'From the hill to the asphalt': the My House My Life Program and the faces of mobility in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

Throughout the last fifteen years, various socioeconomic transformations have substantially reduced inequality in Brazil. Due to a set of public policies - such as a stable currency, minimum wage increases, conditional cash transfer programs, and the expansion of internal consumption markets - these changes elicited a debate around the emergency of new middle classes in developing countries and foregrounded the intermingling of public policies, citizenship and consumption in defining contemporary Brazil (Kopper, 2016). Drawing from a quanti-qualitative research among public housing beneficiaries of Minha Casa Minha Vida (My House, My Life) collectively organized in the city of Porto Alegre, this project focuses on the exchanges between public planners, governmental representatives, marketers, community leaders and desiring citizens. Concretely, it will provide responses to a couple of crucial questions: what kinds of mobility are unleashed by the public policy? What alternative modes of governance are being fashioned as the program is implemented in its local configurations? As a technology of government, Minha Casa Minha Vida blends scientific knowledge, state interventions, marketing openings and new subjectivities. By mapping these alignments, openings and foreclosures of meaning, one of the hypothesis is that socioeconomic mobility flourishes through economies of hope - that is, trans-local assemblages crystallizing new temporalities in which the future is redesigned, and the past, re-imagined. As a critical ethnography of the contemporary, this project problematizes how scientific discourses, political materialities, moral cartographies that spatialize the Other and middle-class imagined subjectivities affect each other. In the process, it revisits social concepts such as poverty, mobility, city, home, territoriality and spatial segregation. (AU)