Our struggle is this: an ethnography of the struggles for housing of the housing context of SABESP

Abstract

With this research project I intend to carry out an ethnography with residents of the SABESP housing context (formed in an area of 39, 000 m²) between São João Clímaco and Heliópolis (southwest area of São Paulo). The general objective will be to analytically describe the struggles for housing of the residents of this housing context. I suggest as hypothesis that the struggles for housing in this region, which presents a history of housing conflicts, have become more complex after the interventions of the Slum Urbanization Program (which is managed since 2005 by the Municipal Housing Secretariat of the city of São Paulo). Based on this hypothesis, I intend to develop a fieldwork in the housing context of SABESP in order to: verify which are the perspectives of my interlocutors about the housing interventions of the Slum Urbanization Program; understand which are the tactics, strategies, resources and concepts that compose their struggles for housing for my research interlocutors; recover with the inhabitants of the housing context of SABESP the history of housing conflicts in the area. Thus, I aim to contribute to the bibliographical debates about housing struggles and periphery of São Paulo, proposing: 1) to produce an ethnography from a research position that involves the direct implication of the researcher in the struggle for housing in the periphery of the city (considering that I am the son of a family affected by the Slum Urbanization Program); 2) to describe and understand analytically a complexity around the periphery housing struggles that has not been worked by the specialized bibliography on the theme.