Urban Squatting as a Counter-Hegemonic Struggle in Brazil

Abstract

This paper aims to present urban squatting in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte (RMBH), southeastern Brazil, as a counter-hegemonic struggle. We argue that the squatters' practices go beyond providing housing for those in need and demanding institutionally regulated rights and, instead, their struggles include and engage with a broad range of other locally constituted dimensions, equally necessary to accomplish real changes in life and society. We substantiate this assumption by means of a comprehensive theoretical framework, focused on spatial control as a form of power strategy.This framework includes a critical view of traditional urban planning, institutionalised participation and self-management processes. Also, given that most studies on the subject relate to cases in the Global North, the proposed analysis contributes to expanding perspectives from the South. The view of squatting in this Metropolitan Region as a specific form of counter-hegemonic architecture is justified by a consistent opposition to the naturalized idea of squatters as dangerous trespassers, and their practices as unjustifiable crimes. Methodologically, this paper presents a critical analysis of data obtained by the author during her doctoral research, based on the connections between squatters' practices and the production of their own, alternative spaces, the squatters' capacity to create and promote prefigurative policies, and the collective and quotidian character found in processes of self-management. We conclude that squatting in the RMBH goes beyond the denial of imposed forms of socioeconomic relations or modes of production, and also implies a refusal of how space is controlled, distributed, organized, and owned.