Entre Distopias e Paradoxos. Programa Casa Para Todos e a Política Pública de Habitação em Cabo Verde

Abstract

The Right to Housing is at the centre of any Housing Public Policy. However, this is not enough and, therefore, it works in complementarity with others, namely, the Right to the City, the Right to the Soil and the Right to Habitat. It is as a whole that it is possible to guarantee an effective fight against socio-economic asymmetries, where housing has a participating role in the relationship between inhabitants and their environment. Alongside this process, the State is not the only intervening agent. However, it has the biggest responsibility: to articulate the planning, management and implementation of actions to promote this right. This dissertation focuses on the Casa Para Todos Programme, the first structured and continuous action in the housing sector at national level in Cape Verde, whose main contribution consisted in the direct provision of social housing. Prior to this, sporadic interventions had already taken place in the cities of Praia and Mindelo, neglecting the housing needs of the population of the remaining islands. However, from its planning phase to the effective daily life of the residents, some dissensions were raised. On the one hand, this programme came to fill an important gap at the urban and housing level in Cape Verde but, on the other hand, in certain projects, due to their poorly integrated implementation logic, the distance between the inhabitants and the urban centres was increased, aggravating and perpetuating social exclusion phenomena. This work proposes a review reading of this programme, identifying its opportunities and gaps, launching a set of principles for improvement, operative to the planning of future policies and practices, appropriate and informed by the specificities that characterise the Cape Verdean citizen and habitat. Among the porosities of governmental action, paradoxes and gaps arise, which sometimes give rise to situations that catalyse injustice. Each new intervention produces new knowledge and new know-how. We may not be facing a utopian scenario, but each contribution and reflection increases the distance between reality and dystopia.