O DIREITO À CIDADE: possibilidades de acesso através do Programa Minha Casa, Minha Vida

Abstract

The Right to the City is a powerful tool to understand the contradictions that exist in the Capitalist Mode of Production, as well as to create a utopia, that is, a duty to be, with the aim of realizing an idealization of the city and urban space that is desired. In a conflictual production model such as capitalism, urban space takes on the contours of segregation, be it social or spatial. On the one hand, the real city, materialized by the provision of public or private services to the population. On the other, the periphery of the same place, deprived of access to the basics to maintain its workforce and social reproduction. In this way, this work aims to discuss the socalled “Right to the City” and the possibilities of accessing it through the Minha Casa, Minha Vida Program, focusing on the city of João Pessoa. This is bibliographic and documentary review research, using dialectical historical materialism as a research method. Its general objective is to analyse the possibilities of accessing the Right to the City through the acquisition of housing through the aforementioned program. And in terms of specific objectives, we have: discussing the Right to the City in classic authors; historicize housing policy in Brazil from the Old Republic to neoliberalism and understand the Minha Casa, Minha Vida Program and the social technical work carried out in the post-occupation phase by SEMHAB's social techniques. When talking about possibilities, it is clear that the aforementioned program, despite contemplating the idea of “Right to the City” as a whole, by delivering social interest housing to the populations that need it, allows access to only a part of this right, with housing as the main point of reference for the user to locate themselves as a citizen within the urban space. In Brazil, the industrialization process led the State to launch the first social housing initiatives. During the 1960s, under a strong military dictatorship, the National Housing Bank was created. Throughout governments, housing and the Right to the City, although treated with greater or lesser importance by the State, will never cease to be important for the working class, in need of public policies and access to a fairer and more equal urban space.