Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines housing occupations in São Paulo and how they operationalise radical repair, care, and political mobilisation as an alternative framework to navigate capitalist logics of private property, commodification and propensity for growth.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how grassroot insurgent practices against socio-economic exclusion can serve as a framework for facing the simultaneous crises of inadequate housing and environmental collapse. Towards this, it studies the ideological and operational elements of the housing rights movements in São Paulo, which mobilise houseless populations to occupy abandoned state-owned spaces and pressure the state to provide adequate housing. These sites, called ocupações, become spaces for collective inhabitation through labour of their residents across various stages of creating material and social life from the vestiges of the city. By observing life in ocupações and through discussions with members of the movement in diverse roles, this paper unpacks everyday and longitudinal responses amidst simultaneous crises at individual and communal scales. More specifically, it highlights the radical practices of repair, care, and maintenance alongside political education to recognise the realities of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) as a mode of challenging and navigating the components of private property, commodification and propensity for growth (Harris & Delanty, 2023) within capitalism amidst the backdrop of colonial and racial Brasil. Furthermore, this discussion complicates these insurgent negations of capitalism by questioning the extent to which capitalism can be challenged as the struggle for inclusion into urban apparatuses becomes entangled in notions of sustainment, growth, and success in the urban realm.