Collective usucaption

the importance of social movements in regularizing property ownership in urban centers

Abstract

With the development of the metropolises and industrial growth, there was a movement of emigration, which made the physical space not prepared to receive the amount of people who arrived there. For this reason, during the 1980s there was an urban crisis, and the worst aspect was housing, in addition to the precariousness of labor relations and public transport. In line with this panorama, several social organizations of countless branches organized themselves to plead, before the constituent legislators, the insertion of regulations on urbanization and property rights in the Federal Constitution of 1988. Through this movement, two articles were inserted in the Federal Constitution, in which rules were laid down to protect the right to property and housing, through the usucaption, which was called a special constitutional usucaption, for having easier requirements than those previously existing, in order to privilege the social function of the right to property, to regulate the right of those who owned land, but did not have the regularization of them, so that idle properties had a purpose. Despite the progress brought by the Constitution, it was only in 2001 that this right should be regulated, which occurred through the City Statute, which, in addition to regulating the way in which the usucaption would be effected, a modality of this institute was instituted that allowed the collective acquisition of the property, with the scope of regulating invaded and favelized areas. The present work aims to demonstrate what these requirements are and, from there, to verify the importance of social organizations in the realization of the right to housing and property through collective usucaption.