In the first edition of the student competition for press reportage on architecture, the jury awarded the first prize to Kinga Zemle for her reportage entitled "Occupation and resistance - urban guerrillas in the fight against the housing crisis." Below we publish the winning text and congratulate the winner. We encourage you to read it!
Kinga Zemla studied at the Faculty of Architecture at the Cracow University of Technology, as well as TU Delft in the Netherlands. She did her architectural practice at the Spanish studio Equipo Olivares Arquitectos, and also worked for a year at the Swedish urban planning office Mandaworks. She is currently completing her master's degree in architecture at the Royal University of Technology in Stockholm (KTH). She tries to combine architecture with her passion for writing.
Occupation and resistance - urban guerrilla in the fight against the housing crisis
Meeting
We stand helplessly on the street, with heavy raindrops heralding the afternoon cloudburst that has proven to be a regular part of the March repertoire in steamy São Paulo. A stick-thin old man with sunburned skin pushes a lickety-split cart up the street, on which piles a mountain of unidentifiable junk, veritable trophies of collecting, an abundance of indistinguishable rags, sheets, boards, clippings and debris. It thunders angrily, completely over the top, as if everything is about to collapse, until finally a silvery curtain of rain falls on Álvaro de Carvalho Street with a bang. We scatter in panic, but the old man doesn't raise his head, doesn't speed up, pushes his cart further, in worn sandals about to wade in the dirty-brownpuddles swelling everywhere.
We don't know if we've come to the right place, because although the number and street match, where we expected the building of the "9thof July" occupation stretches a cracked wall, marred by an al fresco of vulgar graffiti. We look around uncertainly. If one were to draw a cross-section of this street, it would be a cross-section through completely alien worlds. Running between them, Álvaro de Carvalho Street is not a coherent complement to them, but a mere string that cuts through the place out of communicative necessity. Any such string, which serves only for movement and does not grow into street life, is more of a tunnel between tightly enclosed frontages than a clear evidence of human habitat. This impression is compounded by the absence of any human activity visible from the ground level - the first floors are silent as if under a spell, the gates are closed, the windows covered.
I hide from the rain under the narrow canopy of one of the closed gates. On the other side of the street, a graffiti wall gives way to a sleek, unadorned fence, which is cut by a black rectangular breach - a gloom-breathing pit, an entrance to a guarded garage and, by the way, another reality. On the silent pedestal of the parking lot's two stories stands a proud, pale plaster tower, about thirty stories high, thirty blue strips of glass balustrades with a delicately rounded shape. Both the tower and its wealthy occupants have no points of contact with the cracked asphalt road below, with us standing on it. In the roar of the rain, the cries of my companions reach me that the building we were supposed to reach doesn't seem to exist.
Just then we spot our interpreter Paula, waving her hand at us from under a battered wall. There's a gate we couldn't see from behind the layer of graffiti - we run across the street, or rather a rushing stream of brown water and trash floating in it. There are no canopies behind the wall, so looking around with curiosity, we bravely get wet. Under an old café umbrella, a toothless old woman, a doorman, perhaps a guard, sits on a plastic chair. She and Paula exchange a few remarks in Portuguese. The gate, which had closed behind us, opens again - several appendages are carrying an old bathtub larger than themselves. In general, there is unexpected movement and liveliness behind the wall - men and women of all ages are bustling around, apparently busy with tasks so important that they seem to pay no attention to the increasingly stuttering rain. They are moving shabby furniture and appliances, sorting out large bundles of unknowable contents, hastily sweeping up leaves. But even they will soon have to succumb to the advancing torrents of cold rain and take shelter in the building, "9thof July" which, hidden behind tall trees, nevertheless exists.
occupation building "9th of July"
Source: the publication accompanying the exhibition entitled. "Lutar Ocupar Resistir: as alternativas habitacionais dos movimentos sociais" (Studio X gallery, curated by Pedro Rivera), Rio de Janeiro, 15.03-14.05.2016
Waiting for us there is the corpulent and friendly activist of the MSTC, the "Homeless Movement at the Center," Preta Ferreira, who has promised to show us around the building and tell us its history, with the help of Paula, who translates into English. Together we enter a dark corridor with cracked walls and uneven flooring. Muddy puddles are slowly forming on the stairwell, as a torrential downpour leaks through the leaking roof - we'll be trudging through several centimeter-deep maelstroms of dirty water on the way out. On the upper floors, the walls are shabby and dirty, and bare light bulbs illuminate long rows of closed front doors, each from a different parish. Our guide briefly tells us about the people who live here, and continues on to the common rooms - makeshift workshops full of boards and tools, improvised classrooms with small school desks, meeting rooms. The rooms are painted in cheerful colors, but are furnished very poorly. There is often no glass in the window openings, so the sound of the storm drowns out Preta's words. A dilapidated room upstairs has been organized as a library, still counting not very many items. Its windows overlook the familiar pale plaster tower with its lofty, elegant balconies.
A classroom in the 9th of July Occupation
photo: Jan Wańczyk
Crisis
Including suburban residents, São Paulo's population reaches 21 million people. In doing so, it is worth noting that its high share of the gross national product, at eleven percent, positions the agglomeration of paulistanos in the top ten cities with the highest GDP in the world, but this does not translate into a very high per capita rate. In addition, like other Brazilian cities, São Paulo is the scene of a massive housing crisis that is, as in a closed circle, both a cause and a reason for deepening social inequality.
The essence of the livelihood quagmire is not only the scarcity of housing or the space to provide it, but above all the extremely damaging municipal policies that allow sick speculation in the real estate market. This phenomenon is particularly felt in the center of São Paulo, for example in the Bela Vista neighborhood, where the "9thof July" occupation building is located. According to official data, nearly three hundred and sixty thousand families, or about 1.2 million people, live in poverty. The housing deficit is defined at one and a half million, and the queue for buying social housing includes more than one hundred and seventy thousand applicants. Given the distribution of the urban program, which concentrates most jobs and services in the center, living in its area makes daily survival easier, especially since public transportation costs a lot, and it can take up to four hours a day to travel from the neighborhoods to which poorer citizens are most often pushed.
A change in urban strategies on the initiative of officials or the state is not to be expected - the policy of gentrification has been in place since the 1990s, and so far there is no sign of it stopping. Gentrification involves "raising the status" of the areas in question, by pushing the poorer population out of them along with their problems to distant suburban areas, and then replacing the lousy housing with modern residential and business developments. The original residents can't afford to live in the sleek new complexes and are forced to leave. In their place, wealthy people appear. Thus, artificially, the neighborhood is "cured" of its socioeconomicproblems and becomes safer. Since this process has not yet managed to settle the huge mass of homeless and poor people, social stratification in downtown São Paulo can be seen at every turn. This is very symbolically captured in his photograph by Tuca Vieira - in the photo from above, a thick wall separates a favela from a luxury high-rise building, on each floor of which tenants have access to a private terrace pool. It's not hard not to see the parallels between the pale plastered tower I described, inhabited by the upper middle class, and the illegally occupied "9thof July" vacancy.
Urban activists are trying to combat these phenomena in various ways. One form of resistance is so-called squatting, although in this text I will take the liberty of using a term more rooted in Latin languages - occupation. In Europe, squatting, or, as the dictionary suggests, living in the wild, occurs rather rarely, usually as an ideological manifesto of groups with an anarchist background. However, in major Brazilian cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, it has a very widespread and critical dimension.
I think such activity can be called a practice - the practice of occupation. Squatting may be associated by the Polish reader with an impulsive act of desperation, but occupation guerrilla warfare in São Paulo has little to do with spontaneity - it is still an act of desperation, but planned to the smallest detail. In addition, the organizations that help local communities orchestrate the takeover of empty buildings are not about ad hoc solutions, such as temporarily providing housing. The occupation is a political act - a sharp critique of the lack of systemic solutions and the intentional indifference of the officially established authorities to the suffering of Brazilian urban residents. Hence, as a political manifesto, but also through the need to bring together people who will unite in pursuit of a single goal, it becomes a resistance movement. For groups willing to take this risk, it will spark more than hope for a better future. Through a sense of collective responsibility, bonds will be formed, as well as a sense of political agency - the belief that they are collectively taking matters into their own hands.
According to official analysis, there are nearly one and a half thousand vacant buildings in São Paulo. The occupation movements, which operate on the verge of legality, currently occupy about seventy of them. Under Brazilian law, a building that serves no social, residential, cultural or economic function for five years can be taken away from its owner, though only through legal proceedings. However, abandoned high-rise buildings are so common that a progressive tax on unused properties was introduced in 2014. Despite the tightened policy and numerous appeals from architects and urban planners, there has so far been no attempt to comprehensively renovate and convert abandoned blocks into residential buildings, which at a time of such acute shortage would be a solution not only economically, but also environmentally (as a form of spatial recycling). Meanwhile, occupiers do not have the right to break into an abandoned building, but if they do and manage to wait inside for 48 hours without police intervention, they can only be ejected with a court order. Once they have occupied the building in this way, they apply for legalization of the occupation, which, however, happens quite rarely. More often they enter into obscure deals with the property owners - an interesting example is a certain building in the inner city, where the occupiers received tacit permission from the owner to use all the floors of his building except the first floor, where he himself maintains a small bar.
The bar in the first floor of the occupied building and the entrance to the temporarily residential section
photo: Jan Wańczyk
There are many organizations in São Paulo that specialize in the practice of occupation. They adopt similar goals, but their ultimate aspirations do not always coincide. They also differ in the strategies they employ, among which they often view the role of dialogue with the authorities differently. For example, the rather radical International Legal Front for the Homeless (FIST) does not seek to establish any relationship with the government, considering it pointless in advance. And while the group's ad hoc activities remain occupation and social demonstrations, its manifesto is not short of bolder and far-reaching demands - including the complete nationalization of the Petrobras oil company, or the transformation of the state system into a socialist one. The Movement of Homeless Workers (MTST), on the other hand, is clear about its three basic premises: access to housing, infrastructure development under the slogan "give back to the city," but also the formation of strong associations (not just workers' associations) that will have an impact on official policy (in some sense, the shape of trade unions).
MSTC
The "9thof July" occupation (Ocupação 9 de Julho) we visited was occupied by the MSTC, Movimento sem teto do centro, or Movement of the Homeless in the Center. Opposed to the rather militant shouts they consider their mottos, such as "Occupation and Resistance!" or "He who does not fight is dead," the MSTC is a relatively subdued organization, focused on dialogue with anyone willing to engage in it. Perhaps that's why it happens to have some successes - for example, leading to the legalization of São Paulo's most famous occupation, the Cambridge Hotel.
The practice of occupation begins with gathering a group of willing occupiers and drawing up a list, including their details. They cannot be completely random people, since the whole enterprise involves taking a lot of responsibility for the others. It is not enough to need housing, the members of the movement become those who are ready to work for the community, share responsibilities and build a better reality together. A suitable site is then selected, based on criteria of structural safety and "level of abandonment," whether the facilities are private or public. Technical expertise is carried out by activist engineerswith whom cooperation has previously been established. Only then can the final assault be launched. I asked Prety what conditions must be met for it to be successful. She replied that it's very simple: you need a lot of people and no police. Then they manage to get inside, where, as I wrote above, they have to wait 48 hours of enormous tension. If they succeed, then comes the time for the actual takeover - the first renovations, improvements, moves.
Carmen Silva, MSTC's leader, admits that her most important task is to bring people together and create efficient networks of people who, in their corresponding roles, will be as useful to their groups as possible. At the moment, the MSTC is dealing with eight different occupations. Each has its own leader, as well as floor coordinators who are responsible for keeping residents informed of current issues or events. Committees are formed that are responsible for specific tasks - for example, cleaning, cooking, repairs, the electrical system, or the sewage system. Specialists are assigned to some of these projects to oversee the work. The MSTC occupies buildings only if it can count on the support of technical professionals, and if it has complete sets of architectural, structural and installation drawings. Silva stresses that interdisciplinary cooperation is fundamental. It has been exceptionally fruitful to establish contact with the architectural community, including abroad. The renovation of the aforementioned Cambridge Hotel involved designers from the local Escola de Cidade, Belgium's Leuven University, and Stockholm's KTH Royal Polytechnic. Silva has been invited to the upcoming Chicago Architecture Biennial, where she will be available to speak about the movement's activities.
For the MSTC, the occupation of "9thof July" is a very symbolic place, as the organization's activities began with its first occupation in 1997. Until the 1970s, the building served as the headquarters of the National Institute of Social Security (INSS), but stood abandoned for more than twenty years. After five years of occupation, the city council pledged to renovate it, and to use it for low-cost housing. To make this possible, the occupiers vacated the former INSS headquarters in 2003. Years passed and the promises made were not fulfilled, and the building began to fall into disrepair. For a time it became a dangerous place, inhabited by drug dealers and desperate addicts. During this time, the MSTC made three unsuccessful attempts at re-occupation. There was also a fire, which became a good excuse for the city - according to an official technical report, the building was no longer habitable as structurally unstable. In the future, the land on which it stands could be sold for an exorbitant sum. However, MSTC sought an independent expert opinion, whose conclusions were quite different. On October 28, 2016, the MSTC occupied "9thof July" once again. Since then, one hundred and twenty-four families have been living illegally on fourteen floors of the building.
As Silva explains: "Sometimes people ask us how dare we renovate and change something that is not ours, but we are only caretakers here. We know perfectly well that it is not ours, and there will come a time when it will be judged whether we can stay or will have to leave forever. But in the meantime, we are using this place, so we have to take care of it."
The care that members of the movement extend not only to the physical state of the building, but especially to the people who live there. As I mentioned, the occupied INSS site has a library, classrooms and workshops, where volunteerteachers teach courses to prepare for exams and help children with homework. Tenants can learn practical skills - such as woodworking to build everyday items under the "do it yourself" motto. Local artists are also invited to help organize cultural events. In this way, the occupation building interacts with its section of the city - creating a meeting place for outsiders.
Unfortunately, Brazil's official media tends to criminalize the activities of organizations like the MSTC, as they blatantly expose the inefficiencies of the state, while at the same time taking on, in a positivist grassroots manner, the responsibilities it should fulfill to its own citizens. As Silva admits, positive agitation of their mission is very important, but it is mainly done through alternative media (not always friendly at all), as well as social media.
Crucial to the future of MSTC's demands is its relationship with those in power. Unlike FIST, the Homeless Movement at the Center does not see itself as a revolutionary force. Silva says that good governance and revolution do not go hand in hand. Her dream is that MSTC representatives could become an official party to the dialogue - at the municipal, regional and state levels. For now, she only happens to delegate her own experts to participate in various colleges or meetings. Neither she nor anyone from the MSTC is pinning their hopes on any particular grouping, because they find the party alignments, which change every four years, too shaky. They try to reach out to everyone with their beliefs. Silva believes that this peaceful attitude paradoxically creates fear and resentment on the part of those in power, who find it harder to mock or spurn their demands.
At the end of the visit to the "9thof July" occupation, we meet its unique occupant, who barks melancholically and tucks his tail. The situation is too unstable to allow residents to have their own pets, but Preta says that this jet-black, fat old man has always been here, occupying "9thof July" first and naturally becoming a member of the community. Among the dogs, there are those whose muzzles always paint a goofy or affectionate fondness. This one, however, belongs to a different category - he has a look as maturingly sad as only representatives of the dog breed can have. His eyes reflect a hopeless readiness for anything - a tragic resignation to fate.
Epilogue
In May 2018, a month after my visit to Brazil, there was a tragic fire in the inner city of São Paulo at the twenty-four-story Wilton Paes de Almeida building, which was occupied by nearly fifty families. After ninety minutes of conflagration, the molten structure collapsed. To date, the exact circumstances that led to the spread of the fire have not been clarified, although a gas explosion has been cited as the cause. The governor of the state of São Paulo, Márcio França, said that sooner or later an accident had to happen - according to him, the building was not safe, and he summarized the occupation as "looking for trouble." Apparently, he finds it difficult to put himself in the place of the people who, when deciding to occupy, often make a choice between life on the street and a shabby favela two hours away.
Wilton Paes de Almeida building
photo: Jan Wańczyk
The police have also come to similar conclusions - in the summer of 2019, I learned of reprisals against MSTC representatives due to the investigation. In June, two of Carmen Silva's daughters, including Preta Ferreira, who guided us through the occupation of "9thof July," along with six other members of the movement, were locked up in pre-trial detention. Defenders believed that the detention was illegitimate and aimed at intimidating the organization. In a touching video from jail, Preta Ferreira confessed:
"I was arrested because I was born a woman, I am black and poor."
A movement grew online under the hashtag #liberdadepreta demanding the release of the detainees. Although the tragic case of Wilton Paes de Almeida seemed to have exposed the anguish of daily life for a part of the São Paulo community, the municipal authorities chose to side with the uninhibited developers and speculators. In the end, however, unable to prove their guilt, police officials were forced to release Preta and his companions, which happened a few months later, in mid-October.
At that time, the INSS handed over the "9thof July" building to the housing company COHAB (Companhia Metropolitana de Habitação de São Paulo) and promised not to expel the one hundred and twenty-four families occupying it. Negotiations are still underway, but the fate of the residents, especially in light of the above combined actions by the police and local politicians, is very uncertain.
Kinga ZEMŁA
Alufire was a partner in the competition
