Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil's Public Housing

Architectures of Hope explores how communal idealism, electoral politics, and low-income consumer markets made first-time homeownership a reality for millions of low-income Brazilians over the last ten years, challenging the value systems and novel arrangements of power and market that underlie the country's post-neoliberal project of modern and inclusive development.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 362 pages
Publication date: 17 November 2022
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press

Architectures of Hope is a book that explores how communal idealism, electoral politics, and low-income consumer markets made first-time homeownership a reality for millions of low-income Brazilians over the last ten years. The book is based 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. MoisÉs Kopper tells the story of how a group of grassroots housing activists rose from oblivion to build a model community. He explores the strategies set forth by housing activists as they waited and hoped for—and eventually secured—homeownership through Minha Casa Minha Vida's public-private infrastructure. By showing how these efforts coalesced in Porto Alegre—Brazil's once progressive hotspot—he interrogates the value systems and novel arrangements of power and market that underlie the country's post-neoliberal project of modern and inclusive development. By chronicling the making and remaking of material hope in the aftermath of Minha Casa Minha Vida, Architectures of Hope reopens the future as a powerful venue for ethnographic inquiry and urban development.

Weight: 363g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780472055647