Rightful Squatting: Housing Movements & the “Right to the City” in Brazil

• In Event: Urban Inequalities: Causes and Redresses

Abstract

Rights-based urban social movements have proliferated since the mid-1970s, but our understanding of their real impacts remains limited. Using the housing movements in São Paulo as an example, the paper examines the mechanisms and effects of the rights-based movements. It argues that the unusual resilience and scale of the housing movements in the city center of São Paulo must be understood in the global context of the coexistence of two contradictory trajectories: the neoliberal urbanism and the rights-based movements. On the one hand, the neoliberal urbanism has resulted in the dismantling of basic institutional welfare and increased spatial and social inequalities. On the other hand, under the banners of the “right to the city,” the rights-based approach has provided new discourse and institutional devices for social movements to justify their actions and influence the policy process. While the rights-based approach has yet to bring fundamental changes to the unequal land and housing distribution in Brazil, it enables new legal and institutional possibilities that have empowered the disadvantaged citizens and turned their struggle into a form of “rightful squatting.” The study demonstrates that the gap between rights promised and rights delivered can be utilized as a political opportunity for collective mobilization. It has implications for contesting inequalities and advancing new conceptions of citizenship in the neoliberal era.

Author

• Yue Zhang, University of Illinois - Chicago