From the hilltop to the asphalt:
political materialities, middle-class subjectivities and public housing in Brazil
Abstract
This paper explores emerging familial arrangements and practices of care following the 2009 launch of Minha Casa Minha Vida, Brazil’s largest public housing program. Brazil’s federal government, overseeing a rising economy, low unemployment, and multiple assistance programs, has promised an end to endemic poverty through the building of large-scale private condominiums. In my ethnographic research in one such unit in the southern city of Porto Alegre, the house has emerged as a key category through which low-income and first-time homeowners conceptualize their new lives, as they move from peri-urban illegal settlements to middle-class urban environments. In this sense, the house becomes an analytic window onto broader issues of citizenship, social inclusion, and economic development. Here, I show how the planning and shaping of architectural models for housing policies are implicated in state efforts to establish the household as the site of an idealized figure of the family. I chart how this moral and affective cartography plays out in specific notions of the home among my interlocutors, and how these cartographies are altered as people strive to remake their lives. How should a house - its persons, objects, and economy - be organized and governed? How might senses of kinship, livelihood, and the delivery and nature of care be reshaped in the process? By questioning the house as a contested site for the replanning of life itself, I explore the materiality of objects and places as key to the instantiation of new political subjectivities.
Bio
Moisés Kopper is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), a Graduate Fellow of the Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, Brazil), and a Visiting Student Research Collaborator (VSRC) at the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. His dissertation draws from long-term and multi-sited ethnographic research with policy makers, urban planners, businessmen and beneficiaries of Brazil’s largest public housing program to date. In the process, he is interested in the knowledge and policy systems through which a new middle class is being fashioned, chronicling the public debate that accompany the massive social recasting of Brazil's poor in terms of market inclusion that follows the housing resettlements. His ethnography unravels the flexible notions of citizenship and consumption underlying the daily interactions between people and the multiple layers and scales of time, place and space they inhabit, exploring the possibilities, limits and ambivalences of a political subjectivity that is emerging as a consequence of the country’s renewed economic and social landscape.
[email protected]
This paper explores emerging familial arrangements and practices of care following the 2009 launch of Minha Casa Minha Vida, Brazil’s largest public housing program. Brazil’s federal government, overseeing a rising economy, low unemployment, and multiple assistance programs, has promised an end to endemic poverty through the building of large-scale private condominiums. In my ethnographic research in one such unit in the southern city of Porto Alegre, the house has emerged as a key category through which low-income and first-time homeowners conceptualize their new lives, as they move from peri-urban illegal settlements to middle-class urban environments. In this sense, the house becomes an analytic window onto broader issues of citizenship, social inclusion, and economic development. Here, I show how the planning and shaping of architectural models for housing policies are implicated in state efforts to establish the household as the site of an idealized figure of the family. I chart how this moral and affective cartography plays out in specific notions of the home among my interlocutors, and how these cartographies are altered as people strive to remake their lives. How should a house - its persons, objects, and economy - be organized and governed? How might senses of kinship, livelihood, and the delivery and nature of care be reshaped in the process? By questioning the house as a contested site for the replanning of life itself, I explore the materiality of objects and places as key to the instantiation of new political subjectivities.
Bio
Moisés Kopper is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), a Graduate Fellow of the Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, Brazil), and a Visiting Student Research Collaborator (VSRC) at the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. His dissertation draws from long-term and multi-sited ethnographic research with policy makers, urban planners, businessmen and beneficiaries of Brazil’s largest public housing program to date. In the process, he is interested in the knowledge and policy systems through which a new middle class is being fashioned, chronicling the public debate that accompany the massive social recasting of Brazil's poor in terms of market inclusion that follows the housing resettlements. His ethnography unravels the flexible notions of citizenship and consumption underlying the daily interactions between people and the multiple layers and scales of time, place and space they inhabit, exploring the possibilities, limits and ambivalences of a political subjectivity that is emerging as a consequence of the country’s renewed economic and social landscape.
[email protected]