Community land trusts as a resistance instrument to neoliberal urban projects

Abstract

Community Land Trusts are established models designed to protect the maintenance of vulnerable communities in certain territories. The figure emerges in the United States in the 1960s, tied to civil rights movements and the population living in rural areas. The present article will evaluate the potentialities and limits of the application of the Community Land Trusts instrument in Brazil as resistance and biopotent practice in an urban space marked by high percentages of irregularity and by a serious situation of socio-spatial inequality. In a context that worsens after the mega-events at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century and with the democratic rupture and deepening of neoliberal logic in cities from 2016 onwards, it is necessary and urgent to establish new practices and forms of property management in a way to draw possible subversions to the logic of Power. CLTs are proposed here as a form of subversive legal practice, either from the defense of the design of a specific legislation on the subject, or by the use of existing legal instruments in order to base the creation of an emancipatory proprietary model.