ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to confront the project of citizenship, contained in the Urban Reform ideal, with the directions of the Brazilian urban policies, local and national, addressed for the enlargement of the access rights to the city. The analysis has as focus the regularization and urbanization policies in low income areas, based on the central place that occupies, today, the housing illegality in the formulation of the Brazilian urban question and public actions. So, the work is about an evaluation of the principles of the urban policies in course and not of their objective results. The main idea is that the legal instruments used in the poor areas, particularly the ZEIS, load contradictory principles. It is questioned in what measure the legal norms and the specific urban patterns instituted in these territories institutionalize two classes of citizens, or two references of welfare, social right and property right; both legal and legitimate ones. One seeks to contribute in the debate on the possibilities of ‘conviviality’ between equality and difference, or even, between equality and freedom, in a deeply hierarchical and unequal society, where the difference is the expression of the inferiority of the poor classes.
