Territories in motion: the socio-material politics of resettlement in São Paulo's peripheries

At the margins of large southern urban agglomerations, housing precarity often meets risky environments, shaping conditions of uncertainty and vulnerability. Increasingly, planning and development interventions deal with this issue by relocating residents to purposefully built and allegedly safer housing. In the peripheries of Sao Paulo, such relocations have been emerging as contested processes involving state and non-state actors. At the fringes of the metropolis, resettlement often overlaps with practices of occupation, shaping ongoing dynamics of occupation, relocation and re-occupation that put territories into motion. Combining urban political ecology and Latin American theories on territory, this thesis examines the socio-material politics of resettlement in the peripheries of Sao Paulo’s macro- metropolis. Qualitative data was collected through one year of ethnographic fieldwork in four peripheral neighbourhoods, where I engaged as an activist, conducted participant observation, and carried out different types of interviews with various state and community actors. Applying different strategies of intra-urban comparison, the thesis brings the different case studies into conversation to explore four main topics. First, it scrutinises contestations involving grassroots and state actors, whereby relocations are negotiated, resisted and claimed in various ways. Second, it explains how demarcations of who will be relocated or not occur amid changing materialities of terrain. Third, it analyses how flows of construction materials occur in the occupation-relocation cycle. Fourth, it elucidates how residents experience socio-material transformations, with a focus on embodiment and social reproduction. The thesis therefore presents critical perspectives on resettlement, advancing scholarship on peripheral urbanisation, housing politics, and environmental risk.