Architecture acts, too! Protests and proposals for housing in Brazil

Abstract

This visual essay explores how architecture can become a site, subject, and agent of cultural protest when it is reclaimed by contemporary urban movements. Numerous urban movements have formed in Brazil and across Latin America to counter-act pervasive social injustices related to housing access, women rights, racial inequality, and poverty. Gathering hundreds of thousands of low-income families, homeless movements are among Brazil’s most radical and emblematic grassroots movements, occupying numerous vacant buildings and obsolete terrains. How, then, are such movements capitalising on the agency of architecture to protest perceived injustices while simultaneously demonstrating alternative proposals? This visual essay uncovers social injustices through images taken by the author.