Seminars

Abstract

On the eve of the 2008 financial crisis, Brazil implemented its largest-ever public housing program, the Minha Casa, Minha Vida. Drawing on a five-year-long ethnography among city planners, architects, street-level bureaucrats, politicians, market and bank representatives, community leaders, and past, present, and future beneficiaries, I will examine how communal idealism, electoral politics, and consumer markets made first-time homeownership a reality for millions of low-income Brazilians over the last ten years. Between 2009 and 2016, Brazil’s Workers’ Party relied on financialized low-income housing to reduce poverty, promote democratic governance, and raise the country’s international profile. By showing how these efforts came together in the making a model community of housing activists, I will examine some of the value systems and novel arrangements of power and market that underlie Brazil’s post-neoliberal project of modern and inclusive development. I posit the concept of “material hope” to understand how practices of infrastructural citizenship and projects of upward social mobility coalesced to generate ambivalent political and economic subjectivities. By chronicling the making and remaking of material hope in the aftermath of Minha Casa Minha Vida’s public and private infrastructure, I reopen the future as a powerful venue for ethnographic inquiry and urban development.