This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

São Paulo should be for all people, not all investors, the former UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing has said, condemning rising inequality and the disenfranchisement of the urban poor in Brazil’s largest city.

Raquel Rolnik was discussing warring forces in São Paulo at Pivô, an exhibition space in the Copan building hosted by Guardian Cities on Thursday night. A former urban planning minister in Brazil, Rolnik served as the UN’s special rapporteur for adequate housing for six years to 2014.

Inequality was not limited to poor communities on the periphery of the megacity, she said. “We have a periphery downtown – I could call them invisible. These are extremely vulnerable people.”

As reported by Guardian Cities from Sao Paulo this week, many thousands of people illegally occupy abandoned buildings in the city centre, both in protest against unaffordable housing and in the absence of alternatives. The right to housing is enshrined in Brazil’s constitution, though it is rarely respected.

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Rolnik said São Paulo’s mayor, João Doria, saw “the best use of a place in the city was one that would produce more profit, not the one that will create more possibilities for people to live”. The same forces propelled many conflicts under way in the city, she said, singling out the ongoing campaign to save the Teatro Oficina.

The founder of the much-loved theatre, Zé Celso, was received with applause at the event, attended by about 200 Paulistanos. Municipal authorities are expected to make a decision on whether to allow development on the land surrounding it to go ahead on Monday.

Julianna (@ju_granjeia) “Depois do impeachment, todo dia tem um golpe no Brasil”, Zé Celso no debate do @guardiancities na galeria Pivô #GuardianSaoPaulo pic.twitter.com/TNU1goklwd

Civic bodies intended to preserve São Paulo’s cultural institutions had been “transformed into agencies for financial speculation”, said Celso in an impassioned speech against gentrification of Bixiga, a central Italian neighbourhood. “All of these agencies are in the private hands today … They don’t see people, they see numbers.”

Cultural institutions such as Teatro Oficina and the groundswell of public support to save them, “affirm the idea that the city must be for all, and not for all investors,” said Rolnik. “Sao Paulo’s urban policy is promoting the opposite.

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“This is a city exclusively for business, by business. The city is being sold to the international capitals: ‘Come invest here, this is empty territory’ … The centre is not empty. It is full of people.”

Guilherme Boulos of the National Coordination of the Movement of Homeless Workers, another panellist, said people were being forced further and further out of the centre, to live in organised squats such as that known as “Povos Sem Medo” (People Without Fear), a sprawling area of 8,000 tents in the São Bernardo do Campo district.

“Expansion means expulsion … [of] the poor, who have a more precarious hold on their territory.”

Occupation was a form of protest against the real estate taboo that poor people could not live in the urban centre, said Boulos, but it remained a last resort when occupiers were prejudiced against and criminalised.

“The phenomenon in Brazil is not a choice: ‘Let’s get together and occupy!’” he said. “People occupy due to the total lack of alternatives.”

There are about 80 organised squats in São Paulo, but many more live on the streets.

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According to the last census in 2015, there were 15,000 people. The number is now thought to be closer to 20,000, and probably the worst such situation in the city’s history.

Urban occupations – many of which had organised their own services and cultural activities – at least fostered community of the kind that was being dissembled by development and gentrification, said Boulos.

“In occupations, you have an extraordinary collective living experience that would be lost in this uprooting. When you go to the centre and the periphery, there are people alone in the crowd with no bonds, no relationships. ...

“Occupation is more than a protest against housing policy. Occupations are also affirmative: of living, community, solidarity.”