Urban Occupations in Fortaleza: Nomad Population, Rights and Housing

Abstract

The motivations and forces that control the processes of occupation of urban areas of contemporary cities are rather complex and diverse. On this large field of possibilities (VELHO, 2008b) this paper aims at expanding the knowledge we have about the urban territory occupation process in Fortaleza, carried by a part of the population that I named urban nomads. These are people who live in places called favelas, irregular settlements, risk areas and housing estates, and that are, regularly, involved in territorialisation and deterritorialisation (DELEUZE e GUATTARI, 1997) of their home places. The urban occupation by the nomad population is a collective action (BECKER, 1997), formed by a complex and diversified net of actors and social powers, that take their discourses from different areas (juridical, religious, originated from community assemblies) making their way protecting their priorities on a daily basis. Having that in mind, this paper aims at investigating juridical laws that regulate the urban land titling issue. We not only analyse them from the positive laws point of view; we try to do an ethnographic research on how the agents involved in that process use these juridical laws negotiating the meaning of their actions (GEERTZ, 2008), and creating hierarchies of credibility (BECKER, 1977) and categories of classification (DURKHEIM and MAUSS, 1969). These are part of a universe of multiple discourses that can have sometimes discrepancies, revealing different, partial and simultaneous worlds in movement. That means that the juridical culture referred to the nomad population does not come from a single font and is not monolithic, inflexible, but is expressed in the multiculturalism of complex societies (BARTH, 2000). Through studies of different territories of the city of Fortaleza and its metropolitan area, I tried to somehow build a symbolic mapping of the movement of urban nomads, reflecting upon the sociological complexity of space-time structures on which events of the human alterity and experience are established on the contemporary world (ROCHA and ECKERT, 2005).