Abstract

This paper aims to present the potential city dwelling tactics and strategies employed by People Living on the Streets (PLS) in Brasília, Brazil, to reflect on the production of care and bonding within the Brazilian PHC (known as APS). First, we will discuss the broad sense of this notion of living as a set of everyday creations and innovations established as transient and circumstantial ways of creating bonds and care and as daily tools of health workers within the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS). We will then present two PLS narratives to offer examples of actions performed in their homes built in the streets. The analysis of these encounters allows us to contextualize their lives on the streets, highlighting the movements that lead to the invisibility of this population and the precarious and fragile state of these practices and existences in and of the city. As a final perspective, we will point to the meeting of these living practices with the actions and technologies used by health workers in the process of self-care in the urban spaces.

Key words:
Urban spaces; People living on the streets; Primary Health Care

Introduction

This paper permeates a set of studies on People Living on the Streets (PLS) conducted since 2016 by a group of social sciences and public health researchers and professors. We will highlight some interviews that became one of the central mediators of the dialogues with these subjects through their invitation to get to know their homes and stories during rapprochement, preliminary conversations and creation of bonds, and the issue of using and building a house on the streets.

In this sense, we will first discuss in this paper how the idea and practice of inhabiting a city are linked to the idea of having the right to use it through its spaces. This expanded combination of living in urban spaces necessarily collides with the modern conception of what a city is and for whom it serves.

The expression right to the city, created by French sociologist Henri Lefebvre¹1 Lefebvre. O direito à cidade. São Paulo: Centauro; 2009., arose to denounce that the urban spaces had already become spatially and symbolically the locus of reproduction of capitalist relations at that time marked by perverse structures of inequalities. The author argues that the right to the city would necessarily be the possibility of living in a city where everyday life itself becomes the cycle of changes in living in the space, enabling all citizens to participate in networks and circuits of the city, thus making it work in perpetual use of citizenship.

Starting from some of the courses elaborated by sociologist Richard Sennett²2 Sennett R. Construir e habitar: ética para uma cidade aberta. 1ª ed. São Paulo: Editora Record; 2018., we will show how the concept of inhabiting a city then involves using its spaces, learning, and constantly improving knowledge and tactics. The author² believes that these processes form an ethical dwelling, as they are actions not atomized in the individual’s figure but which demarcate a sense of collectivity in their realization. We will use the notions of using, inhabiting, having the right to the city as synonyms of these linking tactics that seek to concretely and symbolically relate the lives (human and otherwise) and the city’s spaces.

Tactics-ethics, which Mbembe³3 Mbembe A. Políticas de Inimizade. Lisboa: Antígona; 2017. emphasizes as the ability to develop continents that can consciously house the fragmented conditions of life situations, resulting from the extreme vulnerability encompassing life in the current world. These shelters providing care are points connected with the very ways of health to live in cities and operate in their spaces and inhabitants.

Next, in this work, we will present two interviews from field research carried out between 2016 and 2019. Bringing on listening to people - who had a house even on the streets at the time, contrary to a denomination that (dis)qualifies them - attempts, firstly, to explain the complexity of the act of living and having the right to inhabit the city, even when on the streets.

We will highlight from their statements precisely some of these appropriation tactics, despite all kinds of constraints that being on the streets and having a house in this space represents. Claudia Girola⁴4 Girola CM. Rencontrer des personnes sans abri. Une anthropologie réflexive. Politix [Internet]. 1996 [cited 2019 jun 5]; 9(34):87-98. Available from: https://www.persee.fr/doc/polix_0295-2319_1996_num_9_34_1033
https://www.persee.fr/doc/polix_0295-231... states that it is necessary to stop considering the PLS as some negative portrait of humanity, analyzed as a single, undifferentiated set of losses. The author⁴4 Girola CM. Rencontrer des personnes sans abri. Une anthropologie réflexive. Politix [Internet]. 1996 [cited 2019 jun 5]; 9(34):87-98. Available from: https://www.persee.fr/doc/polix_0295-2319_1996_num_9_34_1033
https://www.persee.fr/doc/polix_0295-231... argues that, based on more sensitive attention, listening to and analyzing these lives should attempt to overcome this first sense of destruction, not stop listening to them, but to get in touch with other forms of construction. The reports originated from three or more meetings with these subjects and were transcribed with the respondents’ consent through the Informed Consent Form. Their real names were changed at their request.

In the next point in the paper, as an initial analysis of these practices, we will contextualize their daily producers and other city uses. Most of these ways of living are adopted by an increasing number of anonymous people, often classified as living on the streets to better (not) see them. Ten years into the enactment of the National Policy for People Living on the Streets⁵5 Brasil. Decreto no 7053 [Internet]. Brasília: Institui a Política Nacional para População em Situação de Rua e seu Comitê Intersetorial de Acompanhamento e Monitoramento; Dec 23, 2009. Available from: http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2007-2010/2009/Decreto/D7053.htm, without knowing who and how many they are (as we will show, we have estimates), these anonymous inventors roam, live, and survive on the streets of cities using of the most varied forms and tactics.

These daily builders of the city on its streets are precisely those intermittently constrained (in every sense) by agents of order, morals, and security, but also assistance, care, and faith, besides the official representatives of revitalizations, reforms, and inclusion. We will finish our analysis by discussing how these experiences produce bonds and can be found on the streets through the role of the Brazilian PHC as an instrument for capturing and expanding these bonds through the production of care⁶6 Giovanella L, Almeida PF. Comprehensive primary care and segmented health systems in South America. Cad Saude Publica 2017; 33(Supl. 2):e00118816..

PHC will be interpreted in this work as user-citizen-centered comprehensive health care, defined in the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS) as a political and social tool for the effective access to universal health care with equity and comprehensiveness, acting continuously for the qualification and completeness of these principles, from multisectoral, transdisciplinary, and participatory actions⁷7 Giovanella L, Mendonça MHM. Atenção Primária à Saúde. In: Giovanella L, Escorel S, Lobato LVC, Noronha JC, Carvalho AI, editores. Políticas e Sistema de Saúde no Brasil. 2ª ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz; 2012. p. 746-833.^,88 Giovanella L. Basic health care or primary health care? Cad Saude Publica 2018; 34(8).. The joint construction of health practices in the urban space opens up the possibility of recognizing the care that adapts, changes, and sometimes transforms itself onto the verbs of inhabiting the city.

Inhabiting as an ethical practice of producing bonds

In Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett⁹9 Sennett R. Carne e Pedra - O corpo e a cidade na civilização Ocidental. 2ª ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record; 2001. shows some of the many analogies developed between the physical body of the city and the human body based on organic metaphors. The author affirms that a considerable part of these analogies, which date back to the end of the 18^th century, served and serve to trap the city in the stereotyped image of a pathological body, where urban planning and its technicians would be the only ones capable of diagnosing the ills and proposing therapies. This relationship imprints the possibilities of city life using a hygienic, balanced, rational, and efficient mythology, also perpetuating a logic that city life encompasses technical knowledge in the hands of a few and not in the experience of its inhabitants in the daily use of their spaces.

The author⁹9 Sennett R. Carne e Pedra - O corpo e a cidade na civilização Ocidental. 2ª ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record; 2001. uses as an example the very decline of space and public man under the growth of increasingly present urban life privatization forms. Abandoning common life makes spaces and processes marked by shared uses and knowledge of city life disappear. Claustrophobia becomes an ethical principle as we have neither availability nor places to live with strangers. The flight from interactions and heterogeneous spaces developed faster from the second half of the 20^th century and has been radicalized with contemporary transformations and impacts on cities.

Thinking about any form of right to the city and ways to inhabit it is establishing multiple networks with multiple movements and themes such as public transport, sanitation, education, health, work, housing, mental health, old age, homelessness, landlessness, employment, LGBTQI+, and people living on the streets.

In this sense, throughout several of his works, Sennett¹⁰10 Sennett R. Juntos: os rituais, os prazeres e a política da cooperação. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record; 2012. suggests paths, including methodological courses, to begin to understand the relationship between subjects and cities and their expressions of creation. As a way of reversing this ethic of claustrophobia, the author presents an endless number of examples of uses and actions of and in the city in several of his works and, in the use and direction of minor practices, seeks rituals that appear to be small, often anonymous, clues to understanding the inventiveness and logic at stake in inhabiting the city.

In Build and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, these paths are explained by the author²2 Sennett R. Construir e habitar: ética para uma cidade aberta. 1ª ed. São Paulo: Editora Record; 2018. when he lists some practices for inhabiting a city. The first would be touching, listening, smelling places, such as poor children in Medellín, Colombia, and their ability to navigate the streets through skimming that enables, according to the author, the development of an embodied and intuitive knowledge about one’s City. The itinerant knowledge, the second practice, is related to the possibilities of encounters and interaction in unknown places and territories and its narrative and healing potential. The last two points - talking to strangers and living and rediscovering one’s condition in unknown places - intertwine with the previous ones, as they open up ways to experience other situations and interactions, sometimes full of misunderstandings and ambiguities, in order to enrich the experience of approximation and learning with the other and oneself and with oneself and the city.

Besides these practices’ inventive and concrete character, Sennett²2 Sennett R. Construir e habitar: ética para uma cidade aberta. 1ª ed. São Paulo: Editora Record; 2018.^,99 Sennett R. Carne e Pedra - O corpo e a cidade na civilização Ocidental. 2ª ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record; 2001.^,1010 Sennett R. Juntos: os rituais, os prazeres e a política da cooperação. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record; 2012. shows that they produce cooperation, actions that seek bonds materialized in meetings, the ability to listen to the other, and the possibility of dialogue.

The isolation processes caused by material structures of inequality, the precariousness of life and work, the loss of the capacity for dialogue, and the several diverse forms of violence are examples that the author brings to explain a dynamic of corrosion of cooperation and the possibility of living together. For this reason, the paths to inhabit a city involve solidarity, cooperation, and the production of bonds in order to enhance its capacities for the rehabilitation of space and the public man.

A new logic of living in cities can be formed by sewing these encounters, cooperation, and care as ethics of dwelling. Meanings, which to Certeau¹¹11 Certeau M. A invenção do cotidiano - Artes de fazer. 5ª ed. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes; 1994., are the “gay freedom of practices” by creating resistance and freedom, besides narrations and possible daily inventions. He says¹¹11 Certeau M. A invenção do cotidiano - Artes de fazer. 5ª ed. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes; 1994. that crossing the city’s spaces is the raw material of daily tactics as it opens up different ways of using and taking ownership of the spaces where one traverses.

The act of walking within the urban system would be the same thing as speaking vis-à-vis the language, and that is why it is the production of perspectives (here and there; far and near), a source of the rhetoric of paths with their turns, detours, calculations, and strategies. Dosse¹²12 Dosse F. O Espaço Habitado Segundo Michel de Certeau. ArtCultura [Internet]. 2013;27:85-96. Available from: http://www.artcultura.inhis.ufu.br/PDF27/5.5_O_espaco_habitado_segundo_Michel_de_Certeau.pdf
http://www.artcultura.inhis.ufu.br/PDF27... explains that dwelling would narrate the sewing of these walks using the care and rehabilitation of memories and experiences throughout the city.

These care lines permeate the very performance of health work in the urban space and its conception that produces forms and practices of working in the city through care. Tactics unfold in the emergence of social medicine and its actions to control space and bodies in the city by establishing itself as the health authority of spaces¹³13 Foucault M. Microfísica do Poder. Rio de Janeiro: Graal; 1979., or in the set of actions that permeate, for example, PHC’s performance, to bring the discussion to the Brazilian context and cities.

Formatted as the first gateway, space of contact, meetings, and establishment of relationships, in which all other care services will be offered to the subject, the PHC action stems from decentralized and capillary tactics in the urban spaces, composing an action filled with care forms permeated by the development of relationships naturally shaped by dialogue, acceptance, and bonding¹⁴14 Torres GMC, Figueiredo IDT, Cândido JAB, Morais APP, Almeida MI. O emprego das tecnologias leves no cuidado ao hipertenso na Estratégia Saúde da Família. Esc Anna Nery [periódico na Internet].2018 [acessado 2021 out. 20]; 22(3): [cerca de 5 p.]. Disponível em: https://doi.org/10.1590/2177-9465-EAN-2017-0169
https://doi.org/10.1590/2177-9465-EAN-20... .

This seaming ability is fundamental, as Mbembe³3 Mbembe A. Políticas de Inimizade. Lisboa: Antígona; 2017. explains, for the creation of new ways of caring for the world, a kind of passerby’s ethics developed from the need for human beings to assume their status of passage in a context that generalizes the fragility of life on the planet itself and all living beings. It is ethics because passing does not imply crossing spaces, places, cities, different countries. It is also the act of seaming a dual relationship of solidarity and detachment from an experience of presence and difference and never indifference, thus of care. The author argues that the space of these textures is a set of places for the experiences of meeting with others that pave the way to self-awareness, coming not from a single individual but from the very relationship of inhabiting the city, the street, and the world.

Next, through the reports of Antônio, Marta, and Júnior, we will present some of these tactics for the production of encounters that happened and occur all the time in passages and walks through the city’s spaces. Bonds produced by encounters, houses that are spaces of shelter and dreams, ways to escape the city and to other lives. These are flesh and stones that also open paths in their friction to think of new tactics for living, working, and researching the streets of cities in the bond with the other.

Home is a good place to meet people

We found Antônio due to the size of his house, made up of different colored canvas, tiles, and two giant antennas with CDs hanging from their poles, which reflected the sunlight, creating a kind of myriad reflections from afar. We approached on foot, and after we introduced ourselves, he soon pulled out two bags to sit on the edge of the curb, protected by the shade of the tree. Very articulate, he tells us that he has been on the streets for over 30 years. He arrived in Brasília in 2010, after walking through several states.

Realizing that we were noticing the house and the ipe that covered it in yellow, Antônio invites us in. The house had three rooms: one with a camp stove and cutlery; another with books, magazines, glass bottles, and two suitcases; and another with his mattress. Despite all his care, he introduces us to his house, first of all, based on its temporariness.

I’m here for now, but someone is coming to take me out. Then I disassemble and assemble in another corner, if not in another city. I don’t want a fuss. I pick up the paraphernalia and get the hell out. I’m on the street because I want to. So, I won’t stay here, like ‘rocks’, skinny, begging for food. I have a house, kitchen, library, and bathroom in the nearest bush (laughs) (Antônio).

We sat in some adjoining place of the three rooms and could have the dimension of the house’s grandeur and noted that five or six adults could be sitting there.

My home is in the open sky, like a yellow submarine. Anyone arriving is immediately spotted through this periscope in the sunroof. From time to time, some people show up here, and we share chores: they bring the food, and I cook. It’s good to sit down and exchange ideas. There are always some women who arrive (smiles). I let them stay until they get on my nerves. However, some people come with their barbaric manners. I tell him to go for a walk or receive hot water in the face (Antonio).

Antônio tells us about his daily activities.

Another time, he tells us,

On another occasion, he says that the antennas with hanging discs were used to communicate with a group of friends by amateur radio.

We still met with Antônio twice more before he was removed from the place.

Home to shelter dreams and fend away worries

Marta, her husband, Júnior, and their two children live in a large canvas and wood house, propped up by a wire fence on the edge of a lot with dense forest. Nearby, supported by the same fence, three other simpler houses were spaced about ten meters apart. They were the only people from outside, gathered around a low fire. Very suspicious, they first showed a great deal of fear when we introduced ourselves as researchers.

Explaining a few of our goals, we managed to set another day to return. The next time around, Marta was alone with her children. The husband owned a cart and was collecting recyclable material. She asked whether we would not like to wait for him and was quite surprised when we replied that we would like to talk to her too and that our intention was precisely to know a little more about her life and her family. With a leisurely speech and always concerned about her children, Marta tells us a little about life while sweeping the floor around the house.

When Junior arrives from scavenging recycling material, his reception is effusive, inviting us in, while his wife babbles about the filth of the house to receive visitors. A spacious house, with a clean floor covered with wicker mats, two bedrooms with mattresses, and another space with many suitcases and canvas bags full.

Another day, also previously arranged, we met Marta and one of her children. Junior and the eldest had gone out to scavenge recycling material.

She was pretty involved in her routine, and we spent some time talking to Marta. When Junior arrived, we shared the lunch we had brought and started talking to him alone.

Junior calls us back into the house to show us the “secret passage” he made for his children. There was an open piece of canvas that led to a passage in the fence that supports part of the house wall behind the bedroom mattress.

Here they pass, and no one sees them. There is no house in Brasilia with a door that has a secret passage to a forest. I tell Marta that this is priceless, but she wants to go back so we can fix a brick house. No rent can buy a passage to the forest or a beach, open to the world (Junior).

We still met with Marta and Júnior’s family a few times before they left for Maranhão, almost six months after our first meeting.

Invisibilities in street situations: anonymous inventors in cities

As Hardt and Negri¹⁵15 Hardt M, Negri A. Bem Estar Comum. São Paulo: Record; 2016. put it, the crowd is the very name of poverty, its becoming, since the notion of poor does not refer to those who have nothing, but the vast multiplicity of all subjects poorly included in the production mechanisms. The multitude is always an open and radical political body, “opposing both individualism and the exclusive and unified social body of ownership”. Misery, they explain, is not in not having anything but in the condition of being separated from what is feasible, the lack of power, creating, and governing¹⁵15 Hardt M, Negri A. Bem Estar Comum. São Paulo: Record; 2016.. The authors argue that migrants, the poor, the precarious are captured by economic statistics always from the negative aspects, never by their potentialities, “leaving aside the forms of life, languages, movements, or capacity for innovation they generate” ¹⁵.

The very term “people living on the streets” and its PLS acronym, made official with the signing of the decree that promulgated the National Policy for People Living on the Streets⁵5 Brasil. Decreto no 7053 [Internet]. Brasília: Institui a Política Nacional para População em Situação de Rua e seu Comitê Intersetorial de Acompanhamento e Monitoramento; Dec 23, 2009. Available from: http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2007-2010/2009/Decreto/D7053.htm derive from a state elaboration and a process of maturation of the social movements to fight for recognition and rights. Even trying to account for a multiplicity, these situations must be pluralized to see who is on the streets of Brazilian cities. The notion included in the document refers to a

Historically, as Declerck¹⁶16 Declerck P. Los náufragos. Madrid: Asociación Española de Neuropsiquiatría; 2006. points out, there is always a movement to “establish distinctions in the sense of classifying and hierarchizing and, at the same time, putting away “the deaf and distressing anomie of this population”¹⁶16 Declerck P. Los náufragos. Madrid: Asociación Española de Neuropsiquiatría; 2006.. The unitary identifications try to account for a multiplicity and contradictorily make it clear that the indigent people are always the others, argues the author.

Escorel¹⁷ demonstrates that from the 1960s to the 1970s, the first works and even definitions for the homeless population were elaborated based on the notions of poverty and misery. Castelvecchi¹⁸18 Castelvecchi G. Quantas vidas eu tivesse, tantas vidas eu daria! São Paulo: Edições Paulinas; 1985. points out that - at the end of the 1970s, with the emergence of a Street Pastoral and the Community of Sufferers, the name “street sufferer” started to be adopted even by the subjects themselves. The idea was to highlight a situation of need and fragility and, since then, point out the invisibility of this population within the official health and social assistance networks. The author highlights that, besides this growing contingent of people living on the streets, we now have the figure of the garbage and recyclable objects collector and, thus, the consequent organization of these people through the Street Sufferers community.

Other denominations appear and disappear according to the street’s fleeting nature. The term “maloqueiro” refers to maloca (shelter) or mocó and is common among house owners. Those who use hostels are sheltered ones. “Trecheiros” or “pardais” are terms for naming itinerant workers or wanderers who cross from one town to another or from small agricultural areas to another¹⁹19 Varanda W, Adorno RCF. Descartáveis urbanos: discutindo a complexidade da população de rua e o desafio para políticas de saúde. Saude Soc [Internet]. 2004 Apr [cited 2019 jun 4];13(1):56-69. Available from: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-12902004000100007&lng=pt&tlng=pt
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=s... . This wealth of representations associated with the PLS intersects with the very multiplicity of homeless lives. Mirrors of visibilities and invisibilities, the multiple situations of life on the streets, while being objects of a variety of stigmatizing denominations, freezing behaviors as deviant or characteristics as contempt and humiliation, shelter a growing portion of precarious and unemployed workers, composing the idea of crowd, explained by Hardt and Negri¹⁵15 Hardt M, Negri A. Bem Estar Comum. São Paulo: Record; 2016..

Only one survey has been officially carried out by the federal government after just over ten years into the enactment of the national policy. Published in 2008, through the former Ministry of Social Development and Fight against Hunger, this work showed that approximately 50,000 people lived on the streets in the country at the time, besides the characteristics of the profile and daily life of these people.

In 2016, 101,854 homeless people were registered through an estimate prepared by the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA), using data provided by 1,924 municipalities via the Census of the Unified Social Assistance System (Censo SUAS). In March 2020, at the onset of the new coronavirus pandemic in the country, the same institute updated the data, noting that the homeless population grew 140% from 2012, reaching almost 222,000 Brazilians and tending to increase with the economic crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also mentions that homeless people include unemployed and informal workers, such as car keepers and street vendors²⁰20 Natalino MAC. Estimativa da População em Situação de Rua no Brasil (Setembro de 2012 a Março de 2020) [Internet]. Nota Técnica - Diretoria de Estudos e Políticas Sociais/IPEA. 2020 [cited 2020 jun 25]. Available from: http://repositorio.ipea.gov.br/bitstream/11058/7289/1/td_2246.pdf
http://repositorio.ipea.gov.br/bitstream... .

The profile of this population is not known - except for estimates of a total number, which continues to rise and be recognized by a multiple set of stereotyped names and fragmented perceptions of their profiles. One of the paths foreseen by the national policy would be precisely through care, including a single publication from twelve years ago of a manual for the care of the homeless population. The invisibility of the population on the streets, often unable to take shelter, clarifies a perverse logic: how to talk about care to this population if you do not know who they are, what they are and think, and what tactics they use to inhabit the city street spaces.

Always assisted and observed as a population contingent that demands health and assistance, the unitary view of PLS as subjects exclusively of demands limits the very sense of approximation and creation of bonds and strangles the notion of care as a relationship solely centered on a notion of subjects in fixed positions of givers and receivers.

The reports we presented exemplify several ways to inhabit a city proposed by Sennett²2 Sennett R. Construir e habitar: ética para uma cidade aberta. 1ª ed. São Paulo: Editora Record; 2018.^,1010 Sennett R. Juntos: os rituais, os prazeres e a política da cooperação. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record; 2012. and are clear reports of bond-producing practices and, thus, cooperation and care. From the invitation to get to know their homes from the inside to the care involved in construction, maintenance, shelter, and precariousness, an analysis of the paths opened by the reports of Antônio, Marta, and Júnior permeates what Cassigoli²¹21 Cassigoli R. Morada y memoria: antropologia y poética del habitar humano. Madrid: Gedisa; 2011. called concrete transcendental, which inaugurates an interiority and indicates the potential links between the subject and the world. Therefore, he explains, it is not the house and its walls that make the dwelling, since dwelling, in its broadest sense, is not only located in the objective world: on the contrary, it is the whole world - objective and subjective - situated from the moment in which one inhabits urban spaces.

Care tactics and encounter practices

Upon entering the houses, the temporariness and precariousness were two of the initial findings and qualifications used by their residents to describe them because of their material support as a building in the middle of the public space and the very life situation of its inhabitants.

Vulnerabilities that materialize in all kinds of contexts exposed there, but that did not paralyze these people waiting for the time to violently lose everything. On the contrary, as a flow of interiority and exteriors, the house becomes a confluence of actions and encounters that open space for multiple viewpoints from which one can observe and analyze these inhabiting tactics. These are reflective perspectives that, starting from gathering statements and actions, enable us to analyze them as the myriads of lights reflected by Antônio’s antennas, which soon vanish or disappear with the change of the sun, as the constructions themselves.

Therefore, as a built space, it is a place, for example, for Júnior to imagine building a house like the one on the beaches of Maranhão, or for Antônio to see that he suffers less police violence; as a space of invention, the house extrapolates its walls and extends itself in connections with the world, like a secret passage to a forest to avoid the forced separation of a family. In other ways, the street space seen from inside the house makes it a sheltering tactic capable of differentiating, through its walls and periscopes, who arrives and who passes by. For example, Marta cites that they are a family and not on the streets as a reason to build a house. On the other hand, Antônio manages from a distance with whom he will be able to sit and share food, stories, and relationships.

As Sucasas²²22 Sucasas JA. Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) - El absoluto ético. In: Ramos MB, Chico DP, editors. Un libro de huellas: aproximaciones al pensamiento de Emamanuel Levinas. Madrid: Trota; 2004. explains about the notion of the house for philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, dwelling and the house are nuclear points of subjectivation, as there is no phenomenology of a house that does not go through the will to independence from space, an expression of the will to durations and ontologies of becoming.

On the other hand, the house observed from the street becomes a space of visibilities and invisibilities, since while trying to hide from power, from the ‘evil sport’, they are exposed as tactical junctions, which produce the meeting through the desire to have coffee with the same public authority, or at least stop by to ask whether everyone is all right.

These reflections are like dwellings at the same time invisible - expressions of the fragile and unstable existence of the passerby’s condition³3 Mbembe A. Políticas de Inimizade. Lisboa: Antígona; 2017., and exposed, by the set of meanings of building an entrance door in the middle of the street under the invisible condition, and anonymous builders of freedom because they constantly try to break away from the accident, which is being stuck in a single situation (on the street), even based on invitations and wishes for visits.

Such lights point to other neighboring entrances from these entrances, such as the Primary Health Care, the user’s access path to the set of services offered by the Health Care Network (RAS). The desired and dreamed visits for conversations, coffees, acknowledgments, and care, besides the proximity and capillarity of these health practices, pose a challenge to the teams to also create tactics to dwell-work care in cities: instruments and innovative forms of bonds that permeate practices of building relationships shaped by mutual dialogue and acceptance.

Health care materializes above all in these meetings. Franco²³23 Franco TB. As Redes na Micropolítica do Processo de Trabalho em Saúde. In: Pinheiro R, Mattos RA, editores. Gestão em Redes: práticas de avaliação, formação e participação na saúde. Rio de Janeiro: LAPPIS-IMS/UERJ-ABRASCO; 2006. points out that health work is initially driven by meetings, which are not composed of a unidirectional relationship and often exceed the institutional organization proposed by the health service. Subsequently, these meetings are transformed into health flows that are “operative, political, communicational, symbolic, and subjective”²³23 Franco TB. As Redes na Micropolítica do Processo de Trabalho em Saúde. In: Pinheiro R, Mattos RA, editores. Gestão em Redes: práticas de avaliação, formação e participação na saúde. Rio de Janeiro: LAPPIS-IMS/UERJ-ABRASCO; 2006. and behave as required for the materiality of care.

When developing a study on the treatment of tuberculosis with homeless people in São Paulo, Hino et al.²⁴24 Hino P, Monroe AA, Takahashi RF, Souza KMJ, Figueiredo TMRM, Bertolozzi MR. O controle de tuberculose na ótica de profissionais do Consultório na Rua. Rev Lat Am Enfermagem 2018;26:e3095. emphasized that the difficulties of adherence of these people to the treatment can only be analyzed through bonding practices and processes, such as art workshops, qualified listening, and reception.

For this reason, the practice of living in the city together with users brings to primary care the possibility of sharing knowledge tactically and care as home visits, thus creating a space for sheltering joint work of common care. Santos et al.²⁵25 Santos S, Souza Â, Abrahão A, Marques D. A visita domiciliar como prática de acolhimento no programa médico de Família/Niterói. Rev Pesqui Cuid é Fundam 2013; 5(2):3698-3705. point out that health work in the territories is materialized through actions in the very territories, focused on reducing stigma, prejudice, and discrimination, with reception and bonding as instruments to sensitize networks to know, accept and respect the differences, value, and support.

As Merhy²⁶26 Merhy EE. Saúde: cartografia do trabalho vivo em ato. 3ª ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Hucitec; 2002. 145 p. points out, due to its centrality and potential in daily health operations, the bond can be considered light work technology. We have possible health actions in the city, grouped as health tactics for the city, since the bond operates as a process of accountability for individual and collective health care, taking the community as a user and the bond as a collective bond²⁷27 Franco TB, Bueno WS, Merhy EE. O acolhimento e os processos de trabalho em saúde: o caso de Betim, Minas Gerais, Brasil. Cad Saude Publica 1999; 15(2):345-353..

In this sense, just as inhabiting a city happens through the development of practices, tactics, and ethics, the city’s health work also uses instruments. Just as there is no single practical way to inhabit the city, the link does not work alone as a light technology in health work. The approach, reception, sensitive and qualified listening, and cooperative intention are examples of light technologies as operative ways to establish these relationships of care, health promotion, disease prevention, adherence, and continuity of treatments.

As Sennett puts it, the city’s dwelling practices are actions of the flesh on the city’s stones. These small tactics produce itinerant knowledge, transforming everyone into space builders, or as Antônio explains, operative parts of a house that can be disassembled and assembled in new places or new cities, light technologies are also produced through live work in action²⁶26 Merhy EE. Saúde: cartografia do trabalho vivo em ato. 3ª ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Hucitec; 2002. 145 p., as they condense within themselves the relationships of interaction and subjectivity, allowing reception and bonding, as accountability and autonomy ethical actions.

The Community Health Workers (ACS) are examples of daily and often anonymous operators of these health work technologies in the city’s space, based on the creation of these meetings. Pinto et al.²⁸28 Pinto AGA, Palácio MAV, Lôbo AC, Jorge MSB. Vínculos Subjetivos do Agente Comunitário de Saúde no Território da Estratégia Saúde da Família. Trab Educ Saude 2017; 15(3):789-802. state that the leadership of these workers, also called from an acronym lies in the capacity to mediate, especially among popular health and medical-scientific knowledge, and act as a potentializing factor of meetings with oneself and the users and between the service and the community. Hallais and Barros²⁹29 Hallais JAS, Barros NF. Consultório na Rua: visibilidades, invisibilidades e hipervisibilidade. Cad Saude Publica 2015; 31(7):1497-1504. argue that this type of work can produce some decolonizing care because it is based on recognizing the diversity and autonomy of the subjects, which thus allows the transformation of the patient-passive subject into an agent-participatory of their health, disease, and care process.

The fragments of dwelling disappear as possibilities for change without farewells. The house was like a way to take a breath away from the streets, with time to dream, plan, receive visitors, meet people, become an agent-inhabitant of that place and time: a momentary possession to breathe and inhabit while creating experiences and survival in cities.

Amidst the global health crisis due to the current pandemic of the new coronavirus, these city spaces were classified as impassable but never as uninhabitable despite the lives, homes, practices, and tactics constantly living and transforming cities and very often care. In a review of studies on the current pandemic, Rios et al.³⁰30 Rios AFM, Lira LSSP, Reis IM, Silva GA. Atenção primária à saúde frente à covid-19 em um centro de saúde. Enferm Foco 2020; 11(1):246-251. found the importance of the ‘collective’ bond between the community and health professionals/teams to boost “community collaboration for social isolation and basic respiratory hygiene measures”³⁰30 Rios AFM, Lira LSSP, Reis IM, Silva GA. Atenção primária à saúde frente à covid-19 em um centro de saúde. Enferm Foco 2020; 11(1):246-251..

Open door meetings are possibilities to think about these and other care provisions, as they are relationships, bonding practices to practice flesh and stones, tactics and light technologies to make and carry through spaces that only work in the tenacity of the daily and anonymous use of health production in and from cities.

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