THE NATIONAL RURAL HOUSING PROGRAM (PNHR): BRAZIL’S HOUSING POLICY FRONTIER

Abstract

            The program known as Minha Casa, Minha Vida (MCMV) embodied the Brazilian housing policy in the last decade, by profoundly transforming urban space. However, the MCMV also impacted rural land through the National Rural Housing Program (PNHR) which, oddly as it may seem when compared with the other modes of the program, had been left out of theorizations, at least as regards Geography. Having realized this, we present a brief description of the PNHR in the first part of the article. To show that its role was not residual, either in quantity or quality, we display throughout the article a set of data, maps, and a small collection of photographs of the PNHR in different locations (between 2009 and 2020). This reveals an important force field of non-hegemonic agents that have led the housing production in rural areas.

In the second part of the article, there is the challenge of including the mentioned policy in the theoretical debate, by questioning whether the PNHR marks a new space frontier as the march of extensive urbanization moves forward (LIMONAD, 2019; LIMONAD, 2020; LIMONAD & MONTE-MOR, 2020; MONTE-MOR, 2019; BRENNER, 2018) or strengthens a new rurality (FAVARETO, 2019).      At any rate, what would be the PNHR’s place in the new Brazilian dynamics of territorial structuring and also territorial policy (BRANDÃO, 2019) demographically impacting preservation of traditional families and communities in the field?

In the third and last part of the article, we point out a few questions as to the political concept of the PNHR, of implanting it in several territorialities, regardless of their local differences: homes for fishing families, maroon and indigenous communities, land reform settlements, extractive communities, squatters, and small farmers. Such beneficiaries cannot simply be labeled as a low income population. Since it exceeds the historically industrial and urban policy, contained by the city limits, the PNHR requires analytical instruments with transdisciplinary studies in Human Sciences and Applied Social Sciences, to set in motion multiple kinds of popular and traditional wisdom which reaffirms the housing theme as a frontier of knowledge.