In 2008, the Brazilian law nº 11888 was approved, which “ensures low-income families free public technical assistance for the design and construction of social housing”. The law states that as we all must have public access to health services, the population that has an income that hinders or prevents their access to housing through the real estate market also has the right to access architectural and engineering services, in a public and free form.

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The Technical Assistance Law for Social Interest Housing (ATHIS) is an integral part of our social right to housing provided in the Brazilian Constitution and must be carried out through financial support from the Union transferred to the states and municipalities.

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In order to encourage ATHIS, the Ceará Council of Architecture and Urbanism (CAU-CE) launched in 2020 an institutional support notice, allocating resources for the service of architecture professionals in two categories of projects: Housing Improvements and Land regularization.

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We were the winning proposal of this notice in the Land Regularization category, with the project entitled “Land Regularization in Conjunto Palmeiras: an intersectional proposal in partnership with Women in Movement (AMEM)”.

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“ATHIS with women” is a group of autonomous architects that seeks to exercise an intersectional theoretical-methodological approach – that is, one that understands the importance of thinking about the articulation of indicators such as gender, race and class in social studies. In partnership with the Associação das Mulheres em Movimento (AMEM) of Conjunto Palmeiras, we drew up a proposal to advise on a broad basis the land title regularization for a group of 40 houses inhabited by families headed by black women and single mothers, in the communities of Conjunto Palmeiras, in the periphery area of Fortaleza.