Urban occupations as a strategy of struggle of social movements for the right to housing and the city in Salvador

Abstract

The present text presents a synthesis of some results and reflections produced from research carried out within the scope of the academic master's degree in Social Work that aimed to analyze the processes of occupation of abandoned buildings in the urban center of Salvador, in the context of the struggle for the right to housing and the city, from the understanding of the leaders of social movements. To this end, we sought to analyze the contradiction between the social function of property and the right to private property expressed in this phenomenon; to identify the strategies undertaken by social movements in the struggle for the right to housing and the city in Salvador and to apprehend the nature of the occupations of abandoned buildings in the center of Salvador in the context of the struggle for housing and the city. This is a qualitative research guided by the historical-dialectical materialist method. The results show that the occupations of abandoned buildings in the urban center of Salvador have been a strategy of struggle mobilized by social movements, which materializes the contradiction between the right to property and its social function, with the objective of pressuring the State to fulfill the right to housing and the city. They express the questioning of the way urban space is produced in bourgeois society, where the interests of profitability are above basic human needs, confirming the central hypothesis of the research.