Public housing and capitalist modernization: a dialectical relationship between sources of research and analysis procedures

Abstract

This article intends to contribute a methodological reflection on the history of housing in Brazil, specifically in regard to the beginning of state action in the sector. The analysis procedures and ways of mobilization of the sources used for the doctorate work of the author will be put on display in order to highlight the methodological choices which served to interpret the public housing production between 1930 and 1964, and its relationship to the establishment of the capitalism in Brazil. This effort is part of the collective work of research of the Group Pioneers of Social Housing in Brazil, coordinated by Nabil Bonduki, which produced a comprehensive survey of housing built in the period, and revealed a diversity of architectural and urban solutions. Due to the nature of the research object, the group contacted several documentary sources that originated an extensive and diversified collection in its material base. To explore, to interpret and to build historiographical approaches from this collection is a task that has not been exhausted. The analysis presented is justified by the complexity of the empirical object and its insertion in a crucial moment for the Brazilian historical process.