Micro-resilience and justice in São Paulo

Abstract

This chapter examines the practices of urban dwellers and organised housing movements in Sao Paulo as a means to explore how community resilience may be associated with ideas of rights, power and agency. It explores the consequences of thinking through notions of ‘community resilience’ (‘resilience from below’) in relation to marginalised urban groups, their perspectives and their priorities. It questions how the ‘resilient practices’ (Petrescu & Petcou 2011, p. 65) of urban dwellers that have been excluded from the circle of citizenship can potentially challenge the uneven distribution of urban resources and opportunities in cities, and shape and frame radically alternative urban imaginaries. It does so by introducing the right to the city and spatial justice, considering their implications in framing community resilience, before going on to explore a case study: the occupation of a housing block in the centre of Sao Paulo, called Ocupacao Marconi. The research described in this chapter emerged from the collaboration between a multidisciplinary group of scholars based in Brazil and the UK. By highlighting the everyday practices of resilience of the occupation and some of the social connections fostered by the research project, the chapter considers its disruption to the status quo of urban planning and policy in the city, as well as its capacity to help formulate new imaginaries for housing, community resilience and the city of Sao Paulo.