ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the housing struggles of squatters who settled in a public park and heritage site in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, in order to be evicted by the state and resettled to state-built social housing. It also examines the ideology of private property that was embedded in the urban development project and promoted by the national government, which the squatters subscribed to and acted upon in their quest for property and social mobility. The attempt to gain possession through dispossession was a process that required Dalva and her fellow squatters to become squatters, thereby moving down in the housing hierarchy in an attempt to reach the desired top position: that of homeownership. The chapter discusses the particularities of the state-built social housing they were making claims to. It also discusses how the squatters attempted to make claims to resettlement through the urban development project and the contested nature of the claims.
