Housing, Citizenship and the Right to the City

This chapter introduces Sao Paulo’s housing movements and their tactic of high-profile building occupations. It analyses how the movements link adequate housing to full or ‘substantive’ citizenship and discusses this conceptualization in light of a critical rereading of T.H. Marshall’s seminal work on social citizenship. The chapter discusses the concept of the right to the city: how it has been interpreted and deployed by housing movements, and its influence on the City Statute that enshrines the right to the city in Brazilian law. The chapter concludes by setting out the dichotomy around which the book is based: the use of legal process (rights discourse, litigation, legislation) and of formal, participatory channels for interaction with the state, compared with extra-legal activities such as building occupations.