The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened existing inequities and injustices in Brazil, seen in the disproportionately detrimental impacts on favelas. State policy responses to the pandemic have disregarded favela residents’ experiences. Recommendations such as ‘shelter-in-place’ ignore the reality of over 11.4 million favela residents who cannot work from home or afford to stop working, nor practise physical distancing from others. This study investigates the discourse of community organisations in favelas as they respond to the threats of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state’s necropolitics. Community organisations in favelas have taken action to protect their residents from the virus, unemployment and hunger. I assess organisations’ (1) justification to act as a collective in their communities, and (2) stances about the government’s responses to the crisis. Through content analysis of social media, websites and media appearances of eight favela organisations and collectives in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, this study finds three main themes through which organisations justify their actions: vulnerability, neglect, and collectivity and care. More than survival strategies, the actions of favela organisations are counter-political acts as they oppose the decrepit necropolitics of the state by collectively enduring in the Brazilian context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding favela organisations’ actions in response to the pandemic is fundamental. It further illuminates the impact of public health emergencies in the lives of informal settlements’ residents and the governance of public health emergencies in these communities.
After defaulting on their foreign-debt obligations in the 1980s, several Latin American countries had to restructure their economies to boost market-led growth. Some of the ensuing housing reforms promoted mortgage expansion and mass housing production. Mexico was among the first countries to follow this logic, and in a particularly aggressive manner. Credit liberalization allowed a handful of real estate firms to experience massive expansions in their operations in the 2000s as they were able to build lower-middle-income housing at an accelerated rate by accessing public, pension and private equity funds. Brazil eventually appropriated some aspects of the Mexican housing model, but not others. In the late 2000s, Brazil began providing deep subsidies to low-income households to connect the private supply of housing with a publicly subsidized demand. This article discusses, challenges and moves beyond prior analyses of these processes by contrasting the two countries' housing finance models and examining the more recent (2010s) evolution and normative shifts in their housing and urban development policy agendas. Despite the direct policy transfer between the two contexts, the South-South comparative analysis presented in the article highlights the fluctuating and unstable nature of financialization processes given the varied inclination of national governments to manage, promote or restrict them, or to contain or accentuate capitalist crises and their implications.
Informal settlements house a significant portion of the world's population, who frequently struggle due to lack of proper housing, urban infrastructure, and insecure tenure. This is an overwhelming reality in Global South countries, requiring alternatives to guarantee permanent and secure affordable housing to residents while promoting community empowerment and quality of life improvements. Community land trusts offer promise for housing struggles due to their mechanism of securing housing affordability permanently and their premise of community control of development. However, despite such promise, there are scarce experiences of community land trusts in contexts of informality. Based on recent and ongoing CLT implementation experiences in Puerto Rico and Brazil, we explore the process, politics, and challenges of community land trust implementation in informal settlements. We consider its potentiality to support housing struggles and mitigate long-lasting dispossession in different urban and housing realities throughout the urban Global South.
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