Disputing security of land tenure in low-income housing settlements in Brazil

[email protected] www.urbancentre.utoronto.ca fax 416 978-7162 The rapid urbanization process of developing countries in the 1960s and 1970s has intensified pressures on the use of resources at rates that demanded alternative solutions beyond local capacities. For example, the number of jobs that needed to be created to accommodate the unskilled migrants was a task that proved to be impossible to accomplish. As a result of this, the poor were left with very few feasible alternatives to access affordable land for housing. Therefore, most urban housing land that the poor have accessed in Brazil is, in some way illegal and is subject to tenure disputes. The government responses to this mismatch between supply and demand have undergone several paths. The failure of centralized state interventions until the 1980s, were largely documented. And, with the reopening of democracy in Brazil, alternative solutions were initiated with some degree of success. Among these, a promising approach initiated at the end of the 1980s aimed at accommodating the urban poor in their existing housing settlements, in recognition of rights to use land for social housing (albeit their present illegal/informal situation). But systematic analysis of these programs is still lacking, and this study contributes to add discussion to the limited extant literature. For example, access to urban land for housing has been a major issue for the vast majority of poor families in most developing countries in the last decades. Most recently, the issues related to access to urban land are more acute especially because serviced land or partially serviced land became a highly disputed commodity in the markets. In addition, the demand for clear titles on the part of the markets have intensified access issues, and most importantly for the purposes of this paper, the duration of permanence of the great majority of this population. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of legal instruments to serve as guarantee for households of disputed land that their permanence in their legalized lots is secure, and that investments are perceived to be permanent. It investigates the case of 1 This paper originated from a research project coordinated by Mr. Geoffrey Payne on Progress in the provision of secure tenure for the urban poor, alternative tenure systems. Another version of the research report has been published in Habitat International (De Souza, 2004).