Revealing the spatial capital of everyday life of rehoused people The case of Minha Casa Minha Vida housing programme in Natal, Brazil

Paper in proceeding, 2022

This paper presents partial results of ongoing research that aims at revealing gains and losses in the spatial capital of everyday life of individuals who moved into housing estates financed by public housing programmes, as well as the possible effects of these gains and losses on social and urban issues. The spatial capital of everyday life is a theoretical-methodological effort created as an extension of the spatial capital theory (Marcus, 2010). This effort adds to Marcus's theory possibilities of measuring advantages for urban life from time-based accessibility to land use and configurational measures. To apply this effort to an empirical object, we measured the spatial capital of everyday life of people who moved into housing estates financed by the Minha Casa Minha Vida Housing Programme (MCMV) (“My House, My Life”), the largest housing programme that ever existed in Brazil. Spatial profiles were created from a combination of time-based accessibility measures extracted from unimodal and multimodal transport, land use, and information concerning private and public transport networks. The outcomes show that the beneficiaries of the MCMV with the lowest income suffer more disadvantages in terms of time-based accessibility to daily life support services and aspects of the network configuration, which may be engendering higher locational costs and deepening a process of socio-spatial segregation. These results indicate that the analytical approach is effective in calculating aspects related to access within the city, and can be an important ally to capture issues inherent to everyday life and to support decision-makers.