Abandoned on the edge? Paranaenses residents dispossessed of their own land and housing, relocated to the peri-urban area

Abstract

Aimed at a group of families in Paraná, between 2007 and 2018, the provincial housing policy mandated the construction of new neighborhoods on the peri-urban fringes of the Paraná conglomerate, outside the consolidated urban area where they resided. Thus, this group of 1.400 families, critically lacking land and/or their own homes where they could reside perma-nently, were assigned new housing, displacing them from their original habitat to an extreme and remote area. The policy fell on socially vulnerable families who, due to renting or resid-ing in precarious housing, had to move 15 km from the place where they had previously lived, worked, and developed their community lives. Within this framework, the actual actions of anomic state relocation policies -in conjunction with speculative operations in the local real estate market- subordinated the living conditions of these groups. This, in turn, reveals the actions of social actors in an expansive urban-regional framework and dispute over vacant land, exposing two sectors in conflict: on the one hand, that of the sociopolitical-economic hegemony of the State/market and, on the other, as a non-hegemonic counterpart, that of the citizen logic of “need”, that of those dispossessed of land and shelter.