Abstract
This chapter introduces São Paulo’s housing movements and their tactic of high-profile building occupations. It analyses how the movements link adequate housing to full or ‘substantive’ citizenship and discusses this conceptualization in light of a critical rereading of T.H. Marshall’s seminal work on social citizenship. The chapter discusses the concept of the right to the city: how it has been interpreted and deployed by housing movements, and its influence on the City Statute that enshrines the right to the city in Brazilian law. The chapter concludes by setting out the dichotomy around which the book is based: the use of legal process (rights discourse, litigation, legislation) and of formal, participatory channels for interaction with the state, compared with extra-legal activities such as building occupations.
We have rights: both to housing and to live in the centre. You can’t just dump us on the peripheries. We are human beings. We’re not animals – not beasts that you can do anything you like with. For me, even though we are poor, we still deserve respect. We deserve housing. And that’s the struggle of the movement, and that’s why I got so engaged in the movement. And further down the line I want to be a movement leader. Once I’ve got my own apartment, I want to be a movement leader, and bring people into the movement, so that they also get the same rights as me. (Interview with Plácida, movement member, 24.07.07)
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Notes
- 1.
Interview with Tristana, social movement leader and member of UMM’s executive committee, 26.03.07.
- 2.
Interview with Benjamin, social movement leader and member of UMM executive committee, 05.06.07.
- 3.
This seems to be the case in Leach and Scoones’s (2007) discussion of global citizenship, where the simple act of engaging in international lobbying seems to qualify the individual for global citizenship; this despite the inexistence of any global government that can uphold rights.
- 4.
For example, a wealthy patient could pay for a private room in a public hospital, but he or she would receive the same quality of care and from the same doctors treating other poorer patients.
- 5.
Holston (2008) describes grileiros as swindlers involved in scams whereby they pretend to have legitimate title to the land they are selling by producing an array of documents, which are either forgeries or have been fraudulently acquired.
- 6.
Extract from the author’s research diary, 04.06.07.
- 7.
Citations from The Right to the City and Space and Politics are from the 1996 English translation of these works, published together by Kofman and Lebas under the title Writings on Cities.
- 8.
Presentation at the UN-Habitat World Urban Forum, Rio de Janeiro, 25.03.10.
- 9.
For a technical discussion of the challenges of implementing the City Statue in practice, see Abigail Friendly’s study of Niteroi (Friendly 2013).
- 10.
From Lefebvre’s The Right to the City (1996: 179).
- 11.
At the time of the original fieldwork for this study, the UMM’s internal structure incorporated six ‘macro-regions’ within the municipality of São Paulo: North, East, Southeast, South, West/Northwest and Centre, and a further three in São Paulo state.
- 12.
There are also pastoral units organized around health, education, children and young people.
- 13.
Levy (2005) also claims that the UMM was formed as a response to the emergence of other umbrella organizations linked to the Partido dos Trabalhadores—the Workers’ Party, or PT—and the unions, particularly the forerunner to today’s Central de Movimentos Populares (CMP) or Centre for Popular Movements.
- 14.
The Cities Ministry was established at the start of Lula’s first term in office and brings together all governmental departments working on urban issues, including housing, that had previously been scattered across a number of different ministries.
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Earle, L. (2017). Housing, Citizenship and the Right to the City. In: Transgressive Citizenship and the Struggle for Social Justice. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51400-0_2
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