Casasmundos : atravessar precariedades, deslocar campos e existir na cidade negra.

Abstract

This thesis stemmed from an unease with the lexicon of precariousness associated with the popular world—a foundational base of much of urban studies, especially within Architecture and Urbanism. Since urban popular classes are predominantly Black, the link between “popular” and “precarious” reveals a false racial neutrality, leading me to scrutinize the dynamics, complexities, and epistemologies of dwelling mobilized in popular and Black territories. The investigation adopted a situated, intersectional, and embodied approach, built through research encounters with my hosts — three Black women living in Itapuã, in Salvador (BA), and in the urban occupations Alto da Conquista and Marielle Franco, in the city’s metropolitan region. From their urban trajectories, memories, and practices of life-making, feminine epistemologies and grammars emerge which, especially grounded in mothering, shape their dwelling processes. Their houses thus stood out as agents in the production of their worlds, intertwining care, labor, ancestry, desires, networks, absences, and anxieties in the material production of homes. By affirming other meanings of dwelling, the relationship between these women-mothers and their houses points to an ontological opening toward forms of urban existence that exceed the colonial grammar that (still) structures our ways of thinking and acting in the city.