Poetics of Reparative Belonging
Overseas Practice Engagement (OPE) — São Paulo, Brazil (2024-2025)
MSc Building & Urban Design in Development, The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL
Team: Ananya Jain, Mario de los Santos, Riley Yang, Serra Utkum Ikiz, Xing Geng, Xiyang Chen, Yasmina Seifeddine
The Overseas Practice Engagement (OPE) in São Paulo has been running over two years in partnership with FESPSP – Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo. It investigates ocupações (housing occupations) in the city, understanding them as radical spaces of possibility—arenas for alternative forms of futuring.
Our 2025 project, Poetics of Reparative Belonging, focuses on two major housing movements: MTST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto, or Homeless Workers Movement) and MSTC (Movimento de Sem-Teto do Centro, or Downtown Homeless Movement). These movements organise and sustain occupations in a city marked by stark contradictions—where over 11% of housing units lie vacant while tens of thousands remain unhoused.
The project frames occupations as radical infrastructures of care, resistance, and worldmaking. They are not simply survival mechanisms but laboratories for reimagining urban life, rooted in collective labour and mutual aid.
Analytical Framework — Reparative Belonging
Our conceptual anchor was the idea of reparative belonging—the belief that acts of care, maintenance, and mutual aid can repair exclusionary urban landscapes while generating radical forms of community.
Rather than treating belonging as a fixed or inherited status, we approached it as an ongoing process—constantly renegotiated and performed through everyday practices. In the occupations, sweeping the floor, cooking a meal, repairing a roof, or organising community theatre are not mundane chores but political acts that sustain alternative futures.
Two thematic entry points shaped our exploration:
Food – as both nourishment and a site of political education (e.g., MTST’s solidarity kitchens feeding over 12,000 people daily).
Art – as a medium of visibility, imagination, and collective memory (e.g., MSTC’s Reocupa gallery at Ocupação 9 de Julho).
Methods — Co-Production in Practice
We adopted a co-productive methodology designed to prioritise collaboration, reflection, and knowledge exchange with the movements and their communities.
Primary methods included:
Participatory Photography – inviting community members to document their spaces, everyday routines, and forms of resistance through their own lenses.
Imaginative Mapping – co-creating maps that visualise relationships, resources, and aspirations within and beyond the occupations.
Situated Observation – embedding ourselves in daily life to observe spatial practices, rhythms, and interactions over an eight-day field engagement.
Secondary Research – situating our observations within broader socio-political and urban contexts.
This approach allowed us to identify and document labours of endurance—repetitive, often invisible acts of care and maintenance that sustain the occupations. These labours are profoundly gendered and racialised, with the burden frequently carried by Black women and single mothers, whose unpaid work is central to the functioning and resilience of these spaces.
Key Findings
Our research found that occupations are far more than housing solutions—they function as pedagogical, cultural, and political infrastructures. They operate as radical infrastructures of care, where solidarity kitchens, childcare, and collective cleaning not only meet material needs but also foster a deep sense of belonging. They are also spaces of political education, where cooking workshops, public theatre, and other collective activities cultivate leadership, critical consciousness, and community agency. At the same time, they serve as alternative urban futures—“urban laboratories” in which communities actively experiment with new models of governance, resource-sharing, and cultural production. Despite operating under constant threat of eviction and political hostility, these movements sustain forms of urban life that resist and counter the alienation and inequality embedded in capitalist urbanism.
Translocal Zine (Network Expansion)
Co-Produced Strategic Directions
In collaboration with community members and allied organisations, we developed three strategic directions to strengthen the movements:
Strategic Porosity – tactically opening occupations to wider publics through cultural programming, performances, and relational exchanges, amplifying visibility without compromising safety.
Network Expansion – developing translocal solidarity networks via zines, public events, international exchanges, and shared organising infrastructures.
Aspirational Policy-Making – reimagining governance structures through the lived futurisms of occupations, including participatory planning, co-building workshops, and community-led policy design.
Short Film (shortlisted for the DPU Short Film Competition 2025)
Acknowledgements
This work is dedicated to all the people who kindly opened their homes to us in São Paulo and shared their time and stories with a group of strangers from London. We are profoundly grateful to everyone from FESPSP – Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo, the MSTC and MTST movements, and all their partners and allies who welcomed us. We also thank those who helped us develop a project close to our hearts, as well as our cohort, without whom our learning in Brazil would have been incomplete.