Author
María Arquero de Alarcón, Ana Paula Pimentel Walker

Publication Date
2022

This multi-year participatory action research with engaged mentoring of professional students provides a spatial justice lens to the arsenal of tools and strategies available for activist educators. The transdisciplinary project involving 14 favelas and young land occupations, NGOs, and universities, highlights the informal urbanization of green and blue zones in São Paulo’s southern periphery. Building on the Freirean legacy, this collaboration calls for the US academy to adopt an anti-colonial stance, learning from and providing support for informal dwellers’ everyday urbanisms while joining social movements’ struggles for social transformation. The project operates through three tactical actions aimed to [A]ctivate through capacity building; [A]rticulate through knowledge exchange between younger and consolidated informal communities, [A]dvocatethrough proper funding and policy reform, for the right to occupy, hold ground and upgrade. Activate: The project carries out the co-production of resilient land occupation practices at the community level.

Working with the residents of occupation Jardim Gaivotas, students from the US and a local institution engage with grassroots’ methodologies that emerge from the lived experiences of land occupiers, such as the tree of dreams. Articulate: the 14 favelas and land occupations, with a platform to exchange experiences of community organization, which engendered demands for urbanized land, housing, and access to water during Covid-19. Advocate: elevating the action research findings as part of the 1^st and 2^nd Meeting of Favelas and Occupations in October 2019 and March 2021, where over 70 favelas and occupations and institutions proposed and demanded solutions to the government through Urban Manifestos. Informal dwellers at the megacities of the Global South are citizen- architects & planners, blending nature and artificial environments to create secure shelter and resilient habitats. US universities must recognize their protagonism, joining their fight to defy inequalities. Without Roof, Water, and Floor, We Live No More!