Between statistics and the city: enrolment and production of social demand for apartments in the Minha Casa Minha Vida housing program

Abstract

This paper analyses the controversies brought out by the announcement of the removal of dwellers of a slum located in a natural disaster risk area to a “popular condominium” of the Minha Casa Minha Vida Program in Rio de Janeiro. It aims primarily to understand the contradiction between the expansion of housing supply and the recent increase in the housing deficit. Thus, the core analysis focuses on the identification of the social problem in the world, in which the technical abstraction of “risk” depends on classifications of concrete situations: the so-called social enrolment. Investigating the disagreements unfolded between dwellers aiming to keep living in the slum and those willing to move to the apartments, this paper proposes a reflection on the dynamics of what I have coined liminal real estate market, a specific space-time configuration between the slum and the popular condominium.