Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil's Public Housing

Architectures of Hope examines how communal idealism, electoral politics, and low-income consumer markets made first-time homeownership a reality for millions of low-income Brazilians over the last ten years. Drawing on a five-year-long ethnography among city planners, architects, street-level bureaucrats, politicians, market and bank representatives, community leaders, and past, present, and future beneficiaries, Moisés Kopper tells the story of how a group of grassroots housing activists rose from oblivion to build a model community.He explores the strategies set forth by housing activists as they waited and hoped for-and eventually secured-homeownership through Minha Casa Minha Vida’s public-private infrastructure.By showing how these efforts coalesced in Porto Alegre-Brazil’s once progressive hotspot-he interrogates the value systems and novel arrangements of power and market that underlie the country’s post-neoliberal project of modern and inclusive development. By chronicling the