Irregular Urbanization as a Catalyst for Radical Social Mobilization: The Case of the Housing Movements of São Paulo

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the city of São Paulo, Brazil and examines the ways in which irregular and illegal growth, characteristic of much of the city, have influenced the collective action of social movements of the urban poor. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork with the Alliance of Housing Movements in São Paulo, or UMM, the chapter describes how, during the 20th century, São Paulo grew as a socially segregated city due to calculated neglect on the part of the municipal authorities. Highlighting the city’s socio-spatial inequality, the degradation of the central districts and the widespread irregularity, it illustrates how these factors have both negatively affected the urban poor and provided a catalyst for social mobilization. In a recent examination of urban citizenship in São Paulo, Holston (2008) has shown how the irregularity of settlements on the peripheries of the city stimulated homeowners in lower-income neighbourhoods to use the law to assert their claims to land and to regularize tenure. However, beyond becoming insurgent citizens in Holston’s terms, this chapter shows how social movements of the poor do more than simply use the law to protect home ownership: they are able to radically reinterpret constitutional law, so as to justify theoretically illegal acts of civil disobedience and promote a vision of a more just city.