Professor Fraya Frehse

‘To Have a Home’: Intersectional Inequalities and Urban Public Space in Post-Covid Latin America

Situational space matters in the lived experience of intersectional inequalities in Latin America. Like other metropolises, São Paulo has registered an extraordinary increase of women-headed family homelessness during the pandemic. This project addresses how social categories of difference contribute to the physical material and social setting of urban public spaces in post-Covid Latin America. It asks how homeless mothers have mobilized categories regarding class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age in streets and squares of the region’s largest metropolis to sustain their lives and children. It submits qualitative data on their socialreproductive interactions in São Paulo (2020-2023) to an analytical dialogue with state-of-the-art approaches to intersecting inequalities, street violence, everyday racism and urban marginality in Latin America. The hypothesis is that intersectional asymmetries play a ‘situational’ role in the production of urban public space. Their management within the spatial boundaries of face-to-face interaction moulds public space physical-materially and socially.