Favela's real estate: particular conditions of valorization via housing developments in armed militia's territories in the city of Rio de Janeiro

• Grant number: 24/09013-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate (Direct)
• Start date: June 01, 2025
• End date: November 30, 2028
• 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
• Associated research grant: 22/12259-8 - Center for Favela Studies (CEFAVELA)., AP.CEPID

Abstract

This research focuses on the real estate production promoted by the Rio de Janeiro's militia, especially in the favelas of Muzema, Tijuquinha and surrounding areas, given their growing expressiveness in terms of built volume, in the worsening of insecurity and vulnerability they represent to their residents and as it is a measure of strengthened territorial control - and immediate production of urban space - by these armed groups. Having emerged after already overseeing property transactions, the construction of their own projects by the militia represents yet another advance in the logic territorial domination and of capturing income from families living in these areas. Thus, the set of practices, political and economic strategies, values and narratives that support this specific real estate production that constitute a so-called militian urbanism, as Benmergui and Gonçalvez (2019) call it, sustain and guide it under the logic of circulation and reproduction of capital. This, constituting an advanced real estate production - in terms of production and property relations, means of financing (of production and consumption), forms of access to housing and market placement of this new product - that presupposes specific conditions for its viability in similar terms to those of the transfiguration of Lefebvre's ([1970] 2002) secondary circuit, from frontier to privileged locus of capitalist accumulation. This work intends to analyze militia's enterprises and, in this effort, it is expected to identify and discuss particular strategies, conditions and solutions of this form of production of the built environment specific to this group, systematizing them in relation to that so-called formal production; whether by its limited field of action for being excluded from the benefits enjoyed by the regulated capitalist market; or whether freed from the normative ties that anchor said formal production. Likewise, it is intended to establish the mediation links that this particular dynamic holds with movements of general transformation, those of the entire urban environment and of contemporary capitalist social reproduction itself.