Why not occupy? The experience of the Kilombo Urbano Squat in Pelotas, State of Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

This article analyzes the Kilombo Urbano Canto de Conexão squat in Pelotas, State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, as a practice of territorial reactivation and production of the commons in a medium-sized city marked by socio-spatial segregation, housing shortages, and vacant properties. Grounded in the Philosophy of Difference and the Cartography of Affects, it examines how practices of self-management and community action operate as active micropolitics. The analysis reveals the coexistence of hegemonic flows, associated with institutional abandonment and neoliberal urbanization, and disruptive flows, linked to the production of the commons, territorial reactivation, and insurgent subjectivities. The study concludes that the Kilombo Urbano squat expands possibilities for fulfilling the right to the city.

Keywords
urban squats; territorialization; insurgent subjectivities; cartography of affects; right to the city

Resumo

Este artigo discute as ocupações urbanas como formas de ação política que emergem quando a institucionalidade falha em garantir direitos básicos e enfrentar o abandono de vidas e territórios nas cidades brasileiras. A partir da Cartografia dos Afectos e referenciais da filosofia da diferença, analisa a Ocupação Kilombo Urbano Canto de Conexão, em Pelotas/RS, evidenciando como as ocupações produzem micropolíticas ativas e modos autogestionados de habitar, territorializando afectos e subjetividades insurgentes que reposicionam as periferias como espaços estratégicos de disputa e reativação territorial. A tensão entre institucionalidades e insurgências cotidianas revela que a política também se realiza na reinvenção de modos de vida que confrontam a lógica urbana financeirizada e excludente, o déficit habitacional e a multiplicação de imóveis ociosos.

Palavras-chave
ocupações urbanas; territorialização; subjetividades insurgentes; Cartografia dos Afectos; direito à cidade

Introduction

Brazilian cities continue to become laboratories of socio-spatial inequality and segregation (Rolnik, 2015; Villaça, 2012), where the right to adequate housing and equitable access to the city remain systematically unfulfilled promises. In contexts shaped by precarious urbanization and hegemonic development projects driven by real estate interests (Maricato, 2000), the city is produced as a commodity (Arantes et al., 2009; Rolnik, 2015), governed through policies that privilege financial capital at the expense of life itself. Within Brazilian medium-sized cities, despite their strategic role in the country's urban network and territorial organization (Lima Silveira, Eckel Machado, & Kohls Schwanz, 2024), the abandonment of bodies and territories has intensified under the discourse of modernization and the narrative that portrays intermediate cities as politically neutral spaces.

In this context, housing precarity and real estate speculation become structuring forces of urban policy, while the growing number of vacant properties challenges the constitutional principle of the social function of property (Art. 5, XXIII, Brazil, 1988). Urban peripheries are transformed into territories of risk and control, but also into spaces of insurgent power. From this perspective, the city emerges as a field of forces and urban conflicts – the material expression of struggles over the right to the city (Lefebvre, 2001) – and as a necropolitical machine (Mbembe, 2016) that determines who is allowed to inhabit and live and who is condemned to displacement and death. Within the contradictions between the production of urban space and the production of life, the question "Why not squat?" emerges as both an analytical and an ethical gesture, illuminating the multiple ways through which politics is enacted and cities are produced, while revealing the creative potential of urban peripheries and the agentic bodies that, through collective organization, engender counter-hegemonic ways of inhabiting and (co)producing urban territory.

As Boulos (2012) argues, the act of squatting constitutes a disruptive appropriation of urban space that challenges the logic of capital and official urban planning. It is a bodily and political affirmation forged in the friction between the State and everyday life. It therefore represents a form of urban struggle (Velloso, 2020) embodied in territory. If dispositifs of power/knowledge (Foucault, 1979) shape subjectivities, they also give rise to counter-enunciations (Foucault, 2007) that reposition historically marginalized bodies, since where domination exists, possibilities for resistance also emerge (Foucault, 1979), and power is not merely repressive but also productive of worlds and realities.

Guided by the conceptual perspective of the philosophy of difference (Deleuze, 2000; Deleuze & Guattari, 1992, 1995, 1997), this study, developed from the doctoral dissertation Urban squatting and the cartography of affects: toward the emergence of a city of difference (Hypolito, 2024, o, our translation), examines urban squats as collective assemblages of enunciation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1995), driven by active micropolitics (Rolnik, 2018) and politics of desire (Guattari & Rolnik, 2011). The financialized neoliberal regime, allied with reactive conservative forces that penetrate urban life by capturing and colonizing territories, subjectivities, and ways of inhabiting the city, appropriates affects and modes of existence, producing conformity and fear while simultaneously compelling the emergence of lines of flight (Deleuze & Parnet, 1998) and ruptures with processes of subjection, thereby enunciating other possible worlds. For Espinoza (2007) and Deleuze (2017), affects refer to variations in bodies' capacities to act and to exist, generated through encounters between bodies. Within urban squats, affects become territorialized as insurgent subjectivities through continuous processes of territorialization and reterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1997; Haesbaert, 2019).

These social movements, through the reappropriation of the powers of the common (Hardt & Negri, 2016), activate small collectivities and multitudes (Negri & Hardt, 2005) capable of establishing spaces of freedom (Negri & Guattari, 2017) within and through urban territory. By reclaiming the city as a space of collective life to which they are entitled, their participants forge desiring-machines (Guattari & Rolnik, 2011), challenging the reduction of the urban to a mere commodity while affirming it as a territory of citizenship and self-management. Their practices respond to the contemporary social and urban crisis (Ribeiro, 2006) as alternative forms of social invention in the face of institutional neglect, dismantling the fiction of the regulated city and making visible what hegemonic planning seeks to conceal – urban lives that refuse to give up on themselves.

It is from this perspective that the Kilombo Urbano Canto de Conexão Squat, located in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, is examined. In a medium-sized city marked by the legacies of slavery, by the financialization of land and built heritage, by the precarious urbanization (Carrasco, 2017), by the speeding inequalities, and by state abandonment, the experience of the Kilombo Urbano Squat operates as a form of urban counter-politics. The squat collectively self-manages housing, activates collectivities, reclaims vacant buildings and abandoned territories (Guizzo, 2008), reconnects peripheral territories and marginalized bodies, and reveals alternative ways of inhabiting and producing the city. Its experience also demonstrates that squatting is not merely about claiming shelter, but about displacing the very sites of politics, affirming that when planning excludes, forgotten urban lives invent their own paths.

Although the Kilombo Urbano Squat is located in a medium-sized city in southern Brazil, the analysis of its trajectory – which followed its development from before consolidation as a squat to the present day – articulated with other urban squatting experiences across the country, particularly in São Paulo (9 de Julho Squat) and Porto Alegre (Casa de Referência Mulheres Mirabal Squat, Baronesa Squat, Rio Grande do Sul Afro-Indigenous Reference Center, and 20 de Novembro Squat), revealed significant similarities and analytical insights into the phenomenon of urban squatting in Brazil. These experiences demonstrate that urban squatting constitutes a broader movement in the struggle for the right to exist and inhabit the city, transcending different urban scales and territories. Urban squats activate urban micropolitics (ibid.) that produce presences, territorial assemblages, networks of care, and new ways of inhabiting the city. They institute alternative uses of urban space, creating territorialities that rewrite the city from within, giving rise to a City of Difference (Hypolito, 2024). Each squat opens a fissure in the commodity city and restores to marginalized bodies what has been taken from them – the collective power to produce realities, reactivate vacant architectures, and struggle for their rights.

Methodologically, this article adopts the Cartography of Affects (ibid.), a processual and inventive approach intertwined with the philosophy of difference and other epistemologies of the sentient (Jacques & Britto, 2008; Kastrup, Passos, & Escóssia, 2010; Rolnik, 2011, 2018), 2018). This approach follows forces, narratives, and transformations emerging through encounters between bodies and territories. The method makes it possible to map the micropolitical forces that foster creation and resistance; the popular and collective narratives that produce counter-hegemonic enunciations, problematizing the right to the city for all; and the transformations that reactivate territories and lives, stimulate the emergence of insurgent subjectivities, and establish shared spaces of freedom and self-management. This is na investigation engaged with the investigated field, one that understands engagement not as a loss of analytical rigor but as a methodological condition for following the processes, affects, and relations through which the territories under study are constituted. Rather than describing the phenomenon from a distance, the research accompanies the territories, the bodies, and the urban struggles spatialized through the urban squats it analyzes.

By tracing these forces, the article proposes a critical reading of abandonment (Rocha, 2010) as a political strategy, of urban squatting as a practice of reappropriating and reactivating the city, and of cartography as a methodological tool for narrating a history of the present in which bodies, territories, subjectivities, and affects become articulated, expanding the horizon of what is possible within urban studies. What the State refuses, urban peripheries reinvent, affirming that the right to the city will not be granted but conquered through the material struggles of bodies that insist on (re)existing when everything seems destined for their expulsion.

Accordingly, the research method seeks to analyze urban dynamics without limiting itself to descriptions of institutional structures, official narratives, quantitative indicators, or normative frameworks, thereby opening space for another way of apprehending the city. In this sense, it becomes essential to follow the forces that traverse bodies and territories, tracing the processes of world-making (Rolnik, 2018) that emerge from everyday urban life and elude neoliberal governmentalities. This requires the invention of methodological approaches capable of moving alongside urban struggles, capturing the intensities and subjectivities embedded in the territorial processes they engender, while remaining attentive to the variations in bodies' power to act and to exist, produced through encounters, and recognizing collective creation as a legitimate mode of knowledge production. It is within this framework that the Cartography of Affects becomes the central methodological operator of this study.

Cartography of Affects as engaged research

The Cartography of Affects does not seek to represent territory as something given and fixed; rather, it proposes to follow the territory as a living process, as a field of forces, as a territorial assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1997) encompassing physical and existential territories, affects, modes of subjectivation, and spatial arrangements in continuous formation. It is a processual and inventive approach grounded in the understanding that knowledge is not a mirror reflecting reality, but an intervention that acts upon it, moves with it, and participates in the production of realities.

Cartography is practiced as research engaged with the processes through which the territories under investigation are produced. Rather than adopting an external position of supposedly neutral observation, it proceeds from a situated perspective that allows itself to be affected, becomes involved in ongoing processes, and contributes to the constitution of those territories. Guided by epistemologies of the sentient (Jacques & Britto, 2008; Kastrup, Passos, & Escóssia, 2010; Rolnik, 2011, 2018), 2018) within the fields of social and urban studies, it understands the city as a territory of encounters, affects, subjectivities, and struggles that transform both the researcher's body and the body-territory under investigation.

In the study of the Kilombo Urbano Canto de Conexão Squat, in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, cartography has operated by accompanying the collective's everyday practices from its emergence in 2017 onward, the regimes of visibility through which the meaning of space is disputed, the networks of solidarity and care that organize life in common, and the ways in which bodies and territories are mutually constituted and affected. The research therefore sought to follow clues and processes rather than outcomes; to accompany the emergence of new territorialities and subjectivities rather than describe the institutionalized uses of urban territory.

The methodological trajectory articulated two complementary movements: a macroscalar mapping, based on the analysis of secondary sources and field visits to urban squats in the cities of Porto Alegre/RS, and São Paulo/SP, which made it possible to identify the dynamics, narratives, and singularities of urban squatting in Brazil; and a microscalar movement centered on the empirical experience with the Kilombo Urbano Canto de Conexão Squat and its agents in Pelotas. The research unfolded through drifts, successive approximations, careful attention to details and bodies in action, and attentive listening to the enunciations emerging from everyday life in the squat.

Data production became inseparable from world-making through a range of methodological tools – including documentary analysis, participant observation, sentientt mapping, photographic records, conversation circles, informal interviews, participation in assemblies, cultural events, care practices, and the collective organization of everyday life within the squat – which gradually became analytical material as they revealed how the affects mobilized throughout the process became territorialized, producing subjectivities that exceed the institutional frameworks of politics, official planning, and representational mapping.

Kilombo Urbano: insurgent politics in Pelotas/RS

The Kilombo Urbano Canto de Conexão Squat emerged within a context in which Pelotas/RS, as a medium-sized city, articulates and distributes regional flows, services, and territorial forces (Lima Silveira, Eckel Machado, & Kohls Schwanz, 2024), while simultaneously reproducing historical inequalities rooted in the nineteenth-century charque economy based on enslaved labor and in the successive processes of precarious urbanization (Carrasco, 2017) that displaced racialized and impoverished populations to land with low market value (Maricato, 2000). This condition of being a medium-sized city is far from neutral; rather, it operates as a political architecture that organizes urban uses and circulations, defines centralities, produces peripheries, and activates dispositifs that render urban conflicts invisible. Under the discourse of a heritage city and a cultural and tourist hub – often sustained by a self-image of high quality of life and human--scale urbanism – Pelotas produces narratives that function as a civilizing veneer, masking its structural urban tensions.

Pelotas/RS: a medium-sized city

The fact that Pelotas is not a metropolis often gives rise to the assumption that it does not experience the same problems as Brazil's major capitals. Yet what emerges is a reconfiguration of the very same dynamics of socio-spatial segregation, unfolding through rhythms, appearances, and intensities that demand different analytical lenses. In the medium-sized city, conflict is less visible but no less effective as an operation of power. It shifts into the realm of everyday governance, diffuse forms of urban exceptionalism, the technical regulation of land use, heritage preservation discourses deployed to prevent occupation and use, and the production of a spatial morality that determines who is allowed – and who is not allowed – to occupy particular areas of the urban fabric. These boundaries may be less visible, but they are no less violent.

Within this urban regime, abandonment is not a mere accident but a structural governmental strategy. By producing vacant spaces and urban voids throughout the city while allowing historic buildings to fall into ruin, the State operates a necroeconomy of space and, by demanding legal regularity and formal authorization to access such spaces, captures the political through legalism. At this point, the medium-sized city reveals itself both as a field of forces (Lefebvre, 2001) and as a site of the normative governance of urban life. Within this context, the presence of the Kilombo Urbano Squat in Pelotas exposes vacancy and abandonment as operations of power, laying barw that the medium-sized city is not a neutral intermediary between center and periphery, but rather a machine of territorial governance. Despite the dominance of selective urban planning, medium-sized cities continue to marginalize racialized populations and dissident subjects, reproducing segregation and inequality, while disobedient bodies insist on (re)existing beyond the places assigned to them.

Despite its historical, economic, and cultural significance, Pelotas – with a population of approximately 340,000 inhabitants (IBGE, 2022) – exhibits high levels of socio-spatial inequality alongside a persistent housing deficit. The city's urban development has been shaped by late industrialization, the legacies of slavery, the depopulation of its historic center, and accelerated peripheral expansion. Urbanization followed a model driven by real estate speculation and socio-spatial segregation, forcing low-income populations to peripheral areas while producing extensive zones of abandonment and social vulnerability. According to Rolnik (2015) and Villaça (2012), urban segregation is a structural process resulting from the alliance between real estate interests, exclusionary urban policies, and historical legacies of inequality. Pelotas reproduces patterns of exclusion similar to those found in Brazil's major metropolitan centers, including the proliferation of vacant or underutilized buildings and lots within its historic center and consolidated neighborhoods equipped with urban infrastructure, while a significant housing deficit persists on the urban margins, where monofunctional and stigmatized housing estates and communities continue to expand amid precarious urban services and infrastructure. The neglect of the social function of property and the failure to enforce the right to housing, established under Federal Law n. 10.257/2001, which regulates Articles 182 and 183 of the Federal Constitution (Brazil, 2001), further aggravate this situation.

According to the Local Social Housing Plan (PLHIS) (Pelotas, 2014), prepared in 2014, the municipality already exhibited a significant housing deficit. More recent data (IBGE, 2022) indicate that approximately “15% of the dwellings in Pelotas are vacant" (Diário Popular, 2023), while the housing deficit exceeds 30,000 units, including "13,600 new housing units and 19,800 existing units requiring renovation to become habitable" (ibid.). The national census (Muniz, 2023) also revealed the existence of 165,649 residential properties (houses and apartments) in the city, of which 25,588 were classified as vacant, while thousands of families continue to live in precarious housing conditions. According to Carrasco (2017), in 2013 Pelotas had approximately 100,000 dwellings within its urban area, yet 30% of its population lived in 156 precariously urbanized settlements, many of them located in environmentally fragile areas such as floodplains and wetlands, resulting from self-built occupations established on land with low market value.

These structural contradictions reveal a profound mismatch between the availability of housing and the effective realization of the right to the city, further aggravated by the State's failure to enforce the social function of property. The concentration of urban infrastructure in limited areas, selective verticalization, and the proliferation of gated communities stand in sharp contrast to the precarious densification of peripheral neighborhoods, reinforcing the city as a commodity (Rolnik, 2015) while deepening socio-spatial inequalities. Within this context, the rights to housing and to the city become objects of symbolic, political, and material struggle.

It is within this context that the Kilombo Urbano Canto de Conexão Squat emerged in 2017 as a form of territorial protagonism and collective resistance, forging alternative modes of existence in direct confrontation with the exclusionary logic that shapes the city of Pelotas. The organized movement, and the collective formed by racialized students, artists, activists, and cultural workers, chose to intervene directly in and through urban territory. Located in the Porto neighborhood – a central university district marked by urban abandonment, vacant industrial heritage buildings, and the unchecked proliferation of empty properties – the squat reactivated a corner building that had remained abandoned for decades, transforming it into a space of housing, (re)existence, cultural production, collective care, and anti-capitalist practices. Its presence challenges the neoliberal logic of privatization while confronting real estate speculation and the financialization of urban land. By transforming a ruin into a territory of life, the squat also affirms another way of inhabiting the city – one that is more solidaristic, collective, and insurgent.

Producing the common and territorial reactivation

In the everyday life of the Kilombo Urbano Squat, dwelling ceases to be an individualized operation of neoliberal life and becomes the production of the common. Here, dwelling is not oriented toward the treatment of housing as a commodity for consumption, but rather toward the co-creation of existence. Affects become a force of territorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1997), not as an abstraction but as a force of action that forges collective arrangements capable of resisting the neoliberal regime of isolation, where care, collectivity, and self-management emerge as everyday political practices. Within this plane, every choice, every gesture, every territorial micro-decision, every act of care, and every reconfiguration of space expresses active micropolitics (Rolnik, 2018). Everyday life in the Kilombo operates as a machine for producing meaning and creating the city, where the common is lived as practice, not only conceived as concept.

The experience of the squat has demonstrated how practices of self-management and community cooperation can expand the common and generate impacts that extend beyond the boundaries of its immediate territory. Through the projects and activities developed over eight years of (re)existence, its agentic bodies have propelled new processes of territorialization and social empowerment, contributing to the reactivation of lives and other urban spaces throughout the city of Pelotas. The actions carried out by the broad social movement organized around the squat have achieved public recognition to the extent that the Pelotas City Council awarded Kilombo Urbano the title of "Meritorious Institution" through Law n. 7,206/2023, "[...] for its contribution to the growth and development of our city" (Pelotas, 2023).

One example is the community kitchen and the “Food Bank”, created through donations and partnerships with the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) and the São Domingo agroecological collective. Since 2018, this initiative has prepared and distributed meals to people experiencing social vulnerability. In 2024, what had previously been a Sunday initiative became a daily activity. The meals are prepared without processed meats, ultra-processed foods, or industrialized seasonings. Everything is cooked in the Cultural Center's kitchen with the ongoing support of a nutritionist who is also a resident of the squat, following the principle of providing healthy food to the community. Weekly menus are designed according to nutritional criteria, combining vegetables, grains, proteins, and carbohydrates. The Food Bank and the meals offered to the community constitute concrete political practices of engagement, solidarity, and empathy, capable of restoring a minimum of human dignity to those they serve. During meal distribution, the Kilombo also becomes a space for listening, dialogue, and respect for the histories and lived experiences of others. These encounters are used to build relationships with participants without judgment, while also promoting workshops and public talks on family farming, organic food production, and healthy eating. They are frequently accompanied by cultural and musical activities that bring together people of different ages, social backgrounds, and ethnicities, fostering connections among diverse forms of knowledge and cultural practices.

Another important initiative is the Conexão Mulheres (Women in Connection) Project, which focuses on gender issues affecting Black, non-Black, Indigenous, and transgender women. Its purpose is to bring women together through activities that foster empowerment, strengthen self-esteem, and support the struggles of women and LGBTQIAP+ communities within the neighborhoods where the collective operates. The project organizes workshops, lectures, and conversation circles with invited guests. Its network of partners includes the Autonomous Women's Group of Pelotas (GAMP), which advocates for women's rights and equal opportunities, contributes to the formulation of public policies to combat gender-based violence, supports victims of violence, and promotes gender, ethnic, and racial equality.

The “Marrabenta Cultural Center Project” operates in the field of cultural production with the aim of democratizing access to art and culture for the city's peripheral populations. The project gives visibility to the work of local artists and musicians by organizing cultural events, community fairs, second-hand markets, art exhibitions, theater and dance performances, concerts, literary and poetry gatherings, photographic exhibitions, graffiti interventions, and film screenings addressing themes such as the right to the city, art, music, culture, gender, and Black and Indigenous movements. Through the Cultural Center, a space has also been created for the integration and expression of African cultural traditions rooted in Brazil, bringing together leaders from Pelotas' Afro-Brazilian community while maintaining exchanges with partners from Mozambique living in Pelotas. The project also welcomes newly arrived African immigrants and students from different regions of Brazil, creating a space in which heterogeneity is assembled, valued, and disseminated.

The Marrabenta Cultural Center has become a vibrant space for collective creation and the celebration of cultural diversity, encouraging the multiplicity of artistic expressions and popular knowledges that traverse the territory. Local artists working in hip-hop, women's slam poetry, reggae, samba, forró, and electronic music regularly organize gatherings, performances, and workshops that transform the Center into a point of convergence between art, memory, and resistance. Among its activities, particular attention should be given to the drum-making workshop, which combines manual craftsmanship with storytelling about the Sopapo drum – an instrument that has become a symbol of the Black movement and an important element of Pelotas' cultural heritage.

The Center also houses a community music studio open for rehearsals, recordings, and music lessons, as well as a multi-purpose workshop dedicated to vocational training and artisanal production, including screen printing, sewing, upholstery, and bag making through the Rasta Jeans Project. A space for the children provides toys, books, art supplies, and educational games, where activities encourage sociability, care, and shared learning, sustaining the conviction that every place is a place of learning for them. In this way, the Marrabenta Cultural Center affirms itself as a living territory of culture and re-existence, where artistic creation and mutual care become inseparable in the everyday construction of an urban common.

The valorization of Black culture and the knowledges of bodies historically marginalized is also materialized on the walls of the squat, transformed into a living archive of memory and resistance. Posters, newspaper clippings, photographs, and printed materials narrate the histories and trajectories of Black women and men who forged paths of struggle and affirmation, including the "Marielle Franco Street" sign, which stands as a symbol of life and resistance against the machines of domination and the necropolitical powers that silence voices and violate bodies. Together, these materials constitute a visual narrative that inscribes Black presence into both the history of the city and the trajectory of the Kilombo movement, reaffirming traditions while continuously reactivating collective memory. Graffiti, protest slogans, representations of Afro-Brazilian religiosity, and figures associated with local and global anti-racist struggles rewrite the space itself, producing another version of history – a collective writing of the present that recognizes the micropolitics of (re)existence and transforms them into living memory and a politics of the future.

The Cultural Center and the initiatives developed within it are constantly reinventing themselves in response to community needs, in an ongoing process through which empathy gains renewed strength. During the Covid-19 pandemic, members of the squat painted the messages "Wash your hands" and "Stay home" on a wall at a street corner, reminding residents of essential public health measures. They also installed a public sink – still in use today – providing free access to clean water and soap. During the catastrophic floods that affected the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in 2024, the squat became a hub of mutual aid, coordinating donations, sheltering displaced families, and mobilizing its networks to provide food, refuge, and care where public authorities were slow to respond. This emergency response reinforced its role as a space of collective protection and demonstrated the organizational capacity of peripheral communities in times of crisis.

As the digital extension of the Marrabenta Cultural Center, the Canto de Conexão TV, the squat's YouTube channel, was created to strengthen and disseminate the squat's cultural and political initiatives. Through live broadcasts, the channel promotes debates on structural racism, popular culture, hunger, urban peripheries, and the roles of women and Black people in music, cinema, and cultural production. These broadcasts bring together Black artists, cultural producers, and intellectuals from Pelotas, southern Brazil, and other regions of the country, while also providing a platform for Indigenous voices and struggles. Among its regular programs, Poltrona Hip-Hop celebrates rap and hip-hop culture while incorporating reggae, charme, and samba. Negras Conexões (Black Connections) focuses on social and public health issues, highlighting the protagonism of Black women and promoting their initiatives. The Canto de Conexão TV channel also publicizes the Center's calendar of events, workshops, public hearings, and community activities, functioning as a vehicle for grassroots communication and an open platform for popular voices. Every year, usually in May, the collective hosts a special live broadcast presenting a report on the previous year's activities while announcing future projects, reaffirming the Kilombo's commitment to the sharing of knowledge, transparency, and the collective construction of the common.

The Núcleo João Cândido serves as the educational and training branch of the squat, offering academic support classes for children, young people, and adults, taught by volunteer educators through an inclusive pedagogical approach. Activities take place within the squat itself, which also houses a library dedicated to research, reading, and study, with a collection built through donations, freely accessible computers, meeting spaces, and facilities for livestream broadcasting. Beyond educational activities, the Núcleo organizes campaigns to collect and distribute school supplies to peripheral communities throughout the city, combining these initiatives with community celebrations and opportunities to listen to families, thereby strengthening social ties and deepening its understanding of local realities.

The project pays tribute to João Cândido – the black admiral, leader of the Revolt of the Lash (1910) – whose trajectory of anti-racist resistance inspires the collective's commitment to education as a tool for emancipation and citizenship. Members of the Núcleo understand access to education as a fundamental condition for equal opportunities, recognizing that combating poverty through education and social projects contributes to reducing social inequality. The project's impact is reflected in the academic performance of participating students and in encouraging the continuation of their studies through Brazil's Youth and Adult Education program (EJA). Integrated into the Núcleo João Cândido, the Biblioteca 0800 (Free Library) project further expands access to reading by placing books on a table outside the squat every day, freely available for anyone to take, read, and donate, reaffirming the squat's commitment to democratizing knowledge and cultivating a culture of sharing.

Another initiative developed by the collective is the Banco de Materiais de Construção (Construction Materials Bank), created to collect and redistribute building materials -including bricks, timber, roofing tiles, doors, windows, and metal fittings – supporting both renovations within the squat and the construction of homes for assisted families. Established in 2018 through a partnership with the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel), the project originated from the reuse of construction materials discarded during university building works and has since become a consolidated initiative in solidarity economy and self-management. The Materials Bank has enabled the reconstruction of the Kilombo's roof, the rehabilitation of its two floors and courtyard, and the collaborative construction of two houses between 2019-2020 and 2021-2022. These projects were carried out collectively by members of the squat, future residents, professional collaborators, and volunteers, with technical assistance provided by architects and urban planners committed to developing affordable housing projects for low-income populations.

The Banco de Materiais de Construção has become a regional reference, articulating networks of solidarity and resource circulation. Local residents, as well as public institutions such as the Social Assistance Reference Center (CRAS), which refers vulnerable families to the Project, donate and collect materials. One particularly emblematic experience was the construction of a new home for Jairinho, a bricklayer and samba musician from the Porto neighborhood whose house had been destroyed during flooding in the Doquinhas community. Faced with this loss, members of the Kilombo organized a collective building effort that brought together local residents, volunteers, and friends to rebuild his home. The Materials Bank also supports housing improvement initiatives in several peripheral neighborhoods carried out by members of the Kilombo, contributing both to reducing the city's housing deficit and to improving the quality of life of the families involved.

The social and solidarity-based work carried out through the Banco de Materiais de Construção materializes the micropolitical strength of collective action, reaffirming the squat's commitment to the reactivation of lives and territories. It also brings to the forefront debates surrounding the right to adequate housing for all, access to the city – articulating questions of gender, race, and unemployment – urban reform, land tenure regularization, and access to housing and basic urban infrastructure as fundamental conditions for human dignity and the quality of life of peripheral populations.

Finally, the Horta Urbana Comunitária (Community Urban Garden) represents another initiative through which the Kilombo Urbano translates active micropolitics into urban space. Located on the corner of the squat, the garden has become a place of encounter and conviviality with the surrounding neighborhood, strengthening community ties and fostering a sense of belonging while promoting sustainability, environmental awareness, and food sovereignty. Based on agroecological cultivation free from pesticides, the garden functions as both an educational and collaborative space – na assemblage-fostering apparatus that connects the squat with neighboring residents and visitors, who participate in every stage of the process, from preparing the soil to harvesting the crops, encouraging collective care for the territory.

Beyond its social and environmental contributions, the garden also holds modest economic potential by inspiring other families and communities to establish household or collective gardens, thereby strengthening local autonomy and reducing food costs. Although the cultivated area is relatively small and production is not continuous, members of the collective recognize the experience as a pilot model of urban agriculture and as a mobilizing dispositif that stimulates debate on food security, the right to a sustainable city, the valorization of family-based food production, and the strengthening of small-scale agricultural practices throughout the region. Within the squat's courtyard, the garden coexists with chickens and other birds raised for household consumption, as well as the preserved mango and paineira trees, together composing an urban micro-ecosystem of (re)existence.

The adoption of the name Kilombo, spelled with a "K," marked a political turning point in the trajectory of the Canto de Conexão Squat. After four years, agents of the collective recognized that their experience was no longer limited to occupying a building but had become the creation of a collective territory of resistance, leading them to rename the initiative Kilombo Urbano Canto de Conexão. The name evokes both the historical quilombos established by Black communities and the contemporary notion of aquilombamento (Souto, 2020) as a practice of belonging, collective organization, and freedom. The use of the letter "K," derived from the Kimbundu language, reinforces ancestral connections while expressing a critique of institutional structures that deny recognition to Black territories. At the same time, it affirms a communal ethics of shared life and projects insurgent futures.

Assemblies are held in a circle. There are no microphones, no podium, and no head table. Every body speaks for itself and for the relationships it creates. Discussions address not only internal issues but also collective responses to external pressures, including eviction threats, conflicts affecting other territories and communities, and struggles over public narratives within the city. Members of the squat also take the floor in public hearings, bringing peripheral voices into the city's decision-making arenas and contesting spaces historically reserved for institutionally authorized forms of speech.

The projects and social initiatives developed by members of the Kilombo therefore extend far beyond housing, the physical rehabilitation of the building, and the communities surrounding the squat. They expand into other neighborhoods and territories across the city. In this process, they both radiate the affects and lived experiences produced within the squat and are themselves affected by the realities and conditions encountered in the territories with which they engage.

The collective distributes food, builds houses, cultivates an urban garden, supports socially vulnerable populations, cares for children, older adults, and bodies dissenting from hegemonic normativities. It also organizes cultural events and political education circles, offers workshops, vocational training courses, educational programs, and film clubs, and acts as a bridge between peripheral communities and public institutions. These practices articulate housing, culture, education, Black memory, and social activism through a self-managed and horizontal organizational framework. Working in collaboration with local and national social movements, the collective develops tactics to confront multiple forms of violence and exclusion – including racism, hunger, cold, unemployment, misogyny, and homelessness – thereby producing a territorial assemblage that connects struggles, knowledges, territories, cultures, bodies, and differences, transforming marginalized territories and subjectivities while continually expanding their possibilities. As a germ of a new world (Rolnik, 2018), the experience demonstrates that the city can be reimagined and recreated through collectivity and the sharing of the common. By occupying and transforming a vacant building, the squat also reactivates the social function of property as a concrete response to the housing crisis.

The Kilombo Urbano thus emerges as a counter-enunciation (Foucault, 2007) to policies of abandonment, making visible what hegemonic discourse refuses to name: there is an excess of space and an exclusion of people. As expressed in the protest slogan "So many people without homes, so many homes without people", commonly painted on the walls of squats throughout Brazil, a central contradiction of contemporary Brazilian urbanism is laid bare. Housing is not scarce because there are too few buildings or too little land; it is scarce because the city has been transformed into a financial asset, while real estate vacancy has become a strategy of capital accumulation. The slogan offers a political diagnosis by revealing that the housing deficit and vacant properties are products of the same logic of the commodity city. When this message resonates within the medium-sized city of Pelotas, it dismantles the myth of the peaceful, human-scale city, demonstrating that urban conflict is not exclusive to metropolitan centers but constitutes an everyday operation of power that produces scarcity in order to preserve privilege. In this sense, squatting ceases to appear as the illegality within the urban process; rather, the true moral illegality lies in a State that allows people to remain homeless while homes remain empty.

There are ruined buildings and ruined lives; there is a city organized for accumulation and a city organized for expulsion. The Kilombo responds through the reactivation of lives and territorialities, embodying the active micropolitics described by Rolnik (2018) and producing ways of living that refuse neoliberal isolationism. Here, affects materialize through everyday practices and the reactivation of territory, while desire operates as a machinic force (Guattari & Rolnik, 2011), not to demand the city, but to produce it.

The immediate confrontation between the Kilombo Urbano Squat and institutional actors reveals that what is at stake is not an isolated conflict but an ontological friction. Across its multiple layers, the State recognizes as legitimate only those forms of life that have been authorized, that perform disciplined citizenship, and that fit within established institutional protocols. Public agencies, universities, municipal councils, government departments, public defenders' offices, the judiciary, real estate investors, and major construction firms operate together as a dispositif for regulating urban space and determining who has the right to dwell. The presence of the squat interrupts this chain of legalistic authority, disrupting hegemonic forms of urban governance that normalize abandonment, real estate vacancy, and the precarization of life.

This is the critical point. The State does not abandon because it is incapable; it abandons by design (Rolnik, 2015). It determines who will be sacrificed to the condition of having no place within urban territory. Abandonment, as a political operation, constitutes a silent grammar of segregation. The insurgent reclaiming of the social function of the city and of property- both guaranteed by law (Art. 5, XXIII, Brazil, 1988) – through the everyday practices of the Kilombo becomes a performative rupture. When residents occupy a building that has stood abandoned for years, they are not producing an exception; rather, they expose the continuous state of exception that structures Brazilian urban policy, while giving concrete expression to the constitutional rights to the city and to adequate housing.

Within this institutional dispute, what is being contested is not simply property, but the very definition of the city itself. After all, which city counts as the city? Institutional actors respond through protocols, regulations, bureaucratic requirements, technical reports, inspections, registries, and administrative procedures. The squat responds through presence, through bodies, through collectively organized life, and through self-management, exposing conflicts while reactivating, connecting, and expanding territory. In this confrontation, it becomes evident that politics is not produced only within institutions; it is also produced against them – and, at times, despite them.

Table 1 presents a comparative synthesis of the hegemonic and disruptive relations of force and flows operating within the context of the Kilombo Urbano Canto de Conexão Squat in Pelotas/RS and of how these dynamics directly shape bodies, subjectivities, processes of territorialization, society, and the city as relational analytical categories.

Chart 1
– Body-Territory Synthesis: Relations of Force and Their Effects

External Hegemonic Forces – from the outside in –	Analytical categories	Internal Counter-Hegemonic Forces – from the inside out –
Bad Encounters – “Sad Affects” (fear, anguish, abandonment)	BODY	Good Encounters – "Joyful Affects" (courage, empowerment, care, freedom, joy)
Technologies and Apparatuses of Knowledge/Power – Biopolitics | Psychopolitics | Necropolitics | Mass Media Depression, anxiety, stress, existential crisis, misogyny, transphobia, wars, discrimination, exclusion, figures of subjectivity (the indebted, securitized, mediatized, and represented subject), the idealization of life, excessive medicalization, the dictatorship of capital, the crisis of freedom, and the capture of the body’s desiring capacities.		Strategies of Escape, Resistance, and Freedom. Making Life Flourish. Community-based and collective self-organization; mutual aid; resistance; urban struggle; bodies in solidarity; protests; networking and strengthening of social movements; creation of inclusive social spaces and projects; civil society organization; psychological support and referral to mental health services; self-care practices; the creation of counter-discourses; coexistence based on respect for differences and dissident identities; civil disobedience; creative insurgency; the promotion of public encounters and debates fostering critical reflection on power relations and dominant structures; the democratization of communication and information; the struggle for representation in positions of power; gender, racial, and class equality; diversity; inclusion; the valorization of ancestral, popular, and minority knowledges and practices; cooperation; and self-management
Segregation | Peripheralization | Social Exclusion | Socio-spatial Inequality (Inclusion/Exclusion) | Informal Settlements | Illegality	TERRITORIALIZATION PROCESS	Connections between Urbanized Neighborhoods and Peripheral Communities; Social Inclusion; Advocacy for Public Policies Promoting Equal Access to Urban Infrastructure and Public Services; Reactivation of Abandoned Urban Spaces and Buildings; Community Participation in Political Decision-Making; Engagement with the Legal Apparatus
Private Property Logic | Real Estate Speculation | Precarious Urbanization | Exploitation of Natural Resources | Urbanization of Environmentally Fragile Areas | Urban Pollution | Lack of Environmental Education and Awareness Policies | Gentrification		Shared Use of Urban Space; Advocacy for the Recognition and Permanence of Urban Squats in Territories Abandoned by Property Owners; Advocacy for Social and Urban Contributions from Developers and Real Estate Actors; Surveys and Mapping of Vacant Urban Buildings and Land; Adaptive Reuse of Buildings; Advocacy for the Creation and Enforcement of Laws, Regulations, and Public Policies to Curb Real Estate Speculation—including Taxes on Vacant Properties and Speculative Gains; Advocacy for the Implementation of the Urban and Environmental Guidelines Established in the Third Master Plan (III PD) to Prevent Uncontrolled Urban Expansion and the Exploitation of Natural Resources; Promotion of Sustainable and Inclusive Urban Development
Politics of Abandonment – Bodies and Urban Territory Properties Stripped of Their Social Function | Ineffective Social Welfare Policies | Concealment of Urban Conflicts		Territorial Reappropriation and Reactivation; Reactivation of the Social Function of Property; Alliances among Diverse Social Groups; Collective Social Organization; Community-Based Social Assistance Initiatives; Cultural Events; Promotion of Spaces for Encounter and Dialogue; Reawakening the Body’s Creative and Desiring Capacities; Popular Participation in Public Hearings, Assemblies, and Decision-Making Arenas; Bringing Conflicts to the Surface
Reproduction of Capitalist Modes of Subjectivation Individualism | Competition | Hyperconsumption | Materialism | Productivism | Meritocracy | Patriarchy | Exploitation | Depoliticization | Hierarchies of Power Relations | Concentration of Power | Homogeneity | Alienation | Subjectification | Pre-established Norms and Standards | Territorial Fixation | Reproduction of Molar Lines | Morality | Reason	PRODUCTION OF SUBJECTIVITY	Creation of Singular Modes of Subjectivation Multiplicity | Collectivity | Solidarity | Creativity | Horizontality | Cooperation | Experimentation | Singularity | Self-Confidence | Self-Esteem | Individuation (Recognition of One’s Desiring Capacities) | Autonomy | Authenticity | Heterogeneity | Intensive Encounters | Resistance, Struggle, and Transformation | Reciprocity and Care | Physical and Existential Movement of Territory | Creation of Territories and Lines of Flight | Ethics of Becoming and Affects
Diffuse Control | Processes of Subjection | Homogenization of Ways of Being, Acting, Existing, and Thinking | Entrapment		Community Empowerment | Autonomy | Creation of Spaces of Freedom | Affirmation of Heterogeneity and Respect for Singular Ways of Being, Acting, Existing, and Thinking
Financialized, Globalized, Colonial-Racial, Capitalist, Anthropocentric, and Phallocentric Neoliberalism	CITY AND SOCIETY	Creative Economy | Donations | Reuse | Recycling | Decolonial Logic
Commodity City | Financialized, Spectacle and Consumer City		City of Difference: Connected, Occupied, and Shared
Impoverishment of Urban Experience | Privatization of Public Space | Exploitation of the Natural Environment | Fixed Territory | Boundary-Making and Enclosure | Gated Communities | Urban Violence and Insecurity		Creation of Spaces of Freedom | Affirmation of Counter-Hegemonic Ways of Using and Dwelling in the City | Openness | Connectivity | Movement and Shared Use of Urban Territory | Promotion of Collective Community Life | Active Frontages | Eyes on the Street | Urban Safety
Housing Deficit | Political Immobility | Failure to Implement Urban Reform		House Construction | Housing Upgrading | Advocacy for Public Policies and Social Housing Initiatives | Creation of Collective Housing Spaces | Occupation of Abandoned Buildings | Land Tenure Regularization
Hunger | Unemployment | Homelessness | Social Vulnerability | Illiteracy | Social Injustice | Indifference		Solidarity Meals | Donation of Food, Household Items, and Construction Materials | Urban Gardens | Promotion of the Creative Economy | Food Security Awareness and Advocacy | Support for Local Production and the Consumption of Goods from Small-Scale Producers | Educational Support | Support for Education and Vocational Training for Youth and Adults | Vocational Workshops | Multi-Purpose Community Space (Work and Study) | Public Access to the Internet and Computers | Community Library | Cultural Center
Burnout Society | Society of Control | Self-Entrepreneurship		Social Project Grounded in Freedom, Sharing, Solidarity, Dialogue and Respect for Singularity and Diversity | Creation of Networks of Care and Mutual Support | Strengthening of Community Bonds and Social Support | Promotion of Individual and Collective Well-Being | Care for Physical and Emotional Well-Being | Events and Activities that Foster Creativity, Experimentation, Free Expression and Collaboration | Valuing Diverse Ways of Living, Self-Realization, Cultural Expressions | Collective and Solidarity-Based Practices Grounded in Sharing, Collective Work, Horizontality | Logic of the Multitude Oriented Toward the Common Good | Society of Affects

• Source: Prepared by the author, in 2024.

The “Body-Territory Synthesis: relations of Force and Their Effects” examines the relationship between the hegemonic forces of financialized neoliberal capitalism and the counter-hegemonic forces generated through the experience of the Kilombo Urbano Squat. Hegemonic forces operate from outside toward the interior of the squat. They are produced on a global and massified scale but become reconfigured according to the specificities of each social and urban context, as exemplified by the medium-sized, non-metropolitan city of Pelotas in southern Brazil. Counter-hegemonic forces, in turn, emerge from within the squat and extend outward. They are produced through a disobedient social movement that challenges the dominant structures of the prevailing socio--economic order and, through the collective organization of bodies and shared action, expose regimes of abandonment and practices of socio-spatial exclusion imposed upon bodies and urban territories. In doing so, they give rise to a spatialized urban struggle enacted through urban squatting.

Insurgent subjectivities reconfiguring urban politics

The everyday experience of the Kilombo Urbano Squat also gives rise to insurgent subjectivities that do not depend on institutional validation in order to exist. These subjectivities are composed through one another, through affects (Deleuze, 2017; Espinoza, 2007) generated in the encounters among the different bodies that participate in the everyday life of the squat, transforming their powers to act and producing a plane of collective assemblage of enunciation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1995) that operates as a political force without a sole spokesperson. In this sense, organized life itself becomes an event.

The insurgent subjectivities that emerge through urban squatting reveal that urban politics is not confined to formal arenas of decision-making. It is also produced beyond them. Institutional boundaries do not mark the limits of politics but constitute one of its principal sites of friction. When insurgent subjectivities intervene directly in territory, making the body the very site of political struggle, they disrupt the State's grammar for legitimizing what counts as politics. This displacement reveals that what is at stake is not the distinction between inside and outside, but rather the threshold where power seeks to capture life and where life persistently escapes.

These insurgent subjectivities allow the common to emerge as an everyday practice rather than as an abstract horizon. They operate through active micropolitics, affirming that the urban is not merely governed but is continually produced whenever bodies organize themselves to inhabit collectively, make decisions through assemblies, create arrangements of cohabitation and care, and collectively distribute functions and responsibilities within a shared territory. What is being produced here is what Hardt and Negri (2016) call the common – not a condition of similarity or homogeneity, but a shared power generated through encounters among singularities and heterogeneities, reconfiguring the very meaning of social life.

Insurgent subjectivity, therefore, is not a by-product of urban squatting but the driving force of the political event it brings into being. Within the squat, activism is reinvented as urban micropolitics, giving rise to a form of politics that exceeds institutional boundaries. It is a politics enacted through the event itself and territorialized as an ongoing process of creation. The squat demonstrates that the contemporary urban struggle is, fundamentally, a struggle over the forms of life that can become possible.

Final considerations

The analytical trajectory of this study demonstrates that the production of urban territory in Brazil remains entangled in the logic of the commodity city, structured through alliances among financial elites, the real estate market, and the State, which perpetuate historical inequalities while deepening institutional abandonment of both bodies and territories. The absence of consistent public policies, together with the neoliberal capture of the urban, renders the housing deficit and real estate vacancy two expressions of the same urban project: one that transforms housing into a financial asset while naturalizing segregation as destiny. Within this logic, both the right to housing and the right to the city are progressively emptied of meaning, while the social function of property is systematically disrespected and subordinated to the imperatives of capital accumulation, configuring the urban as a field of exclusion and control.

Squatting, therefore, is not merely a response to the absence of the State but a positive practice of world-making. It is not a marginal alternative but a way of instituting a City of Difference against the Commodity City. It is precisely at the level of everyday life that politics emerges as a force enacted through care, sharing, invention, collectivity, solidarity, coexistence across difference, and the struggle to exist. Everyday life thus becomes a laboratory of the city. It is there that the city is continually produced as a living process and an open field of possibilities. It is there that a form of politics is constructed that exceeds the formal structures of representative democracy. It is there that an urban world is continually made and that the right to the city is enacted – even when it remains unrecognized by official planning – because it is collectively produced and lived.

The experience of the Kilombo Urbano Canto de Conexão Squat, located in the medium-sized city of Pelotas, reveals the emergence of micropolitical forces that escape the logic of capital and open spaces for the invention of new forms of existence and urbanity. Through self-management, community cooperation, and the production of the common, the squat destabilizes hegemonic urbanism and reactivates the political dimension of the city, transforming the act of dwelling into an exercise in insurgent citizenship and into a concrete practice of realizing the rights to the city and to housing. Every initiative – from the rehabilitation of urban space to the creation of networks of solidarity – operates as a counter-enunciation in the face of State inaction and the capture of urban space, materializing the social function of property not as an abstract legal principle but as a living practice of producing the common.

The actions and projects developed by the Kilombo express active micropolitics and processes of territorialization that extend the movement's reach across other territorialities throughout the city, creating circuits of solidarity, collective labor, and the sharing of knowledge while transforming the occupied territory into a nucleus of physical, social, and symbolic reactivation in Pelotas. These practices, driven by transgressive bodies and affects, activate collective assemblages of enunciation that produce realities, engender insurgent subjectivities that persist in resisting the forces that seek to capture them, and create spaces of freedom both "within" and "through" territory. They constitute a political experiment that is not exhausted by institutions or hegemonic representations but is continually enacted beyond them – in the event, in everyday life, in coexistence across difference, and in shared processes of invention. It is a form of political action that mobilizes the creative powers of desire, opens fissures within the established territory, sets it in motion, and empowers both bodies and collectivities, affirming urban life as an act of collective creation.

Adopted as the methodological approach of this research, the Cartography of Affects made it possible to follow and map these forces in motion, revealing the ways in which affects become territorialized in response to State abandonment. This approach demonstrated that territory is not merely a physical space of dispute but the very field of political invention where relations among power, bodies, and the city are continually reconfigured. The field, understood as a living process, revealed the inventive potential of urban squatting and an understanding of city-making as an ethical, aesthetic, and political practice. From this perspective, the squat is not simply a response to precarity but an urban event expressing the desire to dispute and reinvent territory – and, with it, the very meaning of collective urban life. It is a spatialized form of urban struggle embodied in territory, making visible what hegemonic urban rationality persistently seeks to conceal.

The methodological approach, which brought philosophy, urbanism, psychoanalysis, and social struggle into dialogue, made it possible to perceive the political where statistics cannot. It made it possible to recognize forms of citizenship produced without institutional authorization. It made it possible to follow the production of the common and the reactivation of territories as these processes unfolded. It also made it possible to understand urban squatting across its multiple scales and urban contexts, revealing it as a nationwide movement of territorial reappropriation and the production of the common in response to a shared pattern of territorial exclusion. Across diverse realities, each squat assumes its own singular form of resistance, yet all are driven by the same impulse: to produce difference, affirm the right to the city, and enact the social function of property, opening pathways toward more emancipatory ways of dwelling and existing. Although these experiences cannot be transposed to all situations, they highlight processes and singularities that are generally overlooked in urban planning. In this sense, this study contributes to broadening our understanding of the singularities that shape the production of the urban but often remain invisible.

The findings demonstrate that where the State abandons, urban squats reactivate; where the forces of capital deterritorialize, collectivities reterritorialize; where hegemonic planning renders lives disposable, insurgent subjectivities produce difference, singularity, empowerment, and tactics of (re)existence. The experience of urban squatting, exemplified by the Kilombo Urbano Squat, makes visible that the contemporary struggle over the urban is, above all, a struggle over the forms of life that can become possible, over the city as a field of creation, and over the right to the common as a political value. Urban squats do more than denounce violations of the rights to the city and to adequate housing – they enact those rights in practice, demonstrating that urban space can be reappropriated as a collective good. The City of Difference that emerges through these practices is not born from institutional politics but from the active micropolitics of resistance that reinvent territory through the fissures of the instituted order, affirming that citizenship is exercised whenever bodies organize, create, and bring into being what the State has failed to guarantee: the inalienable right to live, to dwell, and to produce the city.

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• Data availability statement:
  The entire dataset supporting the results of this study was published in the article itself.

• Editors:
  Lucia Bógus
  Luiz César de Queiroz Ribeiro

Data availability

The entire dataset supporting the results of this study was published in the article itself.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  28 Aug 2026
• Date of issue
  Sep-Dec 2026

History

• Received
  17 Nov 2025
• Accepted
  5 May 2026