“Not a cozy dwelling”: Exploring Aspirational Anxieties and the Politics of Displacement in São Paulo’s Squats

In São Paolo’s ancient center, squats provide protective spaces to thousands of residents who cannot or do not want access the formal and highly gentrified housing market. At same time, these formerly abandoned buildings are also a site political struggle claim right decent communal living. This paper traces motives aspirations different types squatters, such as activists, internal international migrants well refugees. Through notion “aspirational anxieties” it concentrates on uncomfortable emergence recognition power asymmetries inherent in affective dimensions solidarian future-making. By showing how dis- emplacement experienced by actors with contrasting eventually irreconcilable biographical experiences, this warns against normative understanding displacement.