contributing to the unusual resilience and scale of the movements. The article reveals that the gap between rights promised and rights delivered can be utilized as a political opportunity for facilitating collective mobilization, contesting neoliberalism, and advancing new conceptions of citizenship.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Eduardo Marques, Aldo Fornazieri, Marta Arretche, Ana Celia Martinez Guarnieri, Fernando Guarnieri, Samuel Ralize de Godoy, and Guilherme Rocha Formicki for their support during her fieldwork in São Paulo, and three anonymous reviewers for comments on prior drafts. Maureen Heffern Ponicki provided excellent research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For instance, during the squatter movements in Berlin in the 1980s, approximately 165 houses were occupied during the peak time, but the occupation lasted for only a few years (Koopmans, 1995, p. 174). In New York City, similar movements took place on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1970s and 1980s, but it remained small with around 500 squatters living in 20 buildings at its peak (Pruijt, 2013, p. 139). In a more recent case, 34 buildings were occupied in Rome between 2012 and 2014 (Di Feliciantonio, 2017, p. 358).

2. There are about 185,000 people living in cortiços. See Lima and Pallamin (2012, p. 45).

3. One Brazilian Real equals US$0.20 as of March 21, 2020.

4. An official of DEAR SUL, Municipal Department of Housing, revealed that, according to the Brazilian constitutional principle of human dignity, the government or companies cannot cut off water or electricity in an occupation as long as people living inside are paying for the services (personal communication, May 4, 2015).

5. According to the Brazilian Constitution (Article 183), low-income occupants can claim their ownership over third party, private lands if the following criteria are fulfilled: (1) the private urban area occupied may not exceed 250 square meters; (2) the occupation must have been continuous for a minimum of 5 years without legal intervention from the owner; (3) the property is used only as habitation for themselves or their families; and (4) the occupier does not own any other property, urban or rural.

6. For an assessment of the Brazilian municipalities’ policy identifying the social function of buildings, see Ministério das Cidades (2015).

7. Technically, the only mayor of São Paulo who stayed in office for longer than a term was Gilberto Kassab. Starting as the deputy mayor of José Serra, Kassab served as mayor of São Paulo for a 2-year term after Serra left to be the governor of the State of São Paulo. Kassab won the next mayoral election and served 6 years in total in office. However, most Paulistanos refer to Paulo Maluf and Celso Pitta, and José Serra and Gilberto Kassab as continuities across electoral cycles due to the strong political alliances between these political figures and their parties. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing it out.

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Yue Zhang

Yue Zhang is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Co-Editor of Urban Affairs Review. She received her Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of comparative and urban politics, with a focus on urbanization in the Global South, metropolitan and urban governance, and urban space and infrastructure development. She is the author of The Fragmented Politics of Urban Preservation: Beijing, Chicago, and Paris (University of Minnesota Press 2013; Chinese translation 2018). Her other published work has appeared in Cities, Town Planning Review, Land Use Policy, and The China Quarterly, among others. She has conducted policy analysis for the World Bank, UNESCO, and other organizations on issues pertaining to inclusive development and cultural heritage preservation. She is currently writing a book comparing the redevelopment of informal housing in China, India, and Brazil.