Porous infrastructures and the politics of upward mobility in Brazil's public housing

Abstract

In Brazil's post‐neoliberal government of upward mobility and public policies, infrastructures are the symbiosis of experimental forms of government, political action, and practices of consumption. This article draws from a four‐year‐long multiscalar ethnography of Minha Casa Minha Vida, the country's largest public housing program. It uncovers the temporalities of infrastructural hope unleashed as people wait for—and engage with—their first homeownership. Specifically, I focus on struggles over the design and implementation of surveillance and security technologies by residents of one such condominium, charting how aspirations for “the good life” crystallize in emerging—yet ephemeral—collectives of consumer‐citizens. My contention is that desires for infrastructure elucidate the ubiquity and ever‐elusiveness of middle‐class affects in Latin American social mobility. The tangled worlds of desire and materials illuminate the workings of a middle‐class sensorial: the topography of images and affects through which class mobility is experienced and located in time and space. Trailing the movement, saturation and porosity of housing materialities and their embroilment with emergent forms of sociality decode the ambiguous economic and political subjectivities flourishing in the aftermath of fraught urban interventions.