Commoning the Public: Federal Land as a Site of Housing Struggle in Rio de Janeiro
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hoffman-avah-mcp-dusp-2021-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
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2.97 MB
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Adobe PDF
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53636664d6663c7f0e74147611f279a0
Author(s)
Hoffman, Ava R.
Advisor(s)
Rajagopal, Balakrishnan
Date Issued
September 2021
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
The state of Rio de Janeiro concentrates the largest number of public lands and buildings under federal ownership in Brazil, a legacy of the former colonial, imperial, and federal capital status of the eponymous city. Many sit vacant, failing to fulfill their constitutionally required social function. In this context, federal-owned public property emerges as a critical site of housing struggle. Contesting the dispossessory logics of ownership mobilized to exclude poor and working class residents from these spaces — bounded and policed against uses and users deemed improper and unproductive — housing occupations inscribe a new logic of collective use through everyday practices of “commoning the public.” In re-imagining public property and the ways that people might relate to it beyond claims to ownership, I suggest that these practices work toward shifting the governance of public property in a more deeply democratic direction. These imaginings are not relegated to the realm of abstraction. Rather, they provide a roadmap for building out robust public policies that see to the transformation of disused public properties in central urban areas into social interest housing.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
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