Middle Class Sensorial and Bottom-Up Condominization in Brazil’s Post-Neoliberal Public Housing

Abstract

In Brazil’s highly segregated urban centers, geographic location is known for its power to instantiate class positionality. Drawing on long term ethnographic engagements with housing beneficiaries of Brazil’s now revamped Minha Casa Minha Vida, I argue that, in the aftermath of the move, first-time homeowners activate remembrances of the hills (the slums where they lived before) to craft novel classed geographies which defy clearcut isomorphisms of class and space. As the once-rising-poor transitioned from peri-urban informal settlements to middle-class urban environments, the material and sensuous qualities of the hills leaked onto the built environment of the projects in unexpected ways. Yet first-time homeowners also engage in new infrastructural practices that challenge fixed understandings of class subjectivity and distinction—a middle-class-making process I refer to as “bottom-up condominization”—. By foregrounding the sensuous and material aspects of socioeconomic membership in the ruins of post-neoliberalism, I attend to the instability and unruliness of middle-class formations. Rather than an objective identifier for social stratification, the post-neoliberal middle class is best defined through its spectral and fleeting qualities —that is, as a “middle class sensorial”—.