Cultural squattering in the city of São Paulo and the struggles against the neoliberal city

Abstract

Urban squattering are recognized worldwide as strategies to fight for the right to the city, in multiple and varied forms. In Brazil these occupations are longstanding, and can be traced back to the first urban quilombos. Cultural squattering, although more recent, are part of these experiences. They are urban commons where people and collectives develop various cultural and autonomous actions. They mostly happen the peripheries, in public unoccupied or underused spaces. In addition to fulfilling their social function, their occupation transforms them into places of collective and emancipatory cultural production, a territorial reference for these peripheries and for the cultural circuits in the metropolis. The article presents the struggles of cultural occupations with a neoliberal urbanism agenda in course over the last two decades in the city of São Paulo, which became bigger especially from 2017 on. The logic of large-scale privatization of land and public goods represents one of the pillars (if not the main one) of this new phase of neoliberal urbanism, directly threatening the permanence of these occupied spaces. We also present here a concrete experience of the articulation and resistance of cultural collectives against the referred neoliberal logic. This experience, organized around the Bloco de Ocupações, is understood as a demonstration of “insurgent citizenship”, a citizenship that is obtained from concrete experiences in the struggle for rights, and which assumes, within the city (or the metropolis), a specific dimension: the right to be part of the city, equally and without distinction .