Commoning the Public: Federal Land as a Site of Housing Struggle in Rio de Janeiro

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.