Segregação urbana em Uberlândia (MG): emergência das ocupações dos sem-teto

Abstract

The housing shortage in Brazil results from the use of urban and rural spaces, through the capitalist mode of production over time. Analyzing this reality implies the need to understand a broad and complex process of segregationist practices that aim to preserve social differentiation in terms of maintaining the privileges of an elite, and expresses, as the main product, the materialization of the precariousness of the right to housing. In this sense, this dissertation has as main objective to understand the occurrence of urban occupations in the city of Uberlândia from the assumption that such occupations manifest themselves as a consequence of the unequal reproduction of its urban space. Therefore, in order to achieve the proposed objective, the present work was divided into four stages. The first consists of a theoretical survey of the main processes and phenomena that show the relationship between the concentration of land and the movements of struggle for housing in Brazil. For this, a reflection was built on land concentration as an intentional and induced process, instituted from numerous initiatives that aimed, over time, to transform land into private property, detaching it from its main function: the mainstay of life. This phenomenon accompanied the modernization of the country and extended to the urban area in such a way as to understand this land concentration as the origin of most of the problems involving the housing theme in Brazil today. The second stage analyzed the logic of the reproduction of urban space in the locus of the object of study of the research in question, the city of Uberlândia (MG), and its intrinsic relationship with the housing shortage, coming from a marketing, speculative and segregationist logic. In a third moment, there was a total of eleven occupations in the established time frame, that is, between 2010 and 2020. The repossession of three occupations was also identified, starting in 2006, 2011 and 2014; three cases of occupations that started before the established time frame, however, that still exist. Finally, the research portrayed the increase of different views on the occurrence of urban occupations in the city, being carried out with a portion of the population, the residents of the occupations, a lawyer for the cause and organizations that act, through solidarity, in helping homeless families. Finally, it is noteworthy that, as it is a pandemic context, the methodology of this work was mainly based on the collection of secondary data, obtained through online interviews and the provision of satellite images.