Me diz onde moras e te direi quem és: 100 anos de habitação social e a produção do espaço na Região Metropolitana do Recife

Abstract

Housing has always been the basic variable for structuring the territory and the explicit manifestation of its socio-spatial hierarchy. Brazilian cities expanded under a dual institutional perspective: formal versus informal. Public housing developments have been made out to be, and present themselves as, official instruments that crisscross “two cities” without representing either perspective fully. Where they have been built explains this duality. Starting early in the 20th century, the decision on the location of these developments relied on different rationalist narratives supported by urban zoning, in order to establish a legitimate and supposedly equitable worldview. Looking through historical lenses, this research analyzes the role of formal city devices - housing policy and urban legislation - in the production and consolidation of spaces for the low-income population in Brazil and its relationship with the processes of socio-spatial segregation that currently structure these metropolises. The Metropolitan Region of Recife, one of the oldest in the country (2023 marks its half a century existence), was used as this study’s spatial boundary. The use of the theoretical concept of segregation revealed its procedural character leading the work to a diachronic approach. The long period studied starts in 1919, with the first disciplinary devices for the location of popular housing in Recife, and ends in 2019, when the Minha Casa Minha Vida Program has been extinct. Despite the different sociopolitical contexts in that century, the investigation shows that urban zoning and the choice of location for social housing developments have fed a placement pattern that continually, distances lower income housing from the metropolitan center. One of the findings is that the segregating institutional practices were born with the housing issue itself and precede, by decades, the emergence of a real estate market. The research thus presents a counterpoint to the most frequent approaches that assume the centrality of the theme in the land prices, highlighting a more perverse and older aspect in public decisions - the desire for separation from poverty by the urban elites. The segregation produced and reproduced by the researched institutional devices normalizes the spatialization of individuals according to social classes. These devices ensure that certain territories are (formally) inaccessible to the lower-income population, at the same time, they legitimize areas of lower value as suitable to the low-income population.