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Paper short abstract

This presentation 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 alienation of labour, private property, and commodification.

Paper long abstract

This presentation 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 housing occupations, ocupações, as part of the greater housing rights movement in São Paulo. A movement of many movements, the housing rights movement mobilises houseless populations to occupy abandoned state-owned spaces and pressure the state to provide adequate housing. Ocupações become sites 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 ocupação sites and through discussions with members of the movement in diverse roles, this presentation unpacks everyday and longitudinal responses amidst simultaneous crises at individual and communal scales. More specifically, it highlights the radical practices of repair and care 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 alienation of labour 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 and success in the urban realm.