Gentrificação e moradia social: como a política urbana pode atuar

Abstract

This research deals with the theme of gentrification and its relation to public works programmes housing policies. The overall objective was to analyse this phenomenon's relation to housing policies that entail some influence by the real estate market in the national context. In order to do that, gentrification was studied in accordance with hegemonic and counter-hegemonic approaches, opening the debate with the analysis of the anglophone literature and closing it with the Latin American theoretic approach. Moreover, we deal with urban entrepreneurship theory, which emphasizes the capitalist production of space and its relation to gentrification. This theoretical line of thought has also shown itself as an epistemological basis to identify the profile of recent housing policies. Afterwards, we studied two national localities, namely the historic district of São Paulo and the central region of Rio de Janeiro. We present the localities, their adoption of entrepreneurship as urban planning, the possibility of existence of the gentrificational phenomenon and how it develops, and the existence of housing policies that produce public housing in those regions. Apart from that, we studied the instrument of inclusionary housing, an innovative format of producing social housing in Brazilian law and public policy. Both housing policies by the city government and inclusionary housing were contrasted to federal housing policies, specially the "Minha Casa, Minha Vida" Program. In this way, it was possible to establish the main characteristics of each format and how they relate to gentrification in the context under analysis. We conclude that both localities under study suffer from a gentrification process, even though it is not a gentrification proper in the classical sense, for there is the expulsion/removal of the area's most vulnerable population, setting the locale up for residency by families with higher buying power. Furthermore, we conclude that the housing policies under scrutiny, although under some sort of influence from the real state market, are capable of altering the paradigm of third wave gentrification, since government tries to control a process boosted by itself when it makes social housing available in areas that go through this process or have the potential to do so. However, these policies are not capable of sheltering the poorest among the poor, which fosters both the substitution of those poorest by social strata with marginally higher buying power and their expulsion to less privileged areas in town; it might besides make up "social cleansing" and a potential preparation of the scene to gentrification in the classical sense.