How does the built environment become political? And how does social housing, as a problem of design, construction and occupation of space, participate in the constitution of this political and social collective called “people”? This book mobilizes contributions from the Sociology of Culture, History of Architecture, Semiotic Anthropology and Critical Urban Studies for analytical directions on these issues based on the analysis of the politics of the production of popular housing in São Paulo throughout the second half of the 20th century.

Between the 1950s and 1990s, São Paulo grew dramatically, with a notable expansion of its peripheral regions. This radical transformation of the city presented a series of dilemmas for architects and urban planners: how could architecture professionals establish connections with the majority of the population, often lacking basic living conditions, including housing and urban infrastructure? How could architectural practice maintain a critical attitude towards reality in a context of scarcity of economic and technical resources?

This book shows how progressive architects and several other actors involved in the production of the built environment formulated two main programs for low-income housing during those decades in São Paulo: a first centered on the search for the rationalization and industrialization of civil construction and focused on attacking the housing deficit, and a second program, formulated after the end of the 1970s, focused on the participation of future residents in design and construction practices. Each of these programs depended on and helped to produce certain “images of the people”: a “people yet to come” or a “people in motion”, which the architect would help to constitute through the constitution of urban built space.