Abstract
This article theorises a multi-year participatory action research engagement focusing on young land occupations and consolidated favelas in São Paulo’s south periphery, providing an arsenal of tools for activist-scholars. Building on Paulo Freire's legacy, we call on academia to embrace activist co-production, learn from and support informal dwellers’ everyday urbanisms, and join social movements’ struggles for social transformation. We advance three modalities of action: awareness raising through emancipatory education and capacity building; articulatção through knowledge exchange between young and consolidated informal communities; and advocacy through policy reform for the right to occupy, hold ground, and upgrade.
Keywords
Introduction
While the concept of co-production has been embraced academically, most theoretical discussions about co-production, co-management and co-governance centre on direct relationships between governments and disenfranchised populations. But as we show in this article, an activist theory of co-production recognises the role of intermediary allies in all branches of government and civil society. Thus, we propose the concept of activist co-production in the context of academic research between universities and communities. We argue that theorising activist co-production matters for practices of participatory action research (PAR) and engaged scholarship because a translational theory of activist co-production can facilitate action in both PAR and community-engaged learning. In community-based PAR, translational theories “promote reciprocal knowledge translation, incorporating community theories into the research” (Wallerstein and Duran, 2017: S40). The commitment to anchoring scholarship on community knowledge and the priorities of marginalised groups is rooted in Latin American academic traditions. We propose a similar approach for activist co-production, building on Paulo Freire’s concept of emancipatory education and reflection. This definition builds on the unequivocal agenda of grassroots organisations and progressive government sectors around the right to the city (Friendly, 2017) and just cities (Fainstein, 2010).
While the origins of co-production are not associated with university-community relationships, the concept of co-production emerged due to neoliberal reforms of the 1990s as a governance tool to compensate for shrinking welfare budgets and exclusive state bureaucracies (Bell and Pahl, 2018; Goodwin, 2019). Co-production emerged to improve service delivery efficiency for low-income communities in the United States and within international development planning (Mitlin, 2008), while alternative approaches based on political empowerment and social justice emerged shortly thereafter (Pimentel Walker and Friendly, 2021; Watson, 2014). Under this approach, co-production in urban planning alongside associated concepts of co-management and co-governance highlight contributions of the disenfranchised communities for building just cities whereby governance structures contribute to possible ‘just’ urban transformations (Perry and Atherton, 2017). Furthermore, good urban governance must address race, gender, and inequality, and include low-income groups (Shand, 2018).
This article demonstrates that the right to the city in São Paulo encompasses theory and praxis, enshrined in Brazil’s Constitution in its two Articles on urban policy (Fernandes, 2007; Pimentel Walker et al., 2020). Although the right to the city in Brazil is inspired by theoretical contributions of Henri Lefebvre (1996), this notion has been tailored by social movements, governments, and professional organisations of engineers, lawyers, and architects in the tradition of co-production. We show that university collaborations with housing movements highlight and consolidate specific aspects of the right to the city and to housing not explicitly guaranteed in urban law and policy. The right to occupy and hold ground remains implicit and subject to diverse legal interpretations, especially at the beginning of a land occupation, as dwellers often suffer evictions or judicial and administrative threats of eviction (Pimentel Walker et al., 2023). Without affordable housing, families occupy land since existing consolidated favelas do not meet demands. We argue that planning theory and practice must embrace and engage with social movements’ conceptualisation of the right to occupy, hold ground, and upgrade. Here, upgrading refers to in-situ practices to improve the built environment and socioeconomic conditions through basic sanitation, infrastructure, housing, and economic, social, institutional and community policies (Magalhães and Di Villarosa, 2012). Therefore, activist co-production matters both for planning scholars, and for practitioners drafting and implementing urban policies and plans.
Despite tenure security being a standard urban policy for informal and precarious settlements in Latin America, evictions from these territories remain a recurrent threat, especially in Brazil (Albert, 2022; Fernandez, 2007; Irazabal, 2018; Pimentel Walker et al., 2023). In São Paulo specifically, the struggle for permanence through land regularisation and upgrading in favelas and young land occupations has historically involved community organisation, popular education, and coalition building. Even consolidated and upgraded informal settlements with tenure security benefit from community organising and coalition building to improve services, infrastructure, public spaces and parks (Calderon and Hernández-García, 2019). The process begins with the need for informal dwellers to collaborate with social movements, establish neighbourhood associations, and seek guidance from community technical assistance offices, legal aid offices, and universities through dedicated research and public engagement units committed to community-based work. 1 Community leaders and activists suggest the importance of engaging in municipal housing and zoning councils, among other participatory planning channels (Donaghy, 2013; Pimentel Walker and Friendly, 2021). For decades, São Paulo’s occupations and favelas have developed community organising strategies and advocacy tools beyond their settlements, including public policies and self-managed housing programs.
This activist PAR in São Paulo’s south periphery is part of a mutually-constituted alliance between housing movements, advisory non-profit offices, informal dwellers’ associations and universities, known as the Articulação das Favelas e Ocupações da Zona Sul (Articulação of Young and Consolidated Informal Settlements in the South Zone, AFOZSUL). 2 The goal is to co-produce knowledge and action for the right to occupy, hold ground, and upgrade, inspiring our conceptualisation of activist co-production. We theorise activist co-production through the lens of AFOZSUL. By exchanging experiences, knowledge, and action, the PAR raises awareness about land occupiers’ rights while advocating for transformational housing policy and universal access to public utilities, regardless of tenure status or age of settlement. Articulação in the context of São Paulo’s social movements refers to an alliance with common goals, without interfering in the autonomy of each association and movement. While AFOZSUL is a flexible collaboration without central decision-making channels, social movements and favela unions have elected presidents, secretaries, and other decision-making structures.
We conceptualise three modalities of academic engagement via activist co-production: (1) awareness raising through community-engaged learning, popular education, and PAR; (2) knowledge exchange through the articulação of younger and consolidated informal settlements with ally organisations; and (3) advocacy to promote policy reform and secure funding for the right to occupy, hold ground, and upgrade. The first modality builds on the Freirean legacy, proposing an approach to emancipatory knowledge co-production based on a right to voice and lived experiences of marginalised groups. Articulação, a term used by housing movements, aims to overcome the fragmentation of community organising and coalition building. The advocacy modality targets policy-making and implementation. In this conception, informal dwellers are citizen-planners, creating secure shelter and resilient habitats (Beard, 2012). Occupying land and holding ground transforms the land occupiers’ personal and positional identities (Pimentel Walker, 2013), informing the co-production of urban policy anchored in the lived experiences of land occupiers.
This article contributes new theoretical perspectives bridging research on co-production, PAR, and broader emancipatory pedagogies inspired by Freire (2014[1968]). We situate co-produced knowledge and action at the core of PAR, supporting activist co-production in planning practice. This reflective research comes from our lived experiences as scholar-activists and activist-scholars through knowledge and action produced within a multi-year activist PAR engagement (Thiollent, 1994) since 2016 addressing the rapid, unequal and precarious informal urbanisation in São Paulo’s south periphery.
Following a discussion on methodology, we conceptualise activist co-production as part of coalition-building efforts with grassroots organisations, and favela and occupation associations. We characterise activist co-production by three modalities: awareness raising, articulação, and advocacy. The empirical section further contextualises these concepts analysing the multi-year PAR in São Paulo's south periphery, whereby we trace the agency of activist scholars joining efforts in struggles for the right to occupy, hold ground, and upgrade in making the just city.
Methods
Our methodology relies on PAR, involving activists as research collaborators and students from Brazilian and U.S. universities. Such relationships between researchers, students, professionals, militants, activists, and community leaders enable research and action to coexist through mutual participation in action research (Thiollent, 1994). PAR itself, less common in planning scholarship, has different strands, such as institutional or liberation/emancipation (Manyena, 2013). Our approach is inspired by Paulo Freire (2014[1968]), sociologist Orlando Fals Borda (1987), and the Latin American liberation theology movement. 3 This PAR strand emerged in the 1960s, incorporating participation of the poor in a pedagogical journey for self-emancipation and transformation of local and global structures of oppression (Hickey and Mohan, 2005). From this vantage point, scholars are catalysts of emancipatory processes, but not drivers of social change and knowledge production (Wallerstein and Duran, 2017). PAR’s Latin American roots aim to decolonise the research process (Torre, 2014) so that disenfranchised social groups lead the production of knowledge about themselves. This is the PAR approach of our scholar-activist co-authors. While our methodology relies on PAR to generate activist co-production, other planning scholars rely on complementary concepts of engaged ethnography to generate co-production defying neoliberal logics of citizen responsibilities for upgrading (Sletto and Nygren, 2015). Building on these approaches, community participation and co-production of housing, grassroots upgrading plans, and land regularisation policies may subvert neoliberalism and pressure government funding provision, while denouncing the structural causes of socio-environmental injustices in informal settlements.
The Participatory Action Research Methods in Activist Co-Production.
Entities that participated in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Meeting of Favelas and Occupations:
Our PAR started between 2016 and 2018 by providing support to Ocupação Anchieta, a young land occupation in the south zone. Together with graduate students in capstone and studio courses, the occupation dwellers’ association and the housing movement União dos Movimentos de Moradia de São Paulo, UMM-SP, (Union of Housing Movements of São Paulo), we deployed rapid appraisal methods to co-develop a plan to establish tenure security, seek funding, and pressure the government for basic services. The University of Michigan team and the Association conducted 64 socio-demographic household surveys, collected 110 direct observations of housing structure conditions, and mapped the land occupation to document environmental resources and basic infrastructure conditions. 5 The team held participatory planning meetings with the Association leadership and attended three general assemblies with all residents to share findings and propose an action plan. Based on reciprocity in service-learning (Jacoby, 1996, Porter and Monard, 2001), this pedagogic component entailed active field immersion and reflective practice based on principles of equality in cross-cultural communication, decision-making, and practice. Students and partners engaged in joint fact-finding (Laws and Forester, 2007) to unpack power imbalances, co-produce agendas and deliverables, and co-create plans to enhance the Association's existing capacities. Going beyond classroom engagement, in 2019 PAR funding supported the partnership with Peabiru Trabalhos Comunitários e Ambientais, a technical advisory firm, to conduct a census of the land occupation, then with 902 households, and initiate a grassroots upgrading plan. The scholar-activists connected the land occupation to the Public Defenders’ Office, local planning departments, non-profit organisations, other universities, and government offices.
The PAR expanded to other occupations, working to combat repossession lawsuits and ongoing eviction threats, and consolidate community organising, inserting these occupations within larger networks. In a second PAR engagement in 2018, we collaborated with Ocupação Jardim Gaivotas, Universidade Federal do ABC, and União dos Movimentos de Moradia de São Paulo to document the occupation's physical conditions, conduct participatory community mapping, oral history timelines and visioning workshops, providing legal services to establish a residents association. The PAR team co-produced a Community atlas, a video and educational pamphlets, focusing on the challenges of land occupations in environmentally protected areas. The PAR team partnered with Gaivotas because of such challenges. This occupation had been evicted and the area reoccupied by former and new dwellers, but tenure insecurity prevailed and the community did not have an established association.
These two PAR collaborations supported the organisation of the First Meeting of Favelas and Occupations of the South Zone on October 19, 2019. The meeting provided an opportunity for seven social movements, 21 favelas and occupations, and five universities to exchange first-hand experiences and technical support in combating tenure insecurity and lack of basic services. Favelas and occupation residents provided testemunhos of their personal journeys as community leaders seeking land regularisation and upgrading. The afternoon thematic policy working sessions with dwellers and professionals crafted action steps for a collective manifesto.
A third PAR engagement focused on facilitating knowledge exchange among consolidated favelas with long traditions of community organising and young land occupation in their initial development. The goal was to strengthen AFOZSUL, expanding its reach and further connecting with local and national policy advocacy groups. Working with 14 favelas and land occupations during COVID-19 required adapting our goals and research methods. The public health emergency prompted the team's rapid response to support the design and administration of a questionnaire on access to water in favelas and occupations during COVID-19. We collected 324 surveys in the south zone, with 263 responses indicating one or more types of problems with water access across 70 communities. The social movements mobilised the media and used survey results to pressure the water utility company and municipality to improve water services during the pandemic. The interview-style testimonies and legal and geographical analysis of the 14 communities constitute the Community Atlas, and two 30-minute documentaries focused on the historical trajectory of housing justice movements and the environmental and water justice issues in the South periphery.
Under the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Second Meeting of Favelas and Occupations took place virtually on March 28, 2021. Together with the themes of regularisation and upgrading, during the 7 virtual preparatory meetings with 14 communities, 3 housing movements, NGOs, and universities, the focus was on secure water access and mechanisms of land conflict resolution. The meeting had 160 representatives from 60 favelas and occupations, reaching 3,854 views and 1,263 engagements.
Our fourth and latest PAR engagement centred on gender and climate justice in favelas and occupations. The partnership with Anchieta and Toka land occupations, and Pantanal, a regularised and upgraded informal settlement, aimed to elevate the voices of women and LGBTQI+ residents, form new leadership, and reflect on the settlements’ history through an intersectional lens. This collaboration brought the communities together with União dos Movimentos de Moradia de São Paulo, The University of Michigan, and the technical advisory firm Peabiru in eight workshops in each community and a final joint event. The workshop methods included photovoice, participatory mapping, community chronologies, and awareness raising through popular education and capacity building. Sharing their lived experiences, residents discussed their housing struggles, shaping the meaning of climate and racial justice through gender and intersectionality perspectives.
The Third Meeting of Favelas and Occupations on December 11, 2023 took place in-person and continued prioritising universal access to serviced land, upgrading, and water, while introducing issues of climate justice and human rights. This day-long event disseminated the PAR findings from the gender and climate justice workshops, and included sessions with professionals, activists, and community leaders, and policy-driven thematic group discussions. The meeting resulted in the 3rd Manifesto of Favelas and Occupations.
By recognising the power imbalances permeating PAR relationships which may privilege academics’ technical knowledge, our team aims to learn from the predicaments of our stances. This article is co-authored by a housing and human rights activist lawyer, two community leaders who are militants and project research collaborators, and three scholars with longstanding engagement in Brazil. In raising awareness of one’s position in the social relations of power, the academic's role is to join forces, expanding solidarity networks for housing justice (Pimentel Walker, 2013). Academics connect with social movements, non-profit organisations, and local universities to partner with communities and shape research, actionable goals, and service-learning collectively. Engaging learning and research supports continued and incremental work beyond the duration of academic semesters or research grants. We conceive of academics as holding their own perspectives, recognising that universities themselves are not monolithic in advancing their social mission (Sousa Santos, 2004).
Conceptualising activist co-production
This special issue highlights the critical role of intermediation alliances between universities and civil society within co-production-as-planning processes. We conceptualise activist co-production to include scholars joining in coalition-building with social movements and favela and occupation associations. Scholars contribute to: awareness raising and knowledge exchange through popular education and capacity building; articulação across young and consolidated informal communities; and advocacy for policy and institutional transformations that build upon the challenges informal dwellers face. Epistemologically, the idea of co-production signals a commitment to distribute knowledge and power between scholars and professionals and a wider network of lay citizens, including local communities (Latour, 1987). This ethos is present in planning practice with knowledge co-production in sustainability studies characterised as context-based, pluralistic, goal-oriented and interactive (Norström et al., 2020).
In some contexts, co-production focusing on state-civil society relationships can become institutionalised, reflected by the term ‘institutionalised co-production’ (Joshi and Moore, 2004) to improve public service delivery. Yet co-production is intrinsically different from participatory planning because the former seeks people’s engagement in formulating and executing public policy (Alford, 2014; Whitaker, 1980), rather than only people’s input. In the Global South, co-production has become a key concept to foster egalitarian public service delivery, with low-income households' participation in water and sanitation provision (Adams and Boateng, 2018). Relatively successful cases of state-community co-production in informal settlements on water access and delivery (Adams and Boateng, 2018) and classic cases of successful co-production, such as co-managed slum upgrading via participatory budgeting (Cabannes and Lipietz, 2015; Pimentel Walker, 2016) explain the appeal of institutional co-production. Nevertheless, co-production goes beyond public service delivery or co-implementation (Paidakaki et al., 2022) to include decision-making. In that sense, the concept of co-governance involves citizens, social movements, and non-profit organisations in the government’s core functions. Indeed, co-governance goes beyond co-produced public service delivery (Ackerman, 2004), and involves achieving accountability. Nevertheless, criticisms indicate the importance of challenging unequal urban governance models, framing co-production as institutional hybridisation in the Global South (Moretto et al., 2018).
In classic discussions of co-production, Elinor Ostrom (1996: 1073) states that, “citizens can play an active role in producing public goods and services of consequence to them.” While Ostrom’s definition led to a paradigm shift in international development planning, research increasingly problematised assertions that co-production is inherently radical in empowering citizens (Blunden and Calder, 2020). For instance, co-production has been associated with reduced public spending and state retreat in neoliberal agendas. In this view, co-production accounts for the market-oriented, neoliberal conditions under which it operates (Blunden and Calder, 2020). Furthermore, Ostrom’s (1996) approach to co-production fails to account for paradoxical state-community relations, “by actively engaging organised groups of citizens in the delivery of public goods and services, coproduction simultaneously promotes autonomy from and engagement with the state” (Goodwin, 2019: 502). These critical interrogations provide insight for scholars and practitioners aspiring to anchor programs, institutions, and research in co-production.
Despite the merits and pitfalls of institutionalised co-production, we theorise activist co-production centred on non-state and non-market actors in precarious informal settlements. What we term activist co-production aligns with Mitlin’s (2008) definition of grassroots-organised co-production as a strategy of social movements to consolidate informal dwellers’ efforts to mobilise the state to achieve urban infrastructure. As such, activist co-production relates to “self-organized co-production” (Mitlin, 2008: 352). Like Mitlin’s (2008) examples on homeless federations, the Brazilian housing movements have a two-fold approach: while they mitigate the everyday needs of dwellers and each settlement’s juridical-urbanistic issues, they advocate for redistributive justice and political representation. Thus, activist co-production builds on Mitlin’s (2008) bottom-up co-production relating to how social movements and grassroots associations use co-production to access basic urban services and influence state programs. As Mitlin (2018) explains, engagement, contestation and subversion characterise the iterative approaches social movements adopt to successfully negotiate with the state. In comparison to bottom-up co-production, activist co-production places greater emphasis on the actions strengthening social movements' positioning vis-à-vis the state and elite interest groups like real estate developers. The concept of activist co-production emerges from the praxis of political action and PAR. Notably, certain actions, namely popular education, community organising, and coalition building, do not directly involve the state; instead, these actions are co-produced among disenfranchised communities, oppressed groups, and the social movements and entities supporting them, including scholars.
Within this context, we define activist co-production not as the absence of a government presence in favelas and occupations, but as a process constituted in the absence of comprehensive tenure security, land regularisation, infrastructure and services upgrading programs. Such activist co-production is anchored in the housing movement’s agendas, serving the needs of those living in favelas and occupations. Other actors, including technical advisory firms in architecture and planning, legal aid offices, and universities provide a supporting rather than agenda-setting role. Housing movements in São Paulo, like the case described by Watson (2014), mobilise non-profits and university faculty to provide community support, rather than setting agendas. While favela and occupation dwellers and the social movements working with them establish priorities, scholars co-produce strategies, facilitate knowledge exchange, and co-develop proposals.
Under our approach, activist co-production is characterised by three modalities of action: awareness raising, articulação, and advocacy. Conceptually, these modalities share complementary philosophical roots, emerging from praxis and the dialectics of action-reflection. Following the Freirian approach to praxis inspired by Marxist theory (Carvalho and Pio, 2017), these modalities are geared towards the liberation of the oppressed and societal transformation. Given the theoretical genesis rooted in community leaders and activists’ lived experiences in favelas and occupations, we argue that the three modalities emerge from the praxis of social movements.
Awareness raising
This modality of activist co-production is rooted in Freire’s approach to PAR and popular education (Schugurensky, 2014), known in Portuguese as conscientização. In Latin America, multiple approaches influenced by Marxism and a dependency theory of underdevelopment “fused activism with empirical research” (Robles Lomeli and Rappaport, 2018: 599). Freire (2014[1968]) critiqued a Portuguese colonial legacy based on the repression of poor and marginalised people in Brazil. For Freire, oppression was the societal enactment of “banking education” where students were empty containers without pre-existing lived experience and knowledge, waiting to receive information from teachers. Developing an emancipatory “problem-posing” form of education through conscientização or critical consciousness, Freire sought the possibility of social transformation. For Freire, knowledge production is never neutral, and “social relations do not exist in a vacuum, but within a structural context of capitalist exploitation and oppression of the vast majority of people in the world” (Sinwell, 2022: 4).
Freire’s critical pedagogy of emancipation as liberation required dialogue and empowerment. Dialogue was the foundation for critical pedagogical interactions, empowerment, and transformation. His approach, therefore, suggests how emancipatory knowledge may effect change as people engage in dialogue. For Freire, all human beings are capable of critically reflecting on their condition through dialogue characterised by humility, mutual trust, and critical thinking, comprising both reflection and action. His goal was to shift the focus away from a dehumanising epistemology of knowledge construction to a liberating and humanising one (Darder, 2018). Especially in Latin America, “these processes contributed to making meaning of and transforming the oppressive living situations of many, redressing social injustice through iterative action-reflection processes, frequently described as praxis” (Lykes, 2016: 45). Known as the ‘Southern tradition’, such approaches are framed as emancipatory, challenging the historical colonising practices of political domination of knowledge by elites (Wallerstein and Duran, 2017). Building on this tradition, we advance the idea of knowledge co-production between favelas, occupations, social movements, and universities, highlighting ideas forefronting multiple systems of oppression. For instance, feminists and others foreground radical differences between forms of oppression (Corrȇa, 2020; Irazábal and Huerta, 2016). As Le Grange (2011: 186) explains, “the nexus of race, class, gender and location needs to be understood to appreciate the multiple and complex nature of the oppression and domination constructs.”
Like D’Ottaviano and Rovati’s (2021) discussion of community-university outreach known as extensão in Brazil, and Ortiz and Millan's (2022) critical urban pedagogy and solidarity construction in Colombia, we build on Freire’s knowledge exchange and dialogical action to propose an approach to knowledge co-production based on a right to voice. In Brazil, extensão exemplifies attempts by public universities to gain legitimacy by serving society through mutual interactions to combat inequalities (D'Ottaviano & Rovati, 2021). While these approaches gained inspiration from bell hooks’ (2003) “teaching to transgress”, especially influential among feminist sectors of Brazilian housing movements like the women’s secretariat of São Paulo’s Union of Housing Movements (UMM-SP) is the 2016 translation to Portuguese of Angela Davis’ (1981) Race, Class and Gender. Women from favelas and occupations tell their own stories at the intersection of class, gender, place, age, and race. Thus, the place of speech gains centrality within the context of community-university relations. To understand this idea, we draw on Djamila Ribeiro’s (2017) notion of a 'place of speech' (lugar de fala) as existing on one’s terms by dismantling dominant hierarchies, foregrounding alternative, not always recognised geographies of knowledge, and addressing erasure and intersectional forms of oppression. As Ribeiro (2017: 64) explains, “we think of a place of speech as refuting traditional historiography and the hierarchy of knowledge resulting from social hierarchy.” Reflecting and recognising one’s place of speech through dialogical action, building transformative solidarity, is an important challenge for scholars involved in activist co-production.
In fact, Ribeiro’s (2017) notion of the place of speech has roots in Latin America’s testemunho, an individual narrative elucidating the formation of collective identities, emphasising action against social injustices, human rights violations and oppression (Forcinito, 2016). The testemunho is a literary genre incorporated into the humanities and social sciences to recognise ‘subaltern’ voices, with or without editorial intervention, yet always without heavy mediation by scholars. It is grounded in popular oral discourse where witnesses portray their experience as representatives of a collective subject (Yúdice, 1991). What is common to Latin American women’s testimonials is that the narrator’s personal story stands for a collective subject (Nunes, 2018). The PAR engagement relied on this tradition, listening and collecting testimonies and co-producing videos and booklets, whereby primarily female favela and occupation residents narrated their experiences of luta (struggle) for the right to housing and serviced land. The inclusion of testemunho in activist co-production results in two key departures from humanities and social sciences traditions. First, although community leaders and activists' voices are central, they are not alone, since other actors provide complementary perspectives, resulting in shared protagonism. Second, the goal of testemunhos in activist co-production is not primarily to denounce overlapping systems of oppression to elites, but to foster popular education and knowledge exchange, and inspire the formation and empowerment of new leadership. Thus, awareness raising of knowledge co-production and exchange builds on Freire’s legacy and the feminist testemunho, while responding to issues of intersectionality and positionality. Testemunho is not only integral for awareness raising for emancipation, but also for articulação and advocacy, exchanging knowledge through testemunho between favelas and occupations, and denouncing inhumane living conditions to effect change, as we explain in the next subsection.
Articulação
The articulação modality reflects the wisdom social movements accumulate about coalition building. In non-engaged, non-PAR research, scholars would interpret articulação as an emic term or insiders’ terminology. However, in PAR, the emic/etic division is moot since the reflection and theorisation is based on praxis and translational research involving scholars, community partners and activists. Thus, even terms with an etic genesis, such as the advocacy modality we discuss next, can be appropriated and re-signified by oppressed groups. Scholars aiming to raise awareness of co-produced knowledge face the challenge of fostering Freirean approaches within neoliberal higher education contexts (Sinwell, 2022). Similarly, scholars’ insertion in articulação fosters networks of radical solidarity to co-produce plans and interventions, intersecting with PAR methods.
Theories of community organising and coalition-building in the Americas during the 1960s were influenced by Paulo Freire and Saul Alinski (Martison and Su, 2012). For the former, emancipatory education and reflection lead to political action and the formation of collective subjects, while the latter focuses on capacity building strategies in community organising against oppression. Both rely on expertise of the oppressed, demonstrating the contradictions of the ruling classes. However, it is Manuel Castells’ (1983) work that captures the shift from labour organising to place-based mobilisation, solidifying a turn in social sciences towards space and society analysis (Miller, 2006). This is relevant for favela organising in Brazil and other barrios populares across Latin America, as proliferating urban social movements formed around community mobilisation for collective access to basic infrastructure. An important aspect of the spatial turn in social sciences is Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city formulated in the late 1960s, influencing Brazilian theory, practice, and law. During the dictatorship, these ideas captured planners, lawyers, architects, and other social scientists’ imaginations, forging links with urban social movements. Furthermore, activist intellectuals performed mediating roles influencing a broader ‘rights turn’ by urban social movements, leading these movements to claim social needs as rights (Holston, 2008; Tavolari, 2020).
The goal of activist co-production does not entail theorising urban social movements, but rather conceptualising actionable strategies contributing to the right to housing and the city. Thus, articulação aims to overcome the fragmentation imposed by neoliberal city-building on community organising and coalition building. Specifically, the liberation theology roots of community organising against class inequalities, such as pastorals of land and favelas, lost its hegemonic influence in favelas (Brum, 2018). Concurrently, the upsurge of the conservative Christian Pentecostal movement and prosperity gospel teachings related to faith, positive speech, and charity (Cunha, 2018) dominate the religious landscape of favelas and occupations. In the low-income peripheries where most favelas and occupations are located, social movements of the 1970s and 1980s and the Workers’ Party lost influence to cultural movements in the 2000s (Caldeira, 2015). New theological approaches promote pluralist liberation theology, foregrounded in anti-colonialism and respect for African and indigenous religions and belief systems (Cascante-Gómez, 2009). These trends are reflected in meetings and workshops that our PAR organises, through songs, blessings, and language from diverse religious traditions.
Advocacy
Building on articulação, the advocacy modality of activist co-production further construes this theory as a call for action. The predominant Euro-American planning theory of communication and consensus building inspired by Habermas (Healey, 1996; Innes and Gruber, 2005) explicitly rejects advocacy, especially social movements’ advocacy, as a desirable planning approach. Communicative planning theory does not see activists as allies advancing social and racial justice in the city, but rather considers social movements as threats because their angry attitude and irrational tactics prevent collaboration and mutual learning (Innes and Gruber, 2005). Alternatively, especially in the Global South, scholars document instances in which social movements act as “critical urban planning agents” (Souza, 2006) through auto-construction as citizen-planners (Beard, 2012) and as policy experts and advocates (Krieger et al., 2021). In this context, housing movements have championed housing and urban planning bills at local, state and national government levels. These movements are also experts in identifying implementation hurdles and recommending legal and institutional adjustments related to access to water and sanitation, zoning councils, and land regularisation. Since social movements are capable of co-production in planning (Mitlin, 2008), advocacy for activist co-production means that scholars must add value to policy proposals, further substantiating demands for institutional reform with research, and brainstorming a means of dissemination.
Within this conception, Watson (2014) describes social movement-initiated co-production as a means to share resources. Moreover, Galuszka (2019: 411) highlights the importance of contestation and advocacy strategies used by social movements, which “questions the understanding of co-production as a consensual engagement and points out how it differs from the collaborative planning process.” As Mitlin (2018) suggests, collaboration, contention and subversion are complementary strategies for grassroots movements. In sum, the advocacy modality allows planning theory and practice to extend its impact beyond the territory, reaching the realm of policy-making. Without social movements' protagonism together with supportive university scholars, this leap is exceedingly difficult.
Of three modalities of activist co-production, advocacy is the only one with a genealogy appropriated from the Global North. Housing movements and other civil society organisations use the term advocacy as a counterpoint to lobbying, emphasising that while the latter serves the interests of for-profit companies in legislative and executive branches, the former furthers public and collective interests. As a podcast widely disseminated in Brazil defines, advocacy is “a process of claiming rights with the aim of influencing the formulation and implementation of public policies that meet the needs of the population” (Enriconi, 2017). This modality focuses the PAR on combating structural inequalities and the institutional racism and sexism that works to produce housing precarity.
Findings: Building an alliance through activist co-production
Activist co-production entails reflecting on the ways planning scholars and practitioners learn from and contribute to social movements’ strategies. In this spirit, the educational, research, and action agendas build upon communities and housing movements’ priorities. The construction of this process is incremental and circular, including awareness raising, articulação, and advocacy. The following subsections discuss the awareness raising modality through our collaboration with Ocupação Anchieta (since 2016), Ocupação Jardim Gaivotas (since 2018), Ocupação Toka (since 2021), and a consolidated and regularised favela, Pantanal (since 2020). The articulação showcases our engagement with an extended network of consolidated favelas and young land occupations, and the actions that bring them together with the project collaborators to mobilise for policy change, what we refer to as advocacy.
Awareness raising through community-engaged learning, popular education, and capacity building
The rise of spontaneous, precarious land occupations in São Paulo’s south zone, especially in environmental protection areas, drove the PAR team to focus on awareness raising and capacity building to strengthen community organising to fight evictions and promote tenure security. The early years of a land occupation can be critical to cultivate resilience through environmentally sustainable strategies of occupation, minimising risks of eviction (Pimentel Walker and Arquero de Alarcón, 2018). At this stage, young land occupations may co-develop urban strategies unavailable through municipal governments (Pimentel Walker et al., 2023), such as legal strategies, environmental stewardship, and auto-urbanização (collectively-driven, self-upgrading). Working with residents’ associations in Anchieta, Jardim Gaivotas, and Toka occupations in Grajaú district and Pantanal in Socorro district, the awareness-raising element in co-production integrated engaged teaching, learning and action research, privileging grassroots’ methodologies emerging from land occupiers’ lived experiences, such as testemunhos, rodas de conversa or dialogue circles.
To obtain land rights, favela and occupation dwellers may become publicly-recognised protagonists in creating more just cities (Wesley et al., 2021). In our PAR, these circumstances constituted a pedagogical learning process where the history of each subject, individual learning, and subjective experience contributed to the collective construction of new political subjects and identities, emerging in processes confronting law and justice (Barbosa, 2014; Pimentel Walker, 2013). Although the awareness-raising modality facilitated this process, the activities did not reach all residents. Some community leaders prioritised religious organising or organising in line with older modalities of patronage. The following reflects on the lessons learned from our PAR activities.
Engagement in Ocupação Anchieta started in 2016 through a collaboration with the housing movements, involving two graduate courses at The University of Michigan, the occupation dwellers’ association, a non-profit landowner, and a network of local partners. Building on this collaboration, graduate students secured funding to implement recommendations co-developed during the course, managed the grants, and co-organised field visits and community engagement activities in 2017 and 2018. The first stage documented settlement conditions while co-developing materials to raise awareness of sustainable occupation strategies and environmental stewardship. Responding to the loss of the only community space, all pivoted to support the construction of a civic shed and prototype for decentralised sewage infrastructure. 6 Concurrently, faculty, housing movements and the Association leadership continued working towards an upgrading strategy independent from the landowner’s plans and government inaction. Critical dialogue on the importance of collective, self-managed action drove the awareness raising process.
A subsequent engagement at Ocupação Anchieta involved PAR support of an auto-urbanização project coordinated by the technical advisory firm Peabiru. In the process, the firm expanded the financial support network and engaged students from LabHab at FAUUSP. During this journey towards collective, self-managed action, the Association leadership moved from framing their actions as a land invasion (construed as a crime of trespassing and environmental infractions) towards the occupy vocabulary, recognising the housing and environmental injustices driving their need to secure shelter in a land occupation. Awareness raising about politics and urban policy accompanies any capacity building effort. During our work in Ocupação Anchieta, participants in the gender and climate justice workshops struggled to identify the urban planning programs benefiting land occupiers, and the institutions and actors supporting them. While women and LGBTQI+ individuals provide most of the community's social services, they lack representation and experience with urban policies supporting land regularisation and upgrading.
The engagement in Jardim Gaivotas started in 2018, guided by our partners at Human Rights Centre Gaspar Garcia who were working with occupants who underwent successive cycles of occupation, violent removal, and reoccupation. In collaboration with LabJuta at UFABC, the community workshops served as spaces for collective knowledge co-creation addressing four areas: the socio-environmental history and strategies of land occupation garnered through life narratives of community members; the synthesis of local and technical knowledge through community mapping; the housing question and conflicts over public policies, land access, and infrastructure provision; and community empowerment through support in building the residents’ association statute. These workshops expanded collective knowledge about local realities and socio-spatial processes of peripheral urbanisation, raising awareness of community assets and needs. Learning with these jointly-developed assessments, residents engaged in “future envisioning”, identifying and prioritising key actions, implementation tactics, main actors and their responsibilities over time. Further, the formalisation of the neighbourhood association helped build internal organisational capacity, shifting from individual narratives of survival to mutual aid and collective action, centred in the struggles for housing rights.
The community workshops integrated the practice of testemunho in different instances. During the tree of dreams, the community timeline, and mapping activities, the intimate setting enabled leaders and residents to share and learn from each other's lived experiences. The testemunhos, sometimes called depoimentos, started within our first visits, before planning the workshops. During the transversal walks through the settlement, leaders invited us to stop by and enter a house, where a resident had a testemunho to share. During these moments, PAR team members and local leaders sit in a circle, listening to testemunhos and learning about life trajectories advancing collective struggles for permanence and adequate housing. While testemunho emerged spontaneously, it became integral to awareness raising and activist co-production (see Figure 1). Images from the Jardim Gaivotas oficinas: ‘tree of dreams’, community chronologies, participatory mapping, and ‘workshop of the future’ to plan short, middle, and long-term actions. Co-produced materials include video, thematic manuals, and community map and plan.
The workshops across PAR projects incorporate popular education materials (booklets, videos, and flyers), awareness raising of the political context and documenting the settlements' trajectory and community organising. For instance, the workshops on gender, LGBTQI+ and climate justice used photovoice, community mapping and chronology to introduce these issues, while their content was then shaped by specific community demands reflecting timely political issues for informal dwellers.
Articulação between young land occupations and consolidated favelas
If awareness raising, popular education, and place-based capacity building are key to community consolidation, the articulação with community leaders and activists from other occupations and favelas is an equally critical modality of activist co-production. In this modality, academics support the struggle for housing and infrastructure through coalition-building with other communities and an extended network of civil society partners. Scholars accompany land occupations in their struggle to hold ground throughout subsequent cycles of occupation, eviction, and reoccupation. Meanwhile, consolidated informal and precarious settlements have undergone cycles of upgrading followed by population growth and densification, all benefiting from articulação with allies. Consequently, community leaders accumulate experience, and cultural and political capital in dialoguing with the government to instigate urban improvements.
Social movements are fundamental in building coalitions among community leaders to promote and implement land regularisation, slum upgrading, and public housing policies (Comarú and Barbosa, 2019; Irazábal, 2018). Such community building in São Paulo fits within broader national efforts for housing rights and the right to the city (Rodrigues and Barbosa, 2010). Nationally, the Movement for the Defence of Slum Dwellers (Movimento em Defesa dos Favelados, MDF) emerged in the mid-1970s during the military dictatorship, the first Brazilian favela movement (Comarú and Barbosa, 2019). The MDF itself was a network, a federation of regional movements and entities of São Paulo. The history of favela movements in São Paulo started in the 1980s with the Movimento Unificado de Favelas (Unified Movement of Favelas). Today, the União dos Movimentos de Moradia de São Paulo, UMM-SP organises favelas and land occupations in all municipal regions through the Secretariat of Slums and Occupations (Secretaria das Favelas e Ocupações). Our PAR learns from this tradition.
Articulação for activist co-production focuses on facilitating knowledge exchange among experienced informal settlements with long community organising traditions and those in the initial stages of their development. In conversation with community leaders, we identified a demand to record and disseminate the history of community struggles. Through testimony-style interviews, community leaders connected their individual trajectories to collective adequate housing struggles. The narratives document how leaders organise inside and outside their territories. The excerpt from a testimony-style interview below demonstrates the action-reflection surrounding articulação: Our struggle was not in vain. We have channels, we have people, we have serious institutions that want to strengthen and want to tell this story. And they want to make sure that there is a discussion of public policies for these issues of housing, health, infrastructure, drinking water supply, electricity, piped gas (Tereza Arrais, Viela da Paz president, Associação Civil Sociedade Alternativa).
Testimony-interviews are part of the Community Atlas, a portrait of 14 young land occupations and favelas in São Paulo’s south periphery, and two documentaries. The visibility of community narratives establishes a community history and documents struggles for tenure security, while exchanging information between older community organisations and young occupations enables mutual learning and joint action. Through mapping and legal profiles, the Community Atlas documents the socio-spatial diversity of informal and precarious settlements and their trajectories of exclusion, struggle, and achievement. Such knowledge can be used to make federal, state and municipal governments aware of the reality of favelas and occupations, establish time of occupation for legal action, and document evolving conditions and resident-led improvements. Indeed, the construction of more just city policies depends on recognising low-income families’ living conditions as urban planning priorities.
Another component in the articulação was the role of institutional partners working as advisors to the popular movements and communities. For instance, the Human Rights Centre Gaspar Garcia advises communities on their constitutional and human right to housing. Advisory nonprofits are indispensable aspects of articulação, advising on collective upgrading strategies and connecting residents to larger networks. Furthermore, they orient and represent community residents in land and environmental conflicts, including those involving public authorities. Since most recent occupations occur spontaneously without previous grassroots’ organising, our PAR articulação efforts became most valuable to them. Thus, the articulação of favelas and occupations with housing movements and allies constitutes a process of popular education, political formation, community organising, and coalition building, without which the resistance processes to hold ground and claim rights would be weakened.
Advocacy through popular meetings and manifestos
The meetings of favelas and occupations in São Paulo’s south zone are important moments to reconvene the PAR team with communities and partners, share action research findings, assess ongoing initiatives, and plan next steps (see Figure 2). These moments of high visibility reinvigorate the articulação, give continuity to AFOZSUL and create opportunities for exchange and coalition building. The preparatory meetings extend for months as the structure, guest speakers, focus areas, thematic working group sessions, and dissemination campaigns are discussed collectively among PAR members and partners. Abridged timeline of the three meetings of favelas and occupations from the southern periphery of São Paulo.
The first meeting of favelas and occupations in Ocupação Anchieta in 2019 fostered solidarity between young land occupations and consolidated informal settlements engaged in struggles for adequate housing. Participants linked growing land occupations in the region with socio-environmental injustices, rising unemployment, low wages, real-estate speculation, and housing unaffordability. The goal was to mobilise communities against processes of governmental criminalisation and stigmatisation of citizen-led peripheral land urbanisation. The working group sessions were structured around four themes: understanding land regularisation; preventing and resisting forced evictions; accessing basic urban services like sanitation and energy; and community organising in housing rights struggles. A concluding urban manifesto with demands and action steps called for urgent government investment in supporting access to land, water, sanitation, and electricity in land occupations and favelas (see Figure 3). The manifesto solidifies the consensus achieved during thematic working groups and establishes steps on prioritised advocacy issues, such as protest marches, requests for public hearings with the water company to expedite provisory water provision, and strategies to revitalise participatory zoning councils. Urban manifesto from the first meeting of favelas and occupations in São Paulo’s south periphery.
The Second Meeting of Favelas and Occupations was held online in 2021 after months of preparation. Guest speakers and thematic working group sessions highlighted the importance of adequate housing during public health emergencies. Co-producing the program, the PAR team held seven meetings including social movement activists, community leaders, popular lawyers, social workers, architects, urban planners, and scholars. These meetings aligned action research outcomes with municipal, state, and national advocacy agendas of housing movements during the pandemic. Actions included supporting national campaigns, like the Despejo Zero (Zero Eviction) Campaign. We disseminated educational materials, PAR reports, such as the water survey, documentaries, and Community Atlas. Articulação and advocacy in-between the second and third meetings took place through social media information exchanges and convocations for action, such as signing petitions and street demonstrations.
The Third Meeting of Favelas and Occupations in 2022 built on previous meetings focusing on the right to occupy, regularise, and upgrade, and access to water and tenure security, while adding a focus on human rights, climate justice, and environmental racism. Public defenders, professors, and practitioners opened the day, and participants formulated questions and shared experiences through spontaneous testemunhos. Engaging in conversation with representatives from the water utility company, public prosecutors, and public defenders, residents advocated for streamlined land regularisation and basic sanitation procedures, and demanded climate disaster prevention programs and government action to protect human rights and combat institutional racism. In the afternoon policy-driven thematic group discussions, participants deepened the meeting focus areas, and proposed action steps for the closing general assembly and manifesto, which had among its action points the support of a municipal bill to suspend evictions in the aftermath of the COVID-19-induced housing crisis.
Conclusion
This article reflects on changes in favela and occupation organising since the late 1960s, and university engagement with popular education via PAR using co-production as an alternative to broader forms of participation and organising. Our conceptualisation of ‘activist co-production’ captures the dual spirit of radical defiance against the unjust city and the legitimacy of local knowledge ingrained in community mobilisation and grassroots’ city-making. It captures the diverse and complementary ways informal dwellers organise for housing justice, and how universities engage critically to advance these actions.
In São Paulo, our approach to PAR prioritises popular education against oppression (Freire, 2014[1968]) by collaborating with community leaders, activists from social movements, non-profit professionals, lawyers, architects, planners, and social workers. PAR activities facilitated knowledge exchange and co-production through policy, spatial analysis, surveys, interviews, informal dialogues, and workshops. This had value because university, community and social movement partners have been co-investigators, setting the PAR agenda from proposal development to implementation. This entailed co-producing educational materials including videos, pamphlets, and booklets, and community organising strategies to demand rights and influence urban policy.
Here, we theorise three modalities of activist co-production: awareness raising through co-produced popular education and capacity building; articulação through knowledge exchange between young and consolidated informal communities; and advocacy through a grassroots’ policy reform agenda for the right to occupy, hold ground, and upgrade. First, activist co-production builds on Freire’s approach to advance knowledge co-production and dialogical action between favelas, occupations, and universities. Through the tradition of testemunhos, women and LGBTQI+ residents of favelas and occupations narrate their struggle for the right to housing and serviced land. Their stories foster popular education and knowledge exchange, inspiring the formation of new leaders, recognising shared protagonism with other actors in the territory.
Second, we theorise activist co-production based on the articulação between favelas with experience in community building and young land occupations newer to community organising, and between these and housing movements, nonprofits, and universities. The articulação modality allows us to reflect and act upon the challenges for coalition building given the fragmentation of community organising in peripheral territories, formed by competing socio-cultural and religious movements. Articulação incorporates this multiplicity of identities and mobilisation approaches, while maintaining common ground towards achieving adequate housing. Favela and occupation residents participate in a pedagogical journey for self-emancipation and transformation of local and global structures of oppression.
Last, we theorise activist co-production as advocacy, a call for action recognising favela and occupation dwellers and social movements as legitimate citizen-planners (Beard, 2012), community experts, and policy advocates fighting for transformational housing policy and universal access to public utilities, regardless of tenure status or settlement age. Our theory as a call to action joins scholarship on southern planning perspectives learning with local disenfranchised communities (Ortiz and Millan, 2022). The activist co-production of housing and grassroots’ upgrading plans entails favela and occupation dwellers pressuring the government to provide funds, while denouncing the structural causes of socio-environmental injustices in informal and precarious settlements. As activist scholars, we recognise the dwellers’ protagonism, joining their fight to defy inequalities, and expanding the network of solidarity for social and housing justice. In this spirit, activist co-production invites planning scholars to engage in reciprocal theory development and add value to urban policy and planning, further substantiating demands for action research for a more just city.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Prototyping Tomorrow and Pressing Matters Grants from the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, The University of Michigan, the Catalyst Grant from the Graham Sustainability Institute, The University of Michigan, Dow Chemical Company Distinguished Award, The University of Michigan, Ford College Community Challenge Award, Ford Motor Company, International Center Experiential Learning Fund, The University of Michigan and Ford Foundation-Latin American Studies Association Special Projects Award.
This article is part of the Special Issue “Coproducing the Just City: Interrogating the Civil Society/Academy Interface” curated and edited by Barbara Lipietz and Agnès Deboulet.
