University of São Paulo: Residents of the periphery play decisive roles in changes in urban space

Brazilian cities have changed over time, along with their ways of producing work and capital. With them, human transformations occurred that, in an interconnected way, characterized the urban agglomerations. In her master’s thesis at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU) at USP, Carolina Freitas analyzes how this relationship between women and the periphery took place.

Between 2016 and 2018, Carolina produced her master’s thesis entitled Women and peripheries as frontiers: the time-space of the residents of the José Bonifácio Housing Complex , with the guidance of professor Maria Beatriz Cruz Rufino. The objective of the research was to understand the transformations of the peripheral space and women’s social roles, and how this is related. “I understood that these experiences of political mobilization intersected and I felt encouraged to theoretically investigate this intersection, its determinations in a more general and complex reality that is the very production of metropolises in the 21st century, especially in the periphery of capitalism”, explains the researcher .

Carolina divided her study into two cycles of analysis: from 1970 to 1985, and from 2000 to 2015, because they were the moments in which financial incentive programs were created for the construction of affordable housing, respectively by the National Housing Bank (BNH) and the Minha Home, My Life .

The housing policy implemented in Brazil by the BNH created the Housing Sets (Cohabs). To reflect on cities, Carolina chose to analyze the Conjunto Habitacional José Bonifácio (Cohab 2) in Itaquera, in the east zone of São Paulo, which grew in both cycles of study. The research method was interviews with the residents of Cohab 2 in Itaquera.

The search
The idea of ​​undertaking the research came from the researcher’s feminist activism. For over ten years, Carolina has been part of the feminist movement in São Paulo. “The life trajectory of those who do the research always motivates the research activity”, she says. Shortly before starting her research, in 2015, the Feminist Spring and the Black Women’s March had taken place , both initiatives in favor of women’s rights, which, according to Carolina, inspired her work. “It was a key year for feminism and I was rocked by that inspiration,” she recalls.

In the research structure, Caroline chose to individually explain the historical transformations of the Housing Complex and, then, women’s work. In the first chapter, there is a description of how the working class was subjected to a peripheral pattern of urbanization and architectural degradation that differed from the accelerated urbanization in the city of São Paulo in the 20th century. underwent intense transformations in its consolidation, which overflowed its characteristic homogenization process”, explains the researcher.

In the second chapter, Carolina exposes female behavior in the face of transformations in an industrial urban scenario, with an expressive center, for an economic expansion to the outskirts of the city. Finally, she related the trajectory of these women and their homes.

The progress of the research had difficulties in accessing the residents of Cohab 2, due to their working hours, leaving little time intervals to carry out the interviews. Despite this, due to the rich content of her responses, the researcher maintained this research method. “Most of the women interviewed, certainly, would demonstrate the non-existence of such time when asked, due to the multiplicity of jobs for which they are responsible inside and outside the home”, she says. “The answers obtained, in fact, did not follow exactly what was expected, appearing to be more complex than the initial scheme designed”, she adds.

working towns
Carolina decided to theoretically investigate the intersection between women and the metropolises of the 21st century, especially in the peripheries. From the definition of the theme, she divided it into its spheres of analysis: gender and race relations, on the one hand, and production of the urban peripheral space, on the other. “This implies mobilizing these processes of spatial transformations in the urban outskirts and in the daily life of the residents of the outskirts as a contradictory economic unit, a tangle of times that materialize in a socio-spatial way”, she explains.

At the end of the 20th century, the city of São Paulo was governed by an industrial economy. The woman’s role in this scenario was to inhabit a dormitory town, while the man would carry out his manufacturing activities in the center. From the 1970s, there is an industrial deconcentration, which moves a new economy towards the peripheries. “The factories leave the city of São Paulo, and it starts to have a different urban political economy”, observes Carolina.

With this change, there was a growth in the real estate market for areas far from the center, so that builders turned their attention to local housing. “It is no longer aimed at those who can pay, but at those who can essentially go into debt”, explains the FAU researcher. “The developers are going to use financing to build a lowered imitation of what they were already doing in the expensive neighborhoods of the city”, she adds.

In addition, housing incentive programs were also ways of minimizing crises of dissatisfaction among the population with the political regime in question, directing them towards the dream of home ownership. “The BNH housing projects also appear as an ideological condition for appeasing the dictatorship”, explains Carolina. “There were high rates of exploitation. You worked hard and got paid little, ”she adds.

Carolina also observes the informal work process for the construction of this urban grouping. “The country ceases to be eminently rural and becomes an urban country. A ‘low-wage urbanization’, that is, produced mainly from the unpaid work of the migrant proletariat that came to the big cities”, she explains. “Most of the working class lived in built-up areas on weekends with their neighbors,” she adds. It is worth noting that the BNH only subsidized workers with a formal contract, who could use their FGTS to build their homes.

Despite her personal experience of living in Cohab 2, Carolina chose this axis due to the historical importance that the place had. “Cohab 2 was a striking experience of the housing policy of the Brazilian business-military dictatorship and a moment of spatial production in the metropolis of São Paulo”, she says. “On the one hand, workers, with their own hands, building their homes and, on the other hand, the State producing mass housing”, she completes.

From productions and appropriations, Cohab was developed as an expansion of the real estate market that took place in the decades 2000-2010. “I sought to interpret similarities and differences between these two cycles with regard to the conception of housing by the Brazilian State, and I tried to reflect on the underlying conception of domesticity of these architectural projects, since it is articulated with the practical activities of women in the social reproduction of the social class. worker”, says the researcher.

The first female residents who occupied the dormitory towns of the industrial era already played a decisive role in informal work, in garage trades and craft services. At the same time, they filled public positions held in these spaces. “They became school cooks, nursing assistants, social workers, kindergarten educators, etc.”, says Carolina.

Current generations face other challenges, such as the distance from the peripheries to the urban centers that still govern power. “These younger girls, unlike their mothers and grandmothers, need to cross the city to work”, exemplifies the researcher. “Displacements in a much more fragmented city, which requires you to live in one place and work diametrically in another”, she adds.

Still, there are women who perform informal jobs in housing complexes. “I accompanied women who did sewing in their apartments, but they were doing sewing for big brands”, says Carolina. “Women are the laboratory of the neoliberal world of work”, she adds.

However, these female personalities can cross their work trajectories. To Jornal da USP , Carolina tells about women who go to work on the other side of town and leave their children with other women while they work. “Women who don’t do day care work in their apartments in an amateur way, but in an almost entrepreneurial and professional way”, she explains.