Possession through Dispossession: In Quest of Property and Social Mobility in Urban Brazil

This chapter examines the housing struggles of squatters who settled in a public park and heritage site in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, in order to be evicted by the state and resettled to state-built social housing. By analyzing the moral stakes in their quest for property and social mobility in relation to both the values attached to homeownership in Brazil and social housing policies that strongly shaped their strategy of gaining ‘possession through dispossession’, the chapter provides a nuanced understanding of squatters’ contested property claims in contemporary Brazil and sheds new light on otherwise well-known issues of dispossession.