Abstract

Under the intertwined environmental crises of capitalist urbanization, we argue that policies on housing and disaster are merging in order to (further) conceal widespread socio-ecological degradation and disaster risk creation. Following two extensive flood and landslide events in 2022 in Petrópolis, Brazil's 'Imperial City', we examine landslide hazard mapping that led to the condemnation of 'at-risk' areas (a disaster risk policy affecting housing), alongside social rent assistance, a housing policy measure that simultaneously addresses disaster risk. We follow our informants' use of the term maquiagem ('make-up'), to demonstrate firstly how the rights-focused discourse of struggle for a safe residence in the city is reappropriated into the capitalist urbanization of nature, and secondly how policy discourses mobilize nature as a "constitutive outside" within urban governance processes. Uniting work in urban political ecology and disaster studies, while extending their intersections with critical housing studies, we show how nominally progressive policies focused on formalizing marginality in urban peripheries discursively construct such areas as 'pre-urban' and within nature to strengthen housing markets and financialization while reproducing vulnerability and exclusion from governmental support. Housing policy often promotes a narrative of equal citizenship and risk reduction, but its reproduction of in/formal distinctions is based on a politicized discourse of urban nature and feeds into ongoing disaster risk creation.

Keywords: urban political ecology, housing policy, Brazil, urban governance, disaster risk creation

How to Cite:

van Minnen, T. N. & Coates, R., (2025) “Maquiagem: Concealing the politicized nature of urban disaster and housing policy in Petrópolis, Brazil”, Journal of Political Ecology 32(1): 6223. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.6223