Abstract
Houses are crucial materialities that instantiate imaginaries of social upward mobility. Based on ethnography conducted among architects, economists and planners, I examine the devices that “perform” the housing market in contemporary Brazil and how it produces adjustments to groups of income, social class and cultural aspirations. I demonstrate how the reconfiguration of real estate companies, triggered by the launch of Brazil’s largest housing program – “My House, My Life” – ended up eliciting an emergent “market” connecting citizenship, consumption and “middle class” moralities. In the process, by qualifying territories, attributes, techniques, constructive standards and architectural design, experts weave together political materialities and inducted cartographies, actively engaging in processes of valorization and precification that reinvent the urban territory of Brazil’s big cities.
Keywords
experts; house; housing policies; social class