Evictions Observatory: interdisciplinary dimensions of risk in times of climate change and housing crisis

• Grant number: 23/12851-7
• Support Opportunities: Research Projects - Thematic Grants
• Start date: November 01, 2024
• End date: October 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Interdisciplinary Subjects
• Principal Investigator: Raquel Rolnik
• Grantee: Raquel Rolnik
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Pesquisadores principais:( Atuais ): Airlane Pereira Alencar ; Diogo Rosenthal Coutinho ; Vera da Silva Telles
• Pesquisadores principais:( Anteriores ): Tercio Ambrizzi
• Associated researchers: Ananya Roy ; Beatriz Tamaso Mioto ; Brenna Bhandar ; Cibele Saliba Rizek ; David Harvey ; Fabio Kon ; Giovanna Bonilha Milano ; Gisela Tunes da Silva ; Glória Cecília dos Santos Figueiredo ; Gustavo Francisco Teixeira Prieto ; Isadora de Andrade Guerreiro ; Julia Ávila Franzoni ; Maria Veronica Gago ; Miguel Robles-Duran ; Paula Freire Santoro ; Regina Dulce Barbosa Lins ; Renato Emerson Nascimento dos Santos ; Sandro Mezzadra ; Tercio Ambrizzi ; Thula Rafaela de Oliveira Pires
• Associated scholarship(s): 25/05494-9 - Mapping Legal Risks in Eviction Processes, BP.PD; 25/03045-2 - Extreme events and their impact on the city of São Paulo in the face of the current climate crisis, BP.PD; 25/02462-9 - Critical cartography: articulating multi-scalar and interdisciplinary cartographic methods, BP.PD; + associated scholarships 25/02035-3 - Critical situations: actors, processes, urban borders in dispute, BP.PD; 24/23579-9 - Spatial analysis of the activity of the judiciary in removal processes in São Paulo, BP.IC; 24/23016-4 - Law and Political Economy of Eviction Processes in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area, BP.DD; 24/23630-4 - Organization of spatial databases and production of exploratory territorial readings, BP.IC; 24/23090-0 - Evictions metrics: exploring data sources on housing and risk in the RMSP, BP.IC - associated scholarships

Abstract

This Project aims to inaugurate a new phase of the Observatory of Evictions (OR), which for more than a decade has identified, mapped and analyzed threats and actual evictions of individuals and groups in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo (MRSP), seeking to understand and influence the dynamics, urban projects and policies that lead to evictions. OR starting point was the recognition of the invisibility of these processes of dispossession and forced displacement that have escalated in cities around the world as a result of the advance of housing financialization, identified through the work of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing during Raquel Rolnik's mandate (currently PR of this project). Since then, a network of research laboratories based in universities of São Paulo and across the country, the OR has developed academic research with national and international insertion, based on multi-scalar mapping of threats and evictions that combine collaborative cartographic processes, action-research strategies and methods for mining and analyzing data from court decisions. More than 212 academic products (articles, thesis etc) and 19 events were organized by the OR researchers in the last decade, many of them international, as well as an updated open data online platform registering and analyzing evictions: http://www.labcidade.fau.usp.br/. This data has enabled qualified advocacy on policies and programs that lead to collective evictions through institutional partnerships such as the Public Defender's Office and the Public Prosecutor's Office, public managers, NGOs and social movements.This new phase seeks to tackle the theoretical and methodological limits and challenges related to the lack of data on evictions identifying territories and groups under threat because they are in situations of "risk"; as well as to conceptually develop the category of "risk" as a device for social intervention, which political economy needs to be deepened in times of climate change and housing crisis. To achieve that the project chooses to focus both on the interdisciplinary dimensions of "risk" as a category that articulates fields of knowledge and territorial intervention, which has been increasingly mobilized by urban policies and has had an increasing impact on territories and populations and by advancing methods of registering and identifying groups and territories under threat on line and on time. By setting up an interdisciplinary network of researchers with a multidimensional and multi-scalar approach, the research should advance both through techniques for identifying and quantitatively measuring territories and populations "at risk", as well as addressing and theoretically developing the category of "risk" in the fields of Law, Economics, Urban Planning and Sociology. Risks are observed in their multiple dimensions: technological, physical (geotechnical, hydrological) and the risk of default (impossibility of paying housing mortgage or rents or blocking access to housing policies due to low or informal incomes, or excessive indebtedness). The mobilization of the "risk" category is also related to power relations that associate certain territorial dynamics with the criminalization of those same territories and populations.The innovative potential of this Project lies in the development of an interdisciplinary methodology for measuring and understanding large-scale global phenomena - the climate and housing crises and urban evictions - based on its experimental application in the MRSP. We intend to combine methods and analysis of quantitative data (collected, processed and analyzed in automated databases and time series models and Natural Language Programming), with qualitative methods (interviews, ethnographic research, action research), as well as cartographic techniques and georeferenced representation in a trans-scalar approach, which methodologically articulates process produced "from above" and "from below". (AU)