Introduction
At midnight on 8 March 1997, a movement of inner-city slum dwellers, the Unificação das Lutas dos Cortiços (United Struggles of the Slums, ULC), undertook the first organised building occupation the city had ever seen.Footnote 1 The protest was against the state's failure to ensure that the members of the movement were adequately housed. Although families and individuals had squatted in empty buildings on a small scale before, the occupation of the Casarão Santos Dumont was different. Several hundred movement members, most of them women, set out for the central district of Campos Eliseos, once an elite residential district but now one in which many large family mansions had become cortiços (literally, beehives – overcrowded, poorly maintained tenement buildings where residents share washing and sanitation facilities) and squats. On the way to the Casarão, some of the women came across a police patrol and were asked where they were going. The women replied that they were off to occupy an empty building. The police laughed, believing them to be joking, and the occupation went ahead unimpeded. The movement members remained inside the building for three months, while negotiations were held with the state government (the owner of the property) on how the site could be developed to provide housing for movement members. The perceived success of the building occupation led to a wave of ‘organised occupations’ in São Paulo city and beyond, particularly between 1997 and 1999.
This event, and the many that followed it, could be described simply as civil disobedience, understood as the breaking of the law to highlight an injustice. And yet, this article will argue that the way these building occupations are presented and justified by the housing movements of São Paulo renders them something more than protest or illegal squatting. In dialogue with James Holston's work on ‘insurgent citizens’ of the periphery of São Paulo, I put forward the idea of ‘transgressive citizenship’, which is founded on a rhetoric of rights and, critically, reference to text-based law. The article is based on a year's fieldwork with the União de Movimentos de Moradia (Alliance of Housing Movements, UMM) in 2007, and draws on interviews with leaders and members.Footnote 2
Insurgent citizenship
James Holston's recent publication, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil, puts forward an interpretation of Brazilian citizenship based on research into residents of peripheral São Paulo neighbourhoods who organise to defend their rights to land and property in the face of disputes over ownership caused by the activities of land swindlers or grileiros.Footnote 3 His historical analysis of the nature of citizenship leads him to put forward the idea that in Brazil, ‘the historical norm of citizenship fosters exclusion, inequality, illegality, violence, and the social logics of privilege and deference as the ground of national belonging’.Footnote 4 This argument is based on the central premise that Brazilian citizenship is distinctive because, unlike the French and American variants, it has always been ‘universally inclusive in membership but massively inegalitarian in distribution’.Footnote 5 Although descendents of African slaves were granted citizenship from 1850, this did not eradicate the entrenched discrimination against these and other categories of individuals within society. Holston argues that these people were not discriminated against as non-citizens, but because they were particular kinds of citizens. Differences in education, occupation, race, gender and access to property were used to exclude certain groups from the political process, force them into ‘segregated and often illegal conditions of residence’ and funnel them into labour ‘as servile workers’.Footnote 6 Entrenched forms of differentiated citizenship were also used to justify privileged treatment for other social groups.
Holston argues, however, that with the transition to democracy, ‘insurgent citizens’ on the self-built or ‘autoconstructed’ peripheries of Brazil's large cities have begun to challenge differentiated citizenship by asserting their rights to the legal ownership of property and to urban services. This has involved organising to contest competing claims of land ownership that have arisen as a result of illegal subdivision and sale of plots in peripheral areas in the 1970s. According to Holston, the experience of ‘autoconstruction’ on the peripheries
fuelled the irruption of an insurgent citizenship that destabilized the differentiated at the very sites that had produced differentiation – political rights, landed property, residential illegality, misrule of law, and servility. Although these conditions continue to sustain the paradigm of differentiated citizenship, they also became the conditions of its transformation. In effect, under different circumstances in the peripheries, the sites of differentiation became those of insurgence, as the urban poor gained political rights, became property owners, made law an asset, and achieved a greater sense of personal competence through their urban practices. Moreover, as residents formulated alternative projects of citizenship, they changed the development of the state and its relation with citizens. Their insurgence has thus cracked open the principles of differentiation that for centuries legitimated a particularly inegalitarian formulation of citizenship. It turned the poor residents of the peripheries into new citizens and launched an urban citizenship that transformed Brazil.Footnote 7
Holston asserts, therefore, that the city is not just the context of citizenship struggles, but also the substance of these struggles.Footnote 8
Holston's earlier work also engaged with the concept of insurgent citizenship, which he introduced in his study of Brasilia.Footnote 9 This identified how poorer residents, and those whose labour built the city, resisted modernist urban planning schemes, subverting the state's agenda through their housing and livelihood practices. The concept of insurgent citizenship has influenced planning theorists, including Leonie Sandercock, who develops the idea of insurgent planning in her discussion of multicultural and inclusive cities.Footnote 10 Planning scholars continue to engage with Holston's more recent work: the ethnography of residents of São Paulo's peripheral neighbourhoods in Insurgent Citizenship has been used to inform analysis of urban struggles in countries as diverse as Israel/Palestine, South Africa, the United States, China and India.Footnote 11
These authors draw parallels with Holston's São Paulo case, showing how insurgent movements, rather than constraining themselves to channels for participation that are sanctioned by the state, seek new spaces where they can invoke citizenship rights in order to ‘further their counter-hegemonic interests’.Footnote 12 However, as Watson has argued, reference to insurgent citizenship is generally made to describe cases of what could also be termed ‘everyday resistance’.Footnote 13 In general, these authors do not respond to Holston's occasional ambivalence towards the actions of his research subjects. Indeed, the gloss is generally a positive one, of marginalised citizens expressing ‘explicit counter hegemonies in the urban landscape’, as Michael Rios has expressed it, and making the decision to disengage from the societal mainstream in protest at barriers to equality and inclusion.Footnote 14 Although a review of Insurgent Citizenship predicted that the work would generate ‘vigorous debate’, to date the conclusions drawn by Holston on the nature of Brazilian citizenship have not been extensively interrogated with reference to Brazil itself.Footnote 15
The idea of the struggle for a place in the city and its link to citizenship finds resonance with my own research on the UMM, an organisation that brings together low-income residents who are also mobilised around rights in the urban milieu. The UMM grew up out of the resistance to the military dictatorship in the late 1970s and 1980s, emerging from a broad coalition of pro-democracy actors, and serves as the umbrella movement to which the ULC, which carried out the building occupation described in the opening paragraph, belongs. The UMM organises its member movements around the demand for low-income housing by using formal channels to negotiate with the municipal and state governments, and by undertaking occupations of abandoned buildings in São Paulo's centre. Like Holston's insurgent citizens, the movements and associations affiliated with the UMM first became organised in the peripheral neighbourhoods of São Paulo. They were just one group amongst many different movements that, working closely with the Catholic Church, began to conceive of basic needs as rights and to mobilise accordingly. These groups, organised around health, hunger and education as well as housing, are perceived by a number of Brazilian scholars as being part of a broader movement that is democratising society and that has created, by unsettling the dominant political culture, ‘an extended and redefined notion of rights and citizenship’.Footnote 16
Insurgent Citizenship proposes three ways of understanding citizenship in São Paulo that exist side by side. Firstly, those involved in ‘autoconstruction’ on the peripheries have ‘earned’ their citizenship by contributing to the building of the city. Second, in a hangover from previous historical eras, particularly the labour union reforms undertaken by President Vargas between 1930 and 1945, certain categories of people are considered more deserving than others of the benefits of citizenship, particularly those engaged in formal work. Although gradually being levelled out, social hierarchies and special treatment, especially for the rich, are still part of Brazilian social interaction. Thirdly, ‘text-based’ rights that draw on the Constitution are promoting a more egalitarian society. Holston argues that these three understandings of citizenship are in an ‘unbalanced and corrosive entanglement that unsettles both state and society’ but that, nevertheless, populations on the peripheries have radically challenged traditional ideas of citizenship and are transforming the relationship between state and citizen.Footnote 17
In Insurgent Citizenship, Holston places considerable emphasis on the first and second conceptualisations of citizenship, based on being (1) contributors to the city and (2) honest workers deserving of rights, while underplaying the third, relating to text-based rights that presuppose the innate equality of all human beings. I will argue here that it is the third understanding of citizenship that is becoming more and more critical in contemporary Brazil: it is the demand for equality, to be achieved through constitutional rights, and particularly social rights, that is driving mobilization amongst some of Brazil's poorest populations. Where Holston does discuss urban social movements’ engagement with a rights discourse, he stresses the Arendtian idea of the ‘right to have rights’ popular with many Brazilian scholars. This ‘change in citizenship subjectivity’ brought about through social mobilisation is, for Holston, played out in interactions between different social groups within society, as the poor assert their status as bearers of the right to rights. By contrast, I will show how a discourse linked to text-based rights has become critical for social movements’ interaction with the state.
It should be stated from the outset that at root, Holston's research participants and my own are very different types of urban citizens. The groups of people researched by Holston and named as ‘insurgent citizens’ are perhaps best described as lower middle-class. They are families who bought homes on the peripheries or purchased land in order to build their homes themselves during the 1960s and 1970s. They have since been involved in labyrinthine struggles to ensure legal tenure of their lots, fighting counterclaims of ownership by property developers and landowning families, but they have nevertheless achieved the Brazilian ‘dream’ of owning their own homes, and despite the threatening lawsuits described by Holston, have achieved a considerable degree of security. Indeed, none of Holston's research participants were ever evicted from their homes, and the areas where they live are now consolidated neighbourhoods where houses are made of bricks and mortar and are owned by their residents. But living on the peripheries can also mean living with high degrees of vulnerability – in shacks on the side of the city's highways, by open sewers in favelas or perched on stilts over a reservoir. It can also mean living in a cortiço, for while not on the outskirts of the city in geographical terms, the squalor, violence and poverty of the cortiços render them peripheral in social terms. Existing on some of the lowest incomes in the city, these are the people organised in the movements and associations represented and supported by the UMM.
Given these differences, a discussion of the UMM in light of Holston's theoretical insights might appear unjustified. However, I would argue that consideration of these two groups – Holston's research subjects and my own – in the space of this article is merited for the following reasons. Firstly, Holston argues that his research participants ‘typify the peripheries’, and I wish to show that theirs is not the only understanding of citizenship amongst lower-income residents of São Paulo. Second, a considerable amount of Holston's fieldwork was undertaken in the late 1980s, and as such his analysis does not fully capture the extent to which the Constitution of 1988 has become a critical resource for organised groups of the urban poor. Indeed, he sets out his intention, at the start of his book, to demonstrate the persistence of ‘difference-specific citizenship’, a focus that leaves little space for a discussion of text-based rights.Footnote 18 As such, this article sets out to demonstrate how (1) text-based law has become integral to the understanding of citizenship put forward by the UMM, (2) this understanding has been translated into a ‘politics of rights’, and (3) the law is used by the movement to engage with the state through acts of ‘transgressive citizenship’.
Housing in São Paulo
Before moving on to a more detailed introduction to the UMM, it is important to provide some background to the housing situation in São Paulo around which both the UMM and Holston's homeowners have mobilised. Metropolitan São Paulo is South America's largest city; it has a total population of 19 million, living in 38 municipalities. The municipality of São Paulo alone covers an area of 1,500 square kilometres and has a population of 11.2 million people.Footnote 19 Until the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the coffee boom began, São Paulo was a small town on the main route between the port town of Santos and the interior. Most of the city's phenomenal growth took place in the twentieth century as migrants, first from across the world and then from the country's north-east, arrived in the city looking for work in what was to become Brazil's economic ‘powerhouse’. The state's inadequate response to this influx throughout most of the last century led to a situation in which today, between 50 and 65 per cent of land is illegally or irregularly occupied, or in some other way infringes on laws of planning, building or zoning.Footnote 20
State absence is often posited as the cause of São Paulo's anarchic sprawl, particularly in terms of regulation for low-income settlements. However, research would suggest that this was a wilful absence that suited the state's interests in industrial expansion and the elite's desire to maintain social segregation in the city. Far from lacking regulations and legislation, as Grostein points out, the state's planners and legislators were busy throughout the twentieth century.Footnote 21 Yet legislation did not keep up with the growth of the city in real terms and was systematically ignored or used in such a way as to encourage land speculation and keep low-income workers outside the urban perimeter, where zoning and planning laws did not apply. In this ‘rural zone’, land could be illegally occupied or bought at low prices from ‘clandestine’ subdividers who may or may not have had legal title to it, and the long process of autoconstruction would then begin. This model of self-building on the periphery, outside the urban zone, accelerated with the advent of the diesel bus in the second half of the 1920s.Footnote 22 Once mass transport was easily and cheaply available, the expansion of low-income settlements on clandestine or irregular subdivisions in the peripheral rural zone exploded. Favelas were not a feature of the São Paulo landscape until the 1970s, since up until that time, land on the peripheries was cheap enough for poor urban workers to purchase and then slowly build their homes upon.Footnote 23 The municipal state's toleration of irregular self-building on the peripheries throughout most of the twentieth century acted as a safety valve by providing a housing solution for the rapidly growing urban population at a time of massive industrial expansion. It also brought down the costs of the reproduction of labour, since workers who had built their own homes in the rural zone paid no rent. Some scholars of São Paulo's growth in the twentieth century argue that capitalist expansion in Brazil depended on, and indeed was subsidised by, an army of underpaid workers who constructed their own homes at the margins of the city.Footnote 24
Today the outskirts of the city are still, in practice, the space where the poor are housed. New peri-urban settlements in environmentally sensitive zones in the furthest reaches of the municipality have recorded growth rates of 8.1 per cent in recent years.Footnote 25 The bulk of social housing built by the state and municipal housing companies is also located in peripheral areas, notably to the east of the city, in large estates that can be up to two hours’ travel away from the centre. These efforts to build social housing have not managed to keep pace with demand.Footnote 26 Figures for the city's housing deficit vary considerably. Recent data from São Paulo's municipality record 889,808 households living in ‘inadequate conditions’, with 133,000 of these requiring removal from at-risk areas.Footnote 27 According to reports in the press, the state of São Paulo has a deficit of 1,217,550 homes.Footnote 28
Despite these problems, recent research published on the Brazilian government's information portal reports 6,070,000 empty properties across the country, a number far in excess of the national housing deficit.Footnote 29 Empty buildings are a particularly visible problem in the centre of São Paulo, and although discussion of the problems of the periphery might imply that the centre is a desirable place to live, the inner districts of São Paulo have long been in decline and have recorded negative growth rates during the 2000s. The elites first began to move out of the central areas after cholera epidemics in the early decades of the twentieth century. Businesses began to follow suit in the 1960s as the first skyscrapers were put up along Avenida Paulista, the new ‘chic’ residential and corporate neighbourhood of São Paulo. Paulista, however, appears to have had its day, and elite business has followed the wealthy neighbourhoods further into the south-west of the city. The result is a centre characterised by empty buildings, a visualisation of its unpopularity both as a residential area and as a centre for business. Preliminary data from the 2010 Census record 290,000 empty residential properties in the municipality of São Paulo, but we should add the numerous abandoned hotels, factories and office buildings to this total.Footnote 30 While many buildings are left empty for speculative purposes, they are also abandoned because of legal wrangles over ownership (often amongst heirs), problems of irregular documentation with the land registry (the registry offices have a notoriously corrupt past) or unpaid property taxes.
The structural causes behind some of the problems facing low-income residents of São Paulo in their attempts to access housing have been taken on over the past decades by the Fórum Nacional de Reforma Urbana (National Forum for Urban Reform, FNRU). This coalition, of which the UMM is a member, also includes academics and representatives of trade unions and NGOs. It has lobbied successfully over the past decade for the inclusion of the right to housing in the Constitution (an amendment made in 2000), the enactment of the City Statute in 2001, and the creation of the Cities Ministry and the National Council of Cities in 2003. The City Statute is particularly notable – an internationally acclaimed piece of legislation that as well as regulating the right to housing as set out in the 1988 Constitution also provides the basis for a ‘new legal-political paradigm for urban land use and development control’.Footnote 31 To this end, it reinforces the role of municipal governments in controlling urban development and seeks to ensure that land use policies recognise the ‘social, cultural and environmental interests of other groups and the city as a whole’ alongside those of landowners.Footnote 32 For the UMM, the most significant aspects of the City Statute are its elaboration of the social function of property (thus, buildings should not remain empty for a lengthy period of time) and its explicit recognition of the idea of the ‘right to the city’, a concept that is used and interpreted by the movement in a variety of ways.Footnote 33
The União de Movimentos de Moradia
In an echo of the more well-known Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers’ Movement, MST), membership of the UMM is open to anyone who considers themselves sem teto. Meaning, literally, ‘without a roof’, this term is perhaps best translated as ‘without a roof of one's own’. The UMM works with individuals and families who live in cortiços and favelas, in overcrowded conditions with family or friends, or in other types of substandard housing on illegally or irregularly occupied land. It is composed of several hundred smaller neighbourhood and regional associations that came together to form the alliance in 1987. According to the leadership, there are approximately 50,000 members across São Paulo state.Footnote 34 Individuals joining the movement generally come from very low-income households, and there is therefore considerable class homogeneity amongst the rank and file. Affiliation with the movement is most often based on the need to improve family living conditions or as a response to impending eviction.
During the 1980s, groups of low-income residents affiliated to the MST and supported by the Catholic Church undertook mass occupations of land for housing, particularly on the eastern peripheries of the city. Occupations, sometimes involving up to 100,000 people, were a reaction to the growing density of the favelas and legislation that restricted the opening up of new plots for house-building. In its early years, the housing movement's demands on the local state revolved around the provision of land, calling for thousands of plots from the municipal government on which its members could build their own homes.Footnote 35 Over the course of the 1980s, however, elements of the movement began to develop the idea of mutirão – mutual self-help building, where groups of future residents are involved in building each other's homes. Although much in debt to the rural movement in terms of strategies and rhetoric, the UMM no longer has formal or regular links with the MST.
The idea of occupying empty buildings in the centre of the city arose in the mid-1990s, partly due to the growing realisation that the practice of mutirão was replicating the pattern of reserving the most distant peripheries for the poor, but also in response to a growing number of evictions from cortiços and the start of municipal and state regeneration projects that sought to create spaces for high-income leisure pursuits in the centre of the city. The call for low-income housing in the city centre appeared to gain ground during the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) administration of Marta Suplicy from 2001 to 2004.Footnote 36 However, her failure to gain re-election meant that few of these plans were realised, and the incumbent mayor during my fieldwork year (now in his second term) rejected the idea of centrally located low-income housing. Thus, while the UMM drew back from its strategy of occupations during the PT mayorship, when it seemed to be making progress with its engagement in more formal channels, it subsequently took up this strategy again.
Today the UMM is most dynamic within the metropolitan region, where it actively seeks regular meetings with representatives of state-level and municipal housing departments, and campaigns vigorously to have its members elected to positions on the Conselho Municipal de Habitação (Municipal Housing Council), a participatory space within which housing policy for the city is debated.Footnote 37 Alongside this formal engagement with representatives of the state, the movement also uses mass occupations of abandoned buildings to put forward its agenda for low-income, centrally located housing and highlight the living conditions of its members. These acts of civil disobedience are, in theory, illegal, yet the movement also puts great faith in the power of the law: it draws up proposals for new legislation with its allies in the PT and engages in litigation against the state for the latter's failure to uphold the right to housing, with reference to the Constitution and the City Statute.
Conceptualising the State
The following sections draw on interviews with UMM members and leaders as well as observation at internal meetings and public events. Some of the older movement leaders who described themselves as founders of the UMM had become involved in the movement through experiences with the Pastoral de Moradia (the Catholic Church's housing outreach programme) and the trade unions working at the peripheries of the city in the late 1970s. At the time of my fieldwork, however, the majority of leaders had joined the UMM in the 1980s and 1990s out of a need for housing and had later become committed to the movement's cause, choosing to take up coordinating positions after, in most cases, satisfying their own personal need for housing. Of the most prominent 25 or so leaders in the UMM, just two could be described as middle-class. One had joined the movement not out of need for housing but out of her connection to the Church and personal commitment to social justice. The other joined the movement when he became homeless after the loss of his job and the breakdown of his marriage and family relationships.
The life trajectories of other leaders within the UMM reflect those of the majority of São Paulo's urban poor. Many arrived in the city as children or young adults in the 1970s at the peak of the ‘economic miracle’, accompanying their parents from rural areas of the north-eastern and southern states. They remember helping to work the land at a young age – trabalhando na roça – before leaving for the city. The majority did not finish secondary education as children, and worked in semi-skilled and unskilled employment before joining the movement. Becoming leaders in the movement has had a significant impact on their working lives and earning potential – this is due to the availability of paid work with elected PT politicians. Most have since been able to complete their secondary education, and a significant number have gone on to study at tertiary level. The most popular choice of study is law. Four of the most senior leaders have obtained a legal degree, and at the time of the fieldwork two were studying for it, although only one of these had passed the notoriously difficult bar exam.
The movement's roots in the pro-democracy struggle are evident in the way members and leaders conceptualise the role of the state and make frequent reference to the 1988 Constitution, which is both highly progressive and a symbol of the return to democracy. They stressed continually in interviews that it is the democratic state that is responsible for ensuring that housing solutions are found for the population, particularly considering that housing is a constitutional right. For example, Adana, who advises the UMM's executive committee, described the work of the movement as trying to keep the government to its responsibilities: ‘We hold them to their duties – it's they who are supposed to be building housing.’Footnote 38 Ana, who works with regional movements in the west of the city, expressed similar sentiments: ‘We put pressure on the authorities so that they recognise our right to housing, and so that they give it to us.’Footnote 39 Movement members and the rank and file stressed their desire for a reciprocal arrangement – they are willing to pay for housing, but wish to be given the opportunity to do so through the provision of affordable housing and/or credit. As one movement member living in an occupied building put it, ‘We want a place to live in; we don't want anything for free. We want a solution to this situation. The government has to give us a solution’.Footnote 40
Analysis of the movement's rhetoric quickly reveals that it does not believe the state is keeping its side of the bargain. In particular, the governments of Brazil in the democratic era are not perceived as showing a commitment to equality. Nearly half the UMM representatives interviewed made the allegation that the government (particularly at the state and municipal levels, but also occasionally the federal) is only concerned with protecting the interests of the more affluent sectors in society, and that it enacts exclusionary policies towards the urban poor. Benjamin was one such representative; he stated, ‘The government today just thinks about policies for one sector of society … for the bourgeoisie, for the elite … The state government is exclusionary, and so is the municipal one. They are right-wing governments, and the needy population and social movements suffer at their hands.’Footnote 41 Cristiano was another example: ‘A while back, Kassab [the current mayor] didn't want to approve any plans for social housing in the centre of the city. It just shows that the government isn't worried about the situation here – well, only in that it wants to clean up the area and send poor people off to the peripheries.’Footnote 42
This situation, in which all levels of government are perceived as favouring the moneyed classes over those who are poor and in need, leads to negative evaluations of the state's commitment to democracy. The perceived failure to respond adequately to the needs of the poor from the various levels of government is often conceptualised as a lack of respect and, crucially, as a wilful violation of citizenship rights. This perception has an impact on the way in which the UMM frames the state, and the movement's relationship to it, in public discourse.
The dissatisfaction that movement members feel with regard to Brazil's democracy is manifest in their rhetoric, which is perhaps best described as ‘fighting talk’. The language used has clear echoes of the anti-dictatorship era, in that the movement places itself in opposition to the state. Movement leaders’ rhetoric in interviews, internal meetings and public forums is peppered with the terminology of resistance. The UMM's motto, which it displays on banners and posters, is ‘Ocupar, Resistir, Construir’ (‘Occupy, Resist, Build’).Footnote 43 The UMM is engaged in a ‘fight’ for housing, and the movement's overall goals can be referred to simply as a luta, the struggle. When a family or individual receives the keys to a new home, this is described as a ‘conquest’. When the movement ‘takes to the streets’, it shows its ‘force’. Occupations and street protests are ‘weapons’ of the struggle, and the movement must show daring and strength as the only way to achieve its aims. Men and women in the movement describe themselves as ‘fighters’ who are ‘battling for their rights’.
This discourse of resistance is directed towards the institutions of the Brazilian state, which is sometimes explicitly referred to as ‘the enemy’. Movement leaders talk of ‘taking on’ the authorities, and when they organise protests or occupations, this is described as batendo no governo – literally, battering or hitting the government. It is common parlance among members of the movement to denounce any government that is not explicitly ‘popular’ (which in practice means a PT government) as ‘non-democratic’. Governments ‘betray’ the movement even when it appears to be cooperating and must be made to ‘bend to the movement's will’, while the role of social movements in Brazil is to provide a space for the workers to ‘seize’ or ‘wrench’ their rights from the grasp of government. It is the failure of the state that drives the movement, which, members claim, would not exist if there were adequate and transparent housing policy and provision. In general, the movement claims that rights are not willingly bestowed by the state on its people, and even that the state actively seeks to deny many people rights. As such, these rights must be fought for.
The Politics of Rights
As noted above, a number of key movement leaders have chosen to study law at university. This is a significant phenomenon and reflects a conviction in the importance and power of the law among members of the UMM. The movement's overall commitment to both legislation and litigation in its relationship with the state is also evident. In 1991, the UMM became the first organisation to take advantage of a new constitutional right to submit a proposal for a law of ‘popular initiative’ for consideration by the federal legislature. Leaders also follow and provide input into the processes by which laws are proposed and debated by politicians at all three levels of the state, in particular through their contacts with elected members of the PT. In an interview, Benjamin, a member of the UMM executive who plays a key role as interlocutor between the movement and the municipal and state housing secretariats, summed up the movement's institutional agenda:
In our specific struggle for urban reform … we have the things that are guaranteed us in the [city's] Master Plan, in the City Statute, in the ZEIS [Zonas de Especial Interesse Social, Zones of Special Social Interest]. We have to make these things happen, and make these laws happen in practice – which to a certain extent we contributed to through the law of popular initiative – so that these laws aren't just on paper. If things are happening, there's no reason for us to be mobilising people outside the doors of the municipal, state or federal governments. But if things aren't happening, we have laws that we have to make work. Like the law on the purchase of land, like a whole load of things that we have. And then if that doesn't work, the UMM has its other main type of struggle – occupation.Footnote 44
The laws that Benjamin referred to are municipal (the Master Plan, of which the ZEIS are a part), state-level (the law on the purchase of land, which obliges the state-level housing company, CDHU, to buy land annually for social housing) and federal (the City Statute, which regulates the constitutional right to housing). This extract therefore shows the significant extent to which movement leaders are conversant in current legislation at all levels of the state.
Alongside legislation, the UMM has also become involved in litigation against the state through its close working relationships with the Defensoria Pública (Public Defender), a public body that provides legal aid and can take legal action to protect the rights of marginalised or vulnerable groups, and with specific lawyers sympathetic to the movement within the Ministério Público (Public Ministry), the public prosecutors’ office. Most recently, the movement, represented by a public prosecutor, was successful in its case against the municipal government for ceasing to pay housing benefits to families that had been evicted from properties declared unsafe. Since the municipal government had failed to provide permanent housing solutions for these families as it had originally committed to, a judge ruled that the municipality must continue to pay for their rented accommodation. This ruling led a senior adviser (and former public prosecutor) within the state housing secretariat to declare that the question of housing had become ‘judicialised’ – that is to say, it had ‘left the sphere of negotiation between the authorities and social movements and entered the sphere of the judiciary’.Footnote 45 The UMM's long-term involvement with other actors to ensure that the law is upheld was noted by Anderson:
We have joint activities with other public actors like the Defensoria Pública or the Ministério Público. We have always sought their help … A government might commit what we believe to be a diversion from a particular policy direction that we support. We feel both obliged and at liberty to seek representation with the Ministério Público, or to seek the help of the Defensoria Pública to make a judicial challenge to those public bodies, whether federal, state or municipal.Footnote 46
The importance given to the law evident in the UMM's rhetoric and actions is one indication of the way that the behaviour of social movements is changing in Brazil. According to Holston and Caldeira, Brazilian social movements emerging in the 1970s and 1980s ‘ignored the courts as an arena of redress’ and ‘bypassed the judiciary’.Footnote 47 The UMM's focus on the law is also in sharp contrast to Houtzager's appraisal of the MST, which he notes has been reluctant to engage in the juridical field, perceiving the courts as the traditional enforcer of bourgeois property rights.Footnote 48 Changes to the legal system, with the promulgation of a Constitution that upholds collective and social rights, mean that social movements have had some successes in the courts. For example, an eviction order for the Prestes Maia building in São Paulo, occupied by a rival group to the UMM, was stayed 29 times by a judge, with the argument that the municipality must make provision of decent housing for the occupants before the eviction could take place. This is just one example, however, and this interpretation of the right to housing is far from guaranteed.
It is perhaps surprising that the UMM chooses to use legal channels to press for its aims, firstly because the law and its institutions are often perceived as deeply conservative, but also because of the specific characteristics of Brazil's legal system.Footnote 49 Brazil is a country where the expression ‘Some laws stick and some don't’ is in common usage, and where pervasive ‘rule evasion’ leads to official tolerance of lawbreakers.Footnote 50 Indeed, the significant gap between legislation and its implementation is widely acknowledged by scholars, leading to references to the law as a ‘dead letter’.Footnote 51 Further, Macaulay notes the problems of poor people's access to legal process in Brazil and the extremely slow progression of cases through the courts, which suffer from a shortage of judges.Footnote 52 Court cases at the federal level, for example, can frequently drag on for a decade.Footnote 53 Hold-ups in the legal system can also be purposefully created: Meszaros quotes a senior judge in the state of São Paulo as saying, ‘with the Brazilian judiciary, if you have an able lawyer you can almost eternalise the discussion: it never ends’.Footnote 54 The legal system is further complicated by a profusion of laws at the three levels of the state that can and do contradict each other.Footnote 55 A perceived contradiction between municipal and state law can delay a court case for years as the problem is considered through the appeals process at a higher-level tribunal.Footnote 56 For Caldeira, these problems have generated a distinct lack of faith in the judiciary among the population, particularly for poorer groups, who declare that ‘justice is a privilege of the rich’.Footnote 57 Despite these issues, however, lawyers have considerable status in Brazil, and are among a small group of professionals who are permitted to use the title of ‘Doctor’. Historic deference for members of the profession is noted by Holanda, who labels Brazil ‘a land of lawyers, where, as a general rule, only those citizens who are trained in the law will rise to top public positions and offices’.Footnote 58 He further notes Brazilians’ general faith in the power of law, and their belief that ‘The letter of the law can in itself, and in a dynamic way, influence the future of the population. The rigidity, impermeability and perfect homogeneity of legislation appears to us to constitute the only obligatory requisite for the good functioning of society.’Footnote 59
More recent analysts make similar evaluations. Maricato rebukes urban reform campaigners for behaving as though ‘the principal causes of urban social exclusion were the absence of new laws or new urban instruments’.Footnote 60 This faith in the law, and the idea that ‘a new law will fix things’, is represented by the overabundance of legislation on the statutes: ‘Brazilians have an exaggerated hope that law can produce social change – if one day the laws are obeyed’.Footnote 61 But the ‘ambiguity of law’ in Brazil, where it is never clear how or if the country's ‘inconsistent and voluminous’ legislation will be enforced, leads Pereira to declare that Brazilian legality ‘contains strong elements of fantasy and desire’.Footnote 62 While this situation is clearly problematic for social movements that frame their demands in terms of rights and are involved in legislation and litigation, it also provides a significant resource for movement actors.
Scholars from the law and society tradition have noted how successful litigation can provide momentum to a social movement, helping to increase membership numbers and drawing attention to its aims from society at large. However, they caution against an uncritical faith in the power of litigation to achieve social change – the ‘myth of rights’. Rather than seeing rights and litigation as promoting social change in themselves through the legal system, Scheingold has argued that a general belief in the myth of rights constitutes a resource that can be used by social movements to achieve indirectly through ‘political process what was unavailable through legal channels’.Footnote 63 Writing with reference to the United States, he argues that society is sensitive to the violation of rights and can be mobilised in their defence. Rights as a resource can therefore be used as a weapon against the elites, in what Scheingold has labelled the ‘politics of rights’.
There is very little reason to believe that legal and constitutional values are directly persuasive to the elites who are most immediately responsible for making decisions for the polity. These elites are, however, likely to respond effectively to organized interests, and legal symbols can be usefully employed in behalf of political mobilization. The politics of rights, therefore, involves the manipulation of rights rather than their realization. Rights are treated as contingent resources which impact on public policy indirectly – in the measure, that is, that they can aid in altering the balance of political forces.Footnote 64
Since it cannot be taken for granted that constitutional rights will have an influence on the political system, the rhetoric of rights ‘introduces constitutional values into politics in an imperfect but salient and engaging fashion’.Footnote 65 Essentially, the politics of rights approach is based on a disconnect between rights on paper and rights in practice. This disconnect is used both to mobilise members to the movement, producing a change in legal consciousness, and to generate general support from society in favour of the movement's rights claims, thus potentially bringing about adequately implemented public policy and real social change.Footnote 66 Interestingly, Scheingold's idea that an awareness of the violation of rights works as a mobilising tool is asserted by movement leaders. As Pedro explained: ‘When people identify with the struggle, when someone begins to realise that housing is their right, and that that right is being denied, this really unites people at the grassroots of the movement. From the moment that you get that kind of consciousness, you'll never stop participating in some kind of way’.Footnote 67
Returning to the extract from the interview with Benjamin, although his words seem to suggest that he is a believer in the myth of rights, his final comment – that if the laws do not work, the movement can undertake transgressive collective action – is an acknowledgement of the limited power of the law to advance the goals of the movement. The following sections detail how the UMM places its demands for housing within an approach that reflects a politics of rights.
Housing and Citizenship
It should be acknowledged here that Scheingold based his research on the context of the United States, citing what he saw as a particularly North American belief that ‘politics is and should be conducted in accordance with patterns of rights and obligations established under law’.Footnote 68 However, the discussion above of Brazilians’ faith in the potential power of the law would suggest that this concept is equally applicable to Brazil. Certainly, the considerable if badly coordinated institutional infrastructure in place in the capital for the investigation and prosecution of individuals involved in political fraud and corruption points to a belief that politics, in theory, should be conducted in accordance with the law, even if it manifestly is not in practice.Footnote 69 The UMM is able to take advantage of a Brazilian belief in the myth of rights to garner support for its aims by presenting the city's housing problems as a violation of rights. It achieves this by framing its demands with reference to the Constitution.
The Constitution of 1988 has particular resonance for Brazilian society, marking the end of the military regime and, through its highly progressive content, setting out a legal framework for an egalitarian society. As Macaulay notes, regime transition is often accompanied by the drafting of a new constitution, thus ‘signalling a symbolic discursive and normative break with the preceding regime and its values’.Footnote 70 In the Brazilian case, the process by which the Constitution was written, with many thousands of people involved in the submission of popular amendments, has led to an engrained feeling of ownership over and pride in the document among popular sectors of society. Kingstone and Power note high levels of public awareness of the document, stating: ‘There are few countries in the world where an academic debate on constitutional design has so decisively influenced the journalistic and partisan arenas as the debate in Brazil has since 1985, and fewer still where public debate is so sensitive to perceived deficiencies of the existing institutional arrangements.’Footnote 71 It could perhaps be suggested, using Ferguson's term, that reference to the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 has become part of a ‘metanarrative’ of progress and modernity, and one that has been absorbed by much of the movement and the society it addresses.Footnote 72 Certainly, the power of the Constitution as a normative framework, both as a backdrop for its demands and as a weapon with which to denounce the state, is not lost on the UMM.
As noted above, movement members have made frequent reference, both in public discourse and in interviews, to text-based law. Indeed, their conceptualisation of full citizenship is intimately linked to the fulfilment of social rights, as set out in the 1988 Constitution. The importance of social rights is flagged even in the preamble, and the first article of the Constitution sets out the five foundational elements upon which the republic is based; namely, sovereignty, citizenship, dignity of the human person, social values of work and free enterprise, and political pluralism. The right to housing is set out in Article 6, along with other social rights such as education, health, work, leisure, security, social security, protection of motherhood and childhood, and assistance to the destitute.
Movement members frequently refer to the fact that housing is a constitutional right; this is a particularly powerful component of the movement's politics of rights, since the concept of citizenship is an emotive one in Brazilian society, building, as it does, on the 1988 Constitution. As Holston notes, since the return to democracy, the word cidadania has become ubiquitous in Brazilian everyday life, where its use is ‘evocative of alternative futures’.Footnote 73 For Dagnino, an innovative definition of citizenship as a ‘project for a new sociability’ has ‘penetrated deep into Brazil's political and cultural fabric’.Footnote 74 The movement's establishment of a link between housing and citizenship further buoys the power of its rhetoric, and perceived violations of the government's own charter can be used by the UMM as a weapon against the state.
In interviews, responses to the question ‘What do you understand by the term citizenship?’ generally involved UMM members and leaders listing the social rights enshrined in Article 6 of the Constitution, and referring to the notion of dignity. Perceptions of citizenship were therefore closely associated with social rights, with civil and political elements of citizenship infrequently mentioned. Further, citizenship was generally described in a one-sided way: respondents placed responsibility for the acquisition of citizenship onto the state. A minority of movement representatives interviewed referred unprompted to the duties associated with being a citizen, but they had difficulty giving clear examples of these. This limited appreciation of the complexities of citizenship among some movement members does not necessarily diminish the power of their rhetoric in appealing to a generalised myth of rights, however. As Scheingold notes, the piecemeal use of slogans and symbols may impede ‘systematic reflection on the total social vision implied by the myth of rights’, but ‘in the final analysis it is not the accuracy of the image, but its attractiveness, that determines the success of the myth of rights’.Footnote 75
Particularly salient from responses to the question of citizenship was the clear connection made between having adequate housing and being a citizen. Benjamin, for example, stated: ‘I think that having citizenship means, first of all, having basic things. It means having a house to live in, being respected as a citizen and having the same rights as everybody else.’Footnote 76 The direct link between citizenship and housing can be explained through the connection made by the movement between citizenship and dignity. Dignity will be achieved through the fulfilment of social rights, particularly housing. This is because having decent housing will enable an individual or family to live in a dignified manner, gain access to other social rights and thus become a citizen. These ideas were expressed by a member of a local movement affiliated to the UMM whose family had moved to a centrally located building that had been converted into social housing after it had been occupied: ‘Today I feel much more of a citizen than I did before. When I came to live here, I ‘rescued’ a bit more of my citizenship. We feel like decent people here [a gente se sente gente], and where we lived before, we didn't.’Footnote 77
The phrase ‘sentir-se gente’, literally ‘to feel like a person’, implies feeling like someone who is worthy of respect and who lives in a civilised manner. This idea finds resonance in T. H. Marshall's definition of social citizenship, based on the ability to participate in civilised life according to the standards prevailing in a given society.Footnote 78 Marshall's concept is similar to that proposed by Sen in his work on the concept of freedom, in which he develops the ideas of Adam Smith.Footnote 79 One core freedom is the ability to hold up one's head in public, without feelings of shame. For leaders of the UMM, having decent housing will allow movement members to achieve this type of freedom since it will lift them up to the standard of ‘dignified living’ in Brazil, and by making movement members ‘more like everybody else’, it should also reduce inequalities.
Establishing a connection between housing and citizenship is a critical element of the movement's politics of rights, since it allows for an extremely powerful discourse on limited citizenship. This is the principal argument through which the movement attempts to hold the state to account: it posits the state's failure to resolve the housing problems of the poor as a violation of their citizenship rights. In the eyes of movement members, where the government does not make a concerted, transparent effort to improve the living standards of the poor, this impacts upon levels of citizenship because it denies them dignity. Many interviewees expressed quite similar ideas on the paradox that they were Brazilian citizens, but that there were limits to the extent to which they could enjoy full citizenship rights. A basic explanation of this idea was made by Ernesto, who said: ‘Look, I'm a citizen. But there's something missing for me to be able to really call myself a citizen. What's missing is the house that I haven't got.’Footnote 80 Joanadarc made the link between formal and substantive citizenship more distinct, saying: ‘I haven't yet recovered my citizenship. Citizenship doesn't mean that I was born in some country or another. That has nothing to do with it … I mean, I do have citizenship, Brazilian citizenship, but not in the way that I want it, that I ought to have it, that I deserve.’Footnote 81
These comments on the limited citizenship of those without adequate housing are extremely common among movement members and leaders, and bring to the fore the clear importance placed on the fulfilment of social rights for the acquisition of citizenship among São Paulo's poor. Further, conceptualising citizenship as in some sense limited allows the movement to ‘denounce’ the state as behaving illegally in its failure to uphold social rights, leading to accusations such as ‘The state steals our rights.’Footnote 82 The perceived illegality of the state is a cornerstone of the way in which the movement then justifies its building occupations.
Transgressive Citizenship
Occupations, such as that of the Casarão Santos Dumont, are a tactic that can cause significant embarrassment and logistical difficulties for the government. They fulfil a number of functions: they highlight the city's housing deficit and the humiliating living conditions of so many of its poorer residents, they draw public attention to the fact that thousands of buildings have been left abandoned in the city centre, and they emphasise that the state is failing to uphold the right to housing. They also challenge the spatial segregation of the city by calling for centrally located social housing and opposing the practice of building social housing on the extreme peripheries, contributing to the city's sprawl. In this way, they can be understood as standard acts of civil disobedience – the breaking of the law to highlight an injustice.Footnote 83
The UMM's building occupations can be read as more than simple acts of civil disobedience, however, as they are intimately linked to the movement's politics of rights. Having carefully crafted a rhetoric that infuses the movement's actions with the language of citizenship and posits housing as a fundamental right, its leaders are in a position to render occupations legal through a particular interpretation of constitutional legislation. In interviews, most movement leaders acknowledged that occupations can be interpreted as illegal, as they involve breaking and entering (invasão de domicílio, a breach of the penal code) and, where the owner registers a complaint, trespass (esbulho possessório, a breach of the civil code). However, they were also quick to point out the ambiguity around the legality of occupations. Nora's justification was typical of many movement representatives, as she referred to what is perceived as the government's illegality: ‘[Occupying] is a crime, yes, OK. But I have to tell you that for us as the movement, it's not a crime – because the crime, if you think about it, is the government not giving people housing.’Footnote 84 This perspective adds to the layers of illegality bound up in a building occupation. The movement denounces the state's general failure to house its citizens, and conceptualises this failure as the illegality of the state; this crime is then juxtaposed with the minor transgression involved in occupying a building.
Senior leaders expanded upon this type of justification with a more sophisticated argument that framed occupations within a rights discourse. The politics of rights has become an important component of the justification of occupations, and a way of rendering them legitimate and even legal by giving them a basis in a higher moral order. This argument was glossed elegantly by Henrique Pacheco, a former student activist with the UMM who eventually entered politics, supported by the movement: ‘We broke through the limits of legality, because we superimposed the question of justice and rights over that of legality.’Footnote 85 In a similar way, Adana and other senior leaders justified occupations by arguing that the right to housing, enshrined in the Constitution, not only trumps the civil and penal codes but should also prevail over the right to property where that property is not fulfilling its social function:
You have two laws in Brazil today that confront each other … You have the right to property, which is a ‘sacred right’, a cláusula pétrea in our Constitution, something that can't be altered … Then you also have the right to housing, which is in the Constitution. But now we have the City Statute, which limits the right to property [and says that] your property has to fulfil its social function, and if it's not doing that the authorities have the right to do a series of things, including charging more taxes and, ultimately, expropriating. So this is how I understand it: we would never occupy land or a building that's in use. That would be an idiotic thing to do. We occupy when the property isn't fulfilling its social function, is abandoned, boarded up, and is only serving a speculative purpose. So that's why I don't think occupation is a crime, because it is looking to fulfil a positive purpose, something that is set out in our laws, which is the social function of property.Footnote 86
Adana, therefore, justified occupations through reference to the Constitution and other federal legislation. Arguments justifying occupations in terms of rights and wrongs enshrined in the Constitution – the right to housing and the illegality of property that fails to fulfil its social function – are commonly employed by the UMM. Despite this, however, the issue of whether or not occupations are legal or illegal remains unclear. Few members state outright that occupations are legal, while those who say they are illegal always provide some kind of qualification to justify them. When asked, ‘Are occupations illegal?’, a number of interview respondents skirted the issue, without giving a clear answer. This ambiguity was reflected in Leon's response:
I don't know if they are legal or illegal. I know it's illegal that people don't have their citizenship respected. That's illegal … But I don't know about occupations. In fact, I don't even want to answer you in that way, because once a journalist asked me if occupations were legal or illegal, and I said I didn't care whether there were legal or not. What I cared about was that families couldn't carry on living under bridges, or in cortiços … That's illegal. But to you I'm going to say something different. I don't know if they're legal or illegal, but whatever the case, even if it is illegal to occupy, we are going to carry on doing it. Because the greater illegality is people not having their dignity and citizenship ensured.Footnote 87
It could be argued that the legal ambiguity of occupations is what gives them their strength. On the one hand, the argument that they are legal gives support to the movement's mobilisation around the issue of housing as a right. On the other, occupations must maintain an element of illegality if they are to denounce the greater illegalities of the state and of private landlords, since without the shock factor of a high-profile illegal act, society will pay little attention to the claims of the movement. The importance of the interplay between legality and illegality was further developed by Ivana, who declared: ‘a gente tem que virar um fora de lei para ser atendida na lei.’ This can be translated as ‘we have to become outlaws to get the law to respond to us’.Footnote 88
Building occupations are thus something more than civil disobedience: they are a way of operationalising the articles of the Constitution that defend the right to housing, since occupations provide accommodation (albeit temporarily) for movement members. They are also a way of bestowing social function on illegally abandoned property and, critically, of forcing the state to engage with the movement. Through the grounding of occupations in a politics of rights, they become acts of citizenship, albeit transgressive ones.
The concept of transgressive citizenship encompasses a number of key issues surrounding the relationship between the urban poor and the state in São Paulo. To transgress is to go beyond the limits of what is morally, socially or legally acceptable; thus, breaking the law is a transgression. São Paulo was, literally, built upon transgressions. The city was founded on illegal and irregular occupation of land – a situation exacerbated during the twentieth century by the state's purposeful neglect of its duty of care towards its poorest citizens as it allowed low-income settlements to expand massively, without regulation or services. Thus negotiations over housing between the UMM and the various levels of the Brazilian state already take place within a context of fundamental legal ambiguity, if not outright illegality. When the movement undertakes a building occupation, it is, in essence, re-enacting an illegal practice that has been passively legitimated by the state for centuries. But while this might mitigate the extent to which occupations are perceived as unjustifiable, it is still a transgression of social, moral and legal codes to take possession of another's property.
The act of occupation is undertaken so as to engage with the state and impress upon it the need for a change in attitude towards the urban poor. It is also a way of pressurising the state to respect the law and ensure that the constitutional right to housing and the social function of property is upheld. Occupations are therefore a way of establishing a new type of relationship between the state and society, one in which the state is held as the lawbreaker and transgressor, while by contrast, social movements of the urban poor are implementing the law by giving social function to property and implementing the right to housing. Further, the latter are not just making demands on the state, but proposing a response to the housing crisis. Finally, the term ‘transgression’ indicates a crossing of the limits of expected or accepted behaviour. In the arts, transgression is associated with experimentation and unconventionality; it is a way of contesting orthodox codes of practice and suggesting new ways of interpreting reality. Building occupations are transgressive in this sense, since they propose a new way of conceptualising social justice in the city. They contest the underlying social codes whereby the space of the peripheries is reserved for and identified with the poor in favelas and irregular settlements, or in poorly serviced low-quality social housing on the very edge of the city's limits.
From Insurgent to Transgressive Citizenship
The understanding of citizenship that is emerging among social movements of the urban poor in São Paulo is clearly an example of Holston's third understanding of citizenship, based on declarations of equality and backed up by text-based law. While there are echoes of the ‘contributor rights’ discussed by Holston in the movement's discourse – leaders and members make claims to be improving the city by occupying empty buildings – this is limited in comparison to the rights that movement members claim to be due to them by their very nature as human beings. Taking the articles of the Constitution that deal with social rights as a normative guide, representatives of the housing movement measure their own citizenship with reference to this text. Holston acknowledges that the idea of inegalitarian distribution of citizenship has little place in post-1988 Brazil, where the Constitution and its text-based rights are creating conditions for a conceptualisation of citizenship as ‘universally egalitarian rather than differentiated’.Footnote 89 He thus identifies a change in perceptions of citizenship after the transition to democracy. However, his text repeatedly stresses an understanding of citizenship based not on universalist criteria but with reference to consumption, construction and tax-paying in the city.Footnote 90 This is far from the UMM's assertion of citizenship linked to basic rights held by all human beings and expressed through the idea of the dignity that will be achieved through the provision of social rights.
Since much of Insurgent Citizenship is historical in nature and seeks to present a theory of ‘differentiated citizenship’, the discussion of text-based rights therein is somewhat limited. My fieldwork with the UMM, 20 years after the promulgation of the 1988 Constitution, shows just how important these rights have become. I therefore argue that understandings and practices of citizenship continue to evolve, and that interaction with the state over text-based rights plays an increasingly important role in this evolution. Holston writes that his research subjects did not ‘primarily argue for rights on the basis of their needs as human beings or even their absolute worth as citizens’.Footnote 91 Instead, he documents their use of historical documents and the law to assert their claims to land. Further, while Holston considers in detail the interaction between state and citizens throughout Brazilian history up to the time of the military dictatorship, his examination of Brazil since the transition gives almost no consideration to state–society relations. Instead, the new, more egalitarian citizenship of post-1988 Brazil that he describes is asserted by individuals in the context of their interactions with other people in society – he begins the book with an example of customers waiting at a bank demanding that a rich man take his place in the queue rather than seeking preferential treatment, and ends it with a discussion of the social and spatial relationships between residents and domestic staff in an apartment block. Rather than taking on the state directly, the implication is that self-builders on the peripheries have contributed to a democratisation of social relations by asserting themselves as rights-bearers. The absence of an interaction with the state can also be seen in their use of the law.
Discussions of the use of the law in Brazil frequently cite the Brazilian proverb, ‘For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.’Footnote 92 In this vein, Holston argues that traditionally, the law has represented ‘disadvantage and humiliation’ for non-elites.Footnote 93 He describes how São Paulo's ‘insurgent citizens’ have come to make use of the law and to challenge its elitism. It would thus appear that these residents behave in broadly similar ways to the UMM, but engagement with the legal system by the two groups is quite different. Holston's research subjects are involved in civil disputes over land ownership with other citizens; critically, they do not use the law to engage with the state. Further, they have learnt how to use the complexity of the law to hold up court cases in the hope that a decisive settlement will never be found, and are entrenching conservative attitudes towards property ownership. Holston's subjects are also replicating the pattern of spatial segregation within the city in which lower-income groups are confined to peripheral areas.
By contrast, as my research has shown, the UMM uses the law to challenge spatial segregation in the city by promoting low-income housing in the centre. In this way, it is attempting to change class-based patterns of residence and to ensure housing provision for some of the city's most vulnerable inhabitants. Law is also used to contest the state negligence that led to the growth of illegal residences on the periphery in the first place, and to demand the upholding of social rights by the state in order to correct these historic wrongs.
While I do not claim that the conception of citizenship I present here is held by all of São Paulo's lower-income residents, it is based on interaction with members of the lowest-income groups in the city, who are, in the main, living in overcrowded rental accommodation or in favelas. Denied basic dignity, these residents have very different understandings of citizenship to the homeowners researched by Holston. As evidenced here, it is clearly text-based social rights, rather than differentiated citizenship or contributor rights, that define citizenship for these mobilised groups of the urban poor. And it is the perceived violation of these rights by the state that leads them to undertake acts of transgressive citizenship in order to hold the state accountable for its constitutional commitments. Much has changed in São Paulo and Brazil more generally since Holston's research subjects first started mobilising. The UMM's combination of reference to text-based law and building occupations leads me to propose that the practice of citizenship is currently undergoing a further iteration, and a move beyond insurgency to transgression.
Conclusion
This article set out to demonstrate the importance of text-based law for a social movement of the urban poor in São Paulo, and to present the idea of transgressive citizenship as a way to describe its interaction with the state. Linking housing, and the dignity that it affords, to the acquisition of full citizenship, the movement is shown to construct a powerful discourse on the right to housing and the duty of the state. It further strengthens this politics of rights through acts of civil disobedience, highlighting the negligence of the state by undertaking occupations of abandoned buildings that are of indeterminate legality.
The housing movement's actions reflect, to an extent, those of the organised homeowners described by Holston, who have asserted that they are deserving of rights and recognition as urban citizens. However, the relationship between state and society continues to evolve. For certain groups of urban residents, the struggle to achieve the guarantee of certain rights set out in the Constitution is not yet won. By critiquing current limited levels of citizenship through transgressive collective action, the movement manages to redirect the finger of blame and apportion criminality to the state. It is through this assertion of the illegality of the state that the movement creates a new relationship between state and society, located in the ambiguous ground between legality and illegality. The movement uses this space to confront entrenched perceptions of the peripheries as the place of the poor in the city, and to challenge the government to live up to its stated commitment to social justice.
The UMM's acts of transgressive citizenship find an echo in radical collective action in other parts of the global South, where the promise of a transition to democracy has not resulted in greater levels of equality. In cases where democratic transition has been accompanied by the promulgation of progressive constitutions, social movements representing marginalised people have been able to mobilise around the disjuncture between rights on paper and the reality of their everyday lives, often with powerful political effect. In South Africa, for example, social movements organised around evictions and HIV/AIDS treatment have engaged with the Constitution to promote rights to housing and to anti-retroviral medication. It would appear that the use of text-based law and recourse to legal argument and litigation on the part of social movements is on the increase in countries with high levels of inequality combined with extensive social rights guaranteed in national legislation. This may have wider repercussions for the future of state–society relations in Brazil and beyond, as organised groups of marginalised citizens mobilise to claim their constitutional rights.
