The house, the city and the song: between promise and permanence in the temporalities of popular housing in Brazil

Abstract

This article examines Brazilian housing policy through the articulation between institutional history and popular music, aiming to understand popular housing as a field of friction between non-synchronized regimes of historicity. It is based on the hypothesis that different cycles of housing policy - from the absence of structured intervention to developmentalism, from the juridification of housing rights to their recent financialization - produce horizons of expectation that do not materialize uniformly across the territory, generating persistent mismatches between the time of policy and the time of urban experience. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Koselleck, Hartog, Lefebvre, Santos, and Rosa, the paper argues that these mismatches are not transitional but expressions of a historical dissociation between the rhythms of institutional housing production and the concrete rhythms of life in Brazilian cities. Methodologically, the article mobilizes eleven Brazilian popular music songs, produced between 1928 and 2017, as analytical sources organized into four historical periods, interpreting them as sensitive forms of temporal inscription of the temporalities that traverse each cycle of housing policy. The analysis shows that housing is not merely a shelter or a legal right, but a space where the mismatches between promise and permanence, institutional acceleration and the repetition of precariousness, normative formalization and the reproduction of inequality become manifest. The paper concludes that the housing issue in Brazil must also be understood as a temporal problem, whose resolution requires addressing the structural conditions that produce the dissociation between institutional time and lived time.