Ocupar e resistir: uma etnografia sobre os modos de construir a cidade a partir do Assentamento 20 de Novembro

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the sociopolitical implications resulting from the lack of housing for a large portion of the Brazilian population. This lack is a result of a politically constructed historical process of land, income, and power concentration in the hands of only a few people. Based on this scenario, the study presents occupations as a response from the organized civil population in social movements to the lack of housing and it locates the “Assentamento 20 de Novembro” (“November 20th Settlement”), located in the central region of the Porto Alegre city, more specifically in the Fourth District, as the central focus of analysis. My aim is to understand the ways of inhabiting and conceiving the city politically and intellectually, with the daily life of a group of families located on the margins of the State as the reference point. Through an ethnographically informed work, I explore some scenes that point out to the ways in which my interlocutors, through their social relations, transform life experience into a political tool against the authoritarianism of elites who use the very laws as instruments for conserving the hierarchical structure responsible for perpetuating their privileges. During this journey, my hypothesis is that the mentioned Settlement is a model of imagined urbanism that has been concretely realized by the people who live there on a daily basis. I argue, in this sense, that these experiences build knowledge, pointing to the city not as a self-evident fact, but as a becoming, capable of revealing potentialities focused on democratic radicalization.