ABSTRACT

This chapter shows how the housing policies for the low-income population in Brazil, especially in São Paulo, were transformed by popular practices. The huge increase of the Brazilian favela population in the last decades reaching more than 11 million inhabitants (about 6% of the Brazilian population in 2010) has led institutions to gradually tolerated heterodox practices (such as land invasion) and even to have them legalized by the public power. This article describes the housing condition in the favelas in São Paulo and the evolution of the intervention paradigm from the 1960s to the present day.