Favela's real estate: land control and housing developments by the armed militia in the city of Rio de Janeiro

• Grant number: 23/08544-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: December 01, 2023
• End date: May 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Urban and Regional Planning - Fundamentals of Urban and Regional Planning
• Principal Investigator: Maria Beatriz Cruz Rufino
• Grantee: Kamir Freire Gemal
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research looks at the real estate production promoted by the Rio de Janeiro militia, especially in the favelas of Rio das Pedras, Muzema, Tijuquinha and the surrounding area, in the West Zone of the city, given its growing expressiveness in volume built, in aggravation of insecurity and vulnerability that it represents to its inhabitants and as a measure of the improvement of territorial control - and immediate production of urban space - by these armed groups. Having emerged also from a control of real estate transactions, the construction of own enterprises by the militia represents another advance in the logic of domination of the territory and in the capture of rent from the families living in these areas. Thus, the set of practices, political and economic ends, values and narratives that support this specific production of real estate that constitute a said milician urbanism, as they call Benmergui and Gonçalvez (2019), support it and guide it under the logic of circulation and reproduction of capital. This, as "advanced production", presupposes specific conditions for its feasibility in terms analogous to those accompanying the transfiguration of Lefebvre's (1970-2002) secondary circuit, from limit to privileged locus of capitalist accumulation. This work aims to analyze the militia's enterprises and, in this effort, it is expected to identify and discuss the strategies, conditions and solutions of this particular form of production of the built environment by this very group, systematizing them in the face of the formal market production, considering its limitations for being excluded from the benefits of which the regulated capitalist market enjoys, and its privileges for being released from the normative bonds that anchor the formal production.