City Occupied: What role for the state?
Abstract
This proposed project builds on an existing research collaboration on informal land and building occupations in Bogot?? (Colombia), Cape Town (South Africa) and S??o Paulo (Brazil). Over the past few years, Dr Andreas Scheba together with other early-career researchers from South Africa, United Kingdom, Brazil and Colombia, formed an engaged research network (???City Occupied???) with occupier communities in the three aforementioned cities to study the potential and challenges of informal occupations in providing working class, low-income residents with decent homes. The project responded to growing calls by urban scholars, social justice organisations, and progressive government officials to recognise the global dimension of housing struggles and conduct more comparative research, especially across the global South, to facilitate dialogue, generate shared learning and encourage cross-fertilisation of policy ideas.
