Houses and economy in the favela

Abstract

A particular house provides the thread for a description of how people manage their domestic spaces, plan for the future, earn and spend money and care for their family. The aim of the article is to reflect on the elements that modulate the economy of the favela where they live, setting out from the notion of house, taken as a complex array of people, objects and spaces constructed in relation to other houses. These relations involve interdependence, asymmetries, affects and conflicts visible through everyday exchanges, commensality and the use of money. The ethnographic approach allows us to take economic practices as a window onto the ways in which the many dimensions of social life are intertwined: economy, family practices, gender relations, morality, spatiality and temporality. The text aims to engage in a critical dialogue with views of the favela as a place of absence and of the economy as a separate sphere of life.

An Ethnographic Perspective on Urban Planning in Brazil: Temporality, Diversity and Critical Urban Theory

“…Several studies have demonstrated how urban interventions in Brazil have structured the lives of the urban poor, just like major life events such as marriage, the birth of children, divorce, migration, and the death of loved ones (de Jesús, ; Perlman, ; ). Even when urban interventions do not result in displacement, as Eugênia Motta (: 148) shows in an ethnographic study of housing in a Rio de Janeiro favela , people's life stories are structured along the transformation of their houses in such a way that it becomes a supplement to, as she phrases it, people's ‘temporal landmarks of births and deaths’.…”

Políticas Públicas E Suas Pós-Vidas: Merecimento E Cidadania Habitacional No Brasil Da Mobilidade Social

“…Dona Hilda e muitos outros estabeleceram-se em outro bairro da cidade, o Partenon. Ocupando uma vasta área montanhosa, ele desenvolveu-se longe do radar administrativo de Porto Alegre, alinhado com a história da maior parte das favelas e assentamentos irregulares do Brasil, em que a primeira geração de ocupantes progride e, após mudar-se, "repassa" suas casas para outras pessoas, desencadeando uma espécie de mercado imobiliário informal (Cavalcanti, 2009;Motta, 2014;Valladares, 1978). Ao longo dos anos, dona Hilda esteve constantemente em mudança, ocupando várias casas improvisadas no morro e perto do asfalto.…”

Private school investments and inequalities: negotiating the future in transnational Dakar

“…Guyer and Peters have demonstrated that the concept of ‘household’ as used in demographic and economic surveys is inappropriate for the analysis of African domestic economies (Guyer 1981; Guyer and Peters 1987; see also Moya 2017: 75–7). The resources and residents of a house are ‘not organized according to a calculation of total inputs and outgoings, nor with respect to a house as an enclosed unit’ (Motta 2014: 124), but rather as intertwined relations, which transcend the walls of a single house and also vary over time. The idea of a household as a closed unit with a shared budget hardly maps on to the daily economic organization of Senegalese kin groups.…”