"The Right to Occupy": Multiple Moral Economies in the Urban Squatters Movement in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

• In Event: Reimagining/ destroying the cities?

Abstract

In the major cities of Brazil, a swiftly inflating urban real estate market combined with the brutal neoliberal reduction of public subsidies for housing, have led to an affordable housing crisis. As elsewhere in Brazil, the city of Rio de Janeiro has seen the poor respond to the crisis in a variety of ways, including the takeover and occupation of abandoned buildings. An important key to understanding this growing direct action movement is to discover the motives, views, and projects, both material and ideological, of the occupiers. Existing scholarly portraits of building occupations, both in Brazil and elsewhere in the world, tend to offer mainly homogeneous ideological characterizations of squats (this one is “anarchist”, that one “counter-cultural”, this one is “survivalist”, that one is “anti-authoritarian”, and so on). My own immersive experience in a building occupation in Rio de Janeiro reveals, in contrast, considerable ideological heterogeneity within a single squat. By undertaking fine-grained ethnography, I am able to show and explore the multiple moral economies of squatting embraced by different clusters of occupiers. Revealing this heterogeneity, in which squatters articulate surprisingly complex understandings of rights, justice, and the future, is important not only to grasp the different cosmovisions among urban squatters in Brazil, but also to push in new directions the analysis of urban squatting movements throughout the increasingly unequal cities of the global South.

Author

• John S Burdick, Syracuse University