Helping the Poor Stay Put: Affordable Housing and Non-Peripheralization in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

This project seeks to develop a deeper understanding of new affordable housing experiments in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. To do so, the interdisciplinary, multi-national project team will conduct a three-year study, guided by the following questions: How do these centrally-located, differently-modelled housing projects affect, in different ways and over time, the economic circumstances and livelihoods of the people who live in them? How do they shape, in different ways and over time, the social interactions, exchanges, and ties among project residents and between project residents and their neighbors outside? How do they impact, in different ways and over time, residents' norms of gender, kinship, and sexuality? To what extent does each housing project type have distinctive effects over time on the political views and behavior of its residents? To investigate these questions, the team will take an in-depth look at a specific range of organized efforts to help the poor stay put in a central district of Rio de Janeiro. The chosen setting will be the old port area downtown, which is currently undergoing a major planned "revitalization". In this district, the team will be able to observe and explain, within the same neighborhood, the differential impacts on the poor of a variety of different models for creating centrally-located affordable housing.

Broader Impacts:

By bringing together anthropologists, a geographer, an architect/urban planner, and a housing advocate, this project will serve as an example of productive collaboration between these disciplines, as well as across the academic/advocate divide. Second, by bringing together researchers from three continents - the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil - the
project also promises to yield benefits for international cooperation, by developing good practices for international collaborations and focused reflection on cultural and national differences. Third, it is expected that this project will contribute to international policy discussions about affordable housing in the global south. Project activities and results will be presented to the Affordable Housing Institute, a major US-based venue for discussions and analyses of affordable housing worldwide; to the British Chartered Institute of Housing; to the United States Urban Institute's Center on International Development and Governance, in particular to the Center's thematic area on Harnessing the Power of Urbanization; to the Observatorio das Metropoles, the major Brazil-based research-and-policy think-tank on housing, to which one of the team members belongs; and to the Brazilian Federal Ministry of Cities, which is keenly interested in analyses of social housing.