Social housing in Brazil and Mexico: transformations and continuities in public policies and housing market production

We are happy to announce that PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant at IGEDT, Higor Carvalho, recently published his first book entitled “Social housing in Brazil and Mexico: transformations and continuities in public policies and housing market production”.

The book portrays the intricate processes of transformation and permanence that have taken place in Brazil and Mexico, from the setting up of the first housing policies on a national scale (in the 1960s and 1970s) to the more current ones, already in a context of the rise of neoliberalism and the globalization of capital (from 1990 to the present). Based on empirical and fieldwork research conducted on Brazil and Mexico, this work proposes to dive into the intricate links and conflicts between housing and capitalism.

Book review: "The issue of housing, a constant in capitalism, takes centre stage in and when the urban space territorializes the hegemony of financial capital. Housing, which is fundamental to the lives of those who work and fight for it as a social right, is also where capital has found a material base to guarantee high fictitious gains. In this conflict, different rentier agents articulate and hegemonize the mediation of the state, in a way that is difficult to grasp. With this book, Higor Carvalho allows us to overcome this difficulty, bringing his sensitivity to the Brazilian context, developed in the implementation of urban public policies, along with fieldwork in Mexico, giving emphasis on the right to housing and tackling the land issue.  It also highlights the Latin American perspective, dealing with the production of social housing in Mexico, in the specificity of its communal lands. It concludes clearly that the housing issue is "an integral part of a neoliberal economic and political project to expand the accumulation of capital". This seems to point the way to "transformations and continuities" in the class struggle as well". - Marcia S. Hirata, PhD, professor in the Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Applied Arts at the Federal University of São João del-Rei.

The book may be consulted at the Uni-Arve's (former Uni Carl Vogt) library, Bd. Carl Vogt 66