Transgressive Citizenship and the Struggle for Social Justice

The events of June 2013 in Brazil, when its cities were gripped by protests against bus fare increases and investments in the World Cup, form the starting point for this book. Since then, social mobilization has escalated and diversified, and brought new actors on to the streets. This book provides historical context to the events of 2013–2016 through an examination of the history of the housing movements and their struggle for social justice in São Paulo. It explores their entrenched relationship with the Workers’ Party and their endeavours to establish multiple channels of engagement with the state. The activities of the movements are set against the backdrop of a spatially and socially divided city that prevents the urban poor from realizing their conception of the right to the city.

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.

An examination of the relationship between São Paulo’s centre and periphery is provided through a brief history of the way São Paulo has been settled and a discussion of social and spatial segregation in the city today. An appreciation of the significance of the centre for the urban poor can only be achieved through an understanding of the state’s expulsion of low-income households to the peripheries, its neglect of these areas and the irregularity of so much of the city’s built space. This discussion also provides the context for the movements’ building occupations, which can be read as an extension of the way that land in the city has historically been acquired through illegal occupation.

The chapter situates the housing movements in the context of social mobilization that began during the military dictatorship. An examination of this period aids understanding of the way in which rights claims are perceived and made in the country today. The peripheries of São Paulo were a breeding ground for the collective action that emerged, first, to meet basic needs and then to put pressure on the military dictatorship as these needs were perceived as rights—a position supported by the nascent Workers’ Party. Continuing deprivation in São Paulo explains the ongoing purchase of the idea of the right to the city. The chapter ends with a discussion of the 2013 protests as the latest manifestation of a demand for this right.

The concept of the ‘politics of rights’, key to the book’s analysis of the way the housing movements engage with the right to the city, is introduced in this chapter. It uses interview material to illustrate the movements’ combative stance towards the state, and their ‘fighting talk’. It then contrasts this with the parallel adoption of a discourse and practice of participatory citizenship, evidenced by the movements’ engagement in deliberative policy councils. The chapter demonstrates how the housing movements maintain this dual position by using the idea of democracy and its trappings—participation and the language of rights—to frame their own practice while highlighting the state’s failure to respond to the needs of the urban poor.

This chapter provides a close-up study of the movements’ relationships with the three levels of Brazilian government (federal, subnational state and municipal). It explores how these fluctuate, along with the electoral fortunes of the Workers’ Party, and examines the workings of participatory forums. These experiments in participatory democracy have garnered much attention and considerable praise in the academic literature. However, this chapter illustrates how these spaces can be manipulated by incumbent governments on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. It also demonstrates how the movements’ involvement in these participatory arenas cannot be separated out from their more radical approach to engagement with the state—the building occupations for which they have become famous.

Providing a close examination of the strategy of building occupations, the chapter gives particular attention to the question of legality and the sophisticated discourse of rights that movement leaders have developed to defend their actions. While the act of entering and taking over abandoned buildings breaks the civil and penal codes, the housing movements draw on the constitutional right to housing and the concept of the right to the city enshrined in the City Statute to bestow legality upon occupations. The legal ambiguity of occupations is critical, and the chapter draws on debates around civil disobedience to highlight how the movements also use the act of occupation to draw attention to the illegality of the state’s own actions.

This final chapter and conclusion develops the idea of ‘transgressive citizenship’, understood as the way the housing movements shape their relationship with the state through their acts of civil disobedience, combined with a politics of rights. The chapter asserts the importance of text-based law (the Constitution and City Statute in particular) in the construction of urban citizenship, highlighting the emancipatory potential of the law for urban social movements. The chapter then returns to the discussions of Lefebvre and, particularly, the utopian aspects of the right to the city, positing his utopianism as social and political criticism—as a way of critiquing dominant assumptions on the nature of urban society and asserting other possible urban worlds. In this vein, the housing movements’ acts of transgressive citizenship can be seen to bridge the divide between pragmatic responses to violations of rights in the city and the search for alternative futures.