Vila Kennedy: The Social and Political Organization of Public Housing Residents in Argentina and Brazil, 1960-1973

FAIN: FT-260324-18

Leandro Benmergui
Purchase College, SUNY (Purchase, NY 10577-1402)

Research for a book-length study of slum eradication programs and public housing construction in Argentina and Brazil between 1960 and 1973.

“Land Title and Electricity: the Social and Political Organization of Vila Kennedy’s Residents” explores how residents of Vila Kennedy, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—former slum dwellers relocated into low-income housing—experienced everyday life in their new homes and community, and fought for their rights to urban facilities in the 1970s. Vila Kennedy was part of the Guanabara Housing Program (1960-1965), a development project made possible in the context of the Alliance for Progress, the scheme that President Kennedy launched to promote US diplomacy in the region in the early 1960s. Both the US and the local press treated Vila Kennedy as a failure few years after its initial occupation; sociologists and anthropologists rushed to underpin this conclusion in the 1970s. Preliminary fieldwork with the former residents of this community shows a more nuanced history of obstacles and difficulties but also of social and political organization.