Renato Abramowicz Santos

Renato Abramowicz Santos is a Brazilian researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of São Paulo (USP) and works at the Public Space and Right to the City’s Laboratory (LabCidade) and at the Evictions Observatory. Renato was accepted as a UCLA Visiting Graduate Researcher in 2022, hosted by Professor Ananya Roy at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Renato’s master’s research was about squat buildings and housing social movements in the central region of São Paulo, the largest and one of the most unequal cities in Brazil. The focus of the research was the production of space, political articulations and efforts of emplacement/settlement in the midst of the constant threat of those buildings’ existence in a city in permanent dispute. Renato’s doctoral research is about threats and evictions of populations who create spaces and livelihood in conditions of indetermination and urban conflict in São Paulo’s downtown area. The research seeks to understand these elements in relation to state violence, but also how this same political violence produces networks of protection and resistance against these politics of dispossession and displacement.