Recent History of Ocupação Anchieta and Site Description

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16 02. Cleared Out Housing by TETO. 03. Child Walks Down Dirt Street. 04. Housing Structures. 05. View of Ocupação Anchieta from Main Entrance. 06. Housing Material in Cccupation. 07. Students Walking with Community Partners.

RECENT HISTORY OF OCUPAÇÃO ANCHIETA AND SITE DESCRIPTION

Ocupação Anchieta formed in 2013 in the Grajaú district, 17 miles southwest of the São Paulo City center. Today the site is home to roughly 650 families that organized and formed a resident association (Ocupação Anchieta Association) and political movement (Movimento Anchieta). The site is owned by the non-profit (Instituto Anchieta Grajaú), who received the land originally by donation from a construction company. Currently, the Occupation faces crises of environmental degradation, a lack of formal services and infrastructure, and housing security.

01 (previous) Map of São Paulo and the Location of Ocupação Anchieta.

Ocupação Anchieta (the Occupation) is a four-year old, informal land occupation in São Paulo, Brazil, located 17 miles southwest of the city center in the Grajaú district. São Paulo is the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere, with a population of 11,244,369 according to the 2010 Census (IGBE, 2010).

The City of São Paulo adopts a specific typology of informal housing, yet does not distinguish between a favela (informal settlement) and an ocupação de terra (land occupation). As a result, the city has 1.702 favelas registered; defined as precarious settlements that arise from spontaneous land occupations without previous definition of lots and without streets and can take place in public or private property. Favelas in São Paulo suffer from insufficient infrastructure networks, where dwellings are predominantly self-built with high degree of precariousness. Families living in favelas are low-income families and in situations of social vulnerability (HabitaSAMPA, n.d.). Another important characteristic of favelas or informal settlements is the lack of formal land title (Fernandes 2013). Brazil urban policy prioritizes informal settlement upgrading and tenure security over land titling programs (Pimentel Walker 2016; Lara 2013). Municipalities tend to wait until residents acquire tenure security (not private property rights) before the government launches infrastructure upgrading programs. As a result, more consolidated favelas receive municipal services, while young favelas at the stage of land occupations continue to develop in an unsustainable fashion.

São Paulo is the wealthiest and most populated city in Brazil, it suffers high levels of

08 (left) São Paulo Master Plan. inequity and precarious access to housing, basic infrastructure, transportation, health and educational services. The city faces a housing deficit of 100,000 to 500,000 units. About 1.2 million people live in either favelas or in downtown abandoned buildings, called “extreme” (Holmes, 2016). As a result, the occupation of new land, usually in the city periphery, has become a pervasive last resort to avoid homelessness. Oftentimes, young land occupations, like Ocupação Anchieta, deforest green areas and erect shacks by water bodies.

In 2013, organized land occupations took place throughout the city of São Paulo in response to state and national debates regarding housing and public spending. Nine different occupations settled in the Grajaú district, including Ocupação Anchieta. Many social housing movements led these protests, with the aim to secure affordable housing options for the poorer residents of São Paulo (Gomes, 2013).

Residents began occupying the Ocupação Anchieta site in 2013. The site consists of 220 thousand square meters of land, 136 thousand square meters being primary atlantic forest, a large stretch of forest that extends along the Atlantic Coast from Rio Grande del Norte State to Rio Grande del Sol (Instituto Anchieta Grajaú 2017). The occupied area belongs to Instituto Anchieta Grajaú (The Institute) (IAG), henceforth the Institute, a non-profit organization providing youth educational programs. Currently, between 600 and 700 families live in the Occupation. Families occupied the IAG’s property because they cannot afford to pay rent in more centrally located favelas, as the findings reported in the methodology chapter demonstrate.