Inheriting from a very influential Marxist tradition Arantes , Brazilian Urban Sociology tends to explain the production of urban space by focusing on labor, that is, on the organization of productive relations within Brazilian capitalism.
Far from the urban centers, in areas with no infrastructure, poor families, mostly newcomers from the countryside, make their houses and improvise some collective urban equipment, expending their labor during their free time Oliveira In other words, their self-building practices transfer the cost of housing to working-class families. In fact, studies conducted in different national contexts have already highlighted the importance of the family in the production of urban space. In Southern Europe, other studies have stressed the role of the family in providing access to housing Maloutas ; Allen ; Pfirsch a.
In describing the distribution of social elites within the city of Naples, Pfirsch exposed how their sociability, which emphasizes closeness among kin, prevented the emergence of a luxurious periphery Pfirsch b.
During these investigations, I visited the entire housing subdivision, took pictures of streets and houses, and conducted in-depth interviews with approximately 50 residents besides countless more informal conversations. I also did research in public and private archives, and interviewed public agents involved in the housing subdivision policies. Although the municipal government had officially approved the project, Jardim Maravilha remained no more than a maze of small roads lost in the middle of the forest for decades.
Some land plots were delimited by wooden stakes and barbed wire. Although the law formally obliged the subdivision developers to implement the infrastructure works paving, water and sewage systems, etc. Since then and to this day, the local authorities have been executing public works, often as an outcome of clientelist deals. However, public works reach only parts of the subdivision and do not promote an integrated urbanization: in comparison with the rest of the city, including urbanized slums, indicators of urban quality remain very low in Jardim Maravilha Table 1.
