As ocupações de prédios abandonados e a luta dos movimentos sociais pelo direito à moradia e à cidade em Salvador

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the processes of occupation of abandoned buildings in the urban center of Salvador, from the beginning of the 21st century, in the context of the struggle for the right to housing and the city, based on the understanding of the leaders of social movements. To this end, we sought to analyze the contradiction between the social function of property and the right to private property expressed in this phenomenon; to identify the strategies undertaken by social movements in the struggle for the right to housing and the city in Salvador; apprehend the nature of the occupations of abandoned buildings in downtown Salvador in the context of the struggle for housing and the city; and investigate the relationship between urban and housing policy and social movements in Salvador. The problem of homelessness is one of the most serious among the various expressions of the social issue experienced by the Brazilian working class, especially in large urban centers, and is based on capitalist private property, that is, land as a commodity. Therefore, the main hypothesis of this research is that the occupations of abandoned buildings in the urban center of Salvador have been a strategy of struggle mobilized by social movements, which materializes the contradiction between the right to property and its social function, with the objective of pressure the State to fulfill the right to housing and the city. It is a qualitative research guided by the historical-dialectical materialist method. In addition to the bibliographic review carried out on books, articles, dissertations and theses dealing with the theme, data were collected in official documents on the legal frameworks of housing and urban policy at the federal and municipal levels, and in documents produced by institutes of research on the housing deficit in the city of Salvador; in addition to the empirical research carried out through semi-structured interviews with leaders of the social movements that organize occupations in the center of Salvador, identified from the mapping carried out by Santos (2012) and considering the spatial outline that defines the object of the research: occupations of buildings in downtown Salvador. For the analysis of the collected data, content analysis by thematic categorization was used. The results found demonstrate that the occupations of abandoned buildings in the urban center of Salvador have been a strategy of struggle mobilized by social movements, which materializes the contradiction between the right to property and its social function, with the objective of putting pressure on the State for the fulfillment of the right to housing and the city. They express the questioning of how urban space is produced in bourgeois society, where the interests of profitability are above basic human needs, confirming the central hypothesis of the research.