The articles written by the PÚBLICO Brasil team are written in the variant of the Portuguese language used in Brazil.
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Saturday. More than 20 cities see the streets being taken over by protesters. For the fourth time, in just over a year, people have decided to protest and demand measures to provide homes for everyone. Given the context of inflation and rising incomes, having a place to live has become challenging. And this affects all spheres, from students to workers.
The house is not a random space that you take over. It serves as an intermediary between us and the cities, the intimate and the public, and its principle is to hide, to exist invisible. It requires, to be more than a building, to be “domesticated”, made proper and appropriate. A house causes adaptations between the self and the world, it exists as a moral device, where we can free ourselves from social disguises, therefore, it serves above all to return us to ourselves.
Not having a place to live or how to live sacrifices the possibility of experiencing “at home”, whose economic context is shaped by what is there and what is not there, what is possessed and what is lacking. A house, then, is also a valuable device for everyone’s recognition of their own perspective in relation to the social structure. Without a home, beyond the obvious minimum protections they bring, we lose part of our moral disposition.
Next day. Sunday. People are called to protest against the presence of immigrants in the country. In reaction, others are called upon to protect the presence of foreigners. The prohibitive demonstration was greater. Led by the far-right party, amidst insults and distorted justifications of the need to protect anyone entering Portugal, the city found itself divided on how it understood itself as a shelter space.
If the house is the intermediary between us and the city, cities are houses that mediate social and cultural aspects, where the moral device proposes another logic, coexistence. However, capitalism prevents coexistence, given its need to use and appropriate spaces, producing inequalities, gentrification, real estate speculation and privatizations. When urban space stops being for everyone and becomes a home for a few, it eliminates the ability for movements to oppose capital and emancipation to emerge in the public environment.
Therefore, in the same way that we fight for the right to a home, we need to insist on letting cities be collective homes. It does not mean facilitating entrances or opening doors, but realizing that when arriving, the city is their first shelter, even in a social, political and moral context. When abandoned, these contexts lose meaning and do not need to be assimilated and respected. The interest of radicals is to take cities for themselves, like someone who closes the doors and leaves out the intruder. They treat cities like houses that they want to domesticate to their uses, made their own and appropriate solely to their interests.
In cities limited to restrictive values, culture, also a kind of home, acts in a different way as an intermediary between subjectivity and imagination. When conducted by specific groups, it can institute oppressive forms and mechanisms, especially against groups treated as marginal. Oppression is applied in the form of control, prohibition and violence against anyone who does not belong to the dominant group. And things become even more complicated with digital culture redefining and fragmenting identity, allowing greater willingness for alternative ideas to interfere in subjectivities. In other words, in our ability to imagine. The most owned house of all. Where we keep our expectations, our desires, our feelings, our fears.
In two days, Portugal saw, acted, participated, reacted to some of this. While, in practice, houses are charged to live in, others refuse to accept the house, and the underground movement occurs in the infiltration of the house that protects our imagination. Politics, if it is still interested in preventing the collapse, needs to act and find ways to facilitate access to housing, prepare the city and protect our subjectivity. The opposite will be social chaos, political chaos and cognitive chaos. When one house falls, the rest will give way. And not long.
Suggested readings:
Philosophy of the Houseby Emanuele Coccia. National Printing Office, 2021.
Black Gazes: Race and Representationby bell hooks. Editora Elefante, 2019.
The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture — Volume I: The Network Societyby Manuel Castells. Editor Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2007.
The New Imperialismby David Harvey. Loyola Editions, 2004.
