Democracy does not arise solely in parliaments or institutions – it is created every day wherever people organize their shared lives. Exploring the case of women in Latin America’s housing movements, Carolina Peterli shows how care, self-organization, and collective knowledge lay the groundwork for democratic action.
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We live in a time when multiple crises reinforce one another. Climate emergency intensifies urban inequalities; the financialization of housing turns cities into financial assets; democratic governments are increasingly unable to respond to people’s most basic needs. Across the world, the feeling is strikingly similar: institutions continue to function, yet their capacity to protect collective life appears to be steadily diminishing.
The responses to this scenario usually follow a familiar path. We call for stronger institutions, broader participation, and renewed public trust. These are indispensable agendas. Yet they may share the same blind spot: they continue to assume that democracy is produced primarily within institutions.
But what if the most important question is not how to strengthen democracy, but where democracy is already being made?
When communities organize
This shift in perspective emerges when we look at Latin America’s popular urban territories. These places are usually described in terms of what they lack: infrastructure, public services, security, or state investment. Yet this narrative conceals another reality. Precisely because institutional responses are often insufficient, these territories have developed sophisticated forms of collective coordination capable of sustaining everyday life.
When floods disrupt an entire city, community kitchens begin operating before emergency policies reach affected neighborhoods. When forced evictions threaten entire communities, residents produce territorial diagnoses, develop alternative urban plans, and build national and international solidarity networks. When water, transportation, or food become scarce, communities themselves reorganize – however provisionally – the conditions that the state has failed to guarantee.
These experiences are often described as solidarity, activism, or resistance. All these descriptions are accurate. But perhaps they are insufficient. They describe what happens without explaining what these practices actually produce.
What these communities create is not simply mutual aid. They generate collective capacities to address public problems, produce knowledge, coordinate resources, negotiate conflicts, and imagine shared solutions. In other words, they produce the conditions that allow collective life to continue even when institutions fail.
Perhaps this is where democracy begins.
When democracy no longer fits within institutions
Modern democracies were built upon a relatively clear division of responsibilities. Governments govern. Experts produce knowledge. Markets organize the economy. Families reproduce everyday life. Contemporary crises reveal the limits of this separation.
Climate emergency offers an obvious example. The devastating floods that struck southern Brazil in 2024 demonstrated not only the importance of state intervention, but also something far less discussed: during the first days of the disaster, community organizations, social movements, neighborhood associations, and solidarity networks were already coordinating food distribution, shelter, information, and mutual care in many of the hardest-hit areas.
Similar dynamics have emerged in community kitchens organized throughout Brazil, in the solidarity networks built by housing movements during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in countless grassroots initiatives that confront food insecurity, urban violence, and increasingly frequent climate-related disasters.
None of these practices replace the state. Nor should they.
Yet they all reveal a reality that often goes unnoticed: before institutions are able to act, someone is already producing the conditions that enable society to endure the crisis. This observation requires an important shift in how we understand democracy. Perhaps democracy depends not only on the quality of its institutions, but also on the collective capacities that sustain life when those institutions prove insufficient.
What women in housing movements make visible
It is at this point that the experiences of women in housing movements acquire significance that goes far beyond housing policy. For decades, these women have been described as community leaders, activists, or members of civil society. These definitions remain valid, but they seem too narrow to capture the complexity of the political work they actually perform.
In Vila Autódromo, Rio de Janeiro, women responded to eviction threats not only through protest, but by developing an alternative urbanization plan, bringing together universities, technical advisors, and international organizations to demonstrate that another model of urban development was possible. In Barrio Mugica (formerly Villa 31 y 31 bis), Buenos Aires, women monitored public works, negotiated with different government agencies, exposed mechanisms that pushed families into debt, and translated technical language so that residents could effectively shape the future of their neighborhood.
The most important aspect of these experiences, however, is not their uniqueness. It is what they reveal about the everyday functioning of politics.
These women produce diagnoses, build consensus, coordinate resources, monitor public policies, connect different forms of knowledge, and sustain the relationships of trust upon which collective action depends. They do not enter politics when they attend a public hearing. By the time they reach that meeting, politics has already been taking place for a long time.
Perhaps the problem is not that these women are excluded from policymaking. Perhaps the problem is that we continue to describe as participation a form of political labor that already produces capacities for governing.
Care as democratic infrastructure
This shift in perspective also transforms our understanding of care. For a long time, care has been treated either as a private responsibility assigned primarily to women or, more recently, as a central dimension of social reproduction. Both perspectives have been essential for recognizing a form of labor that has historically remained invisible.
Yet perhaps another step is needed. Care does not merely organize domestic life. It organizes the very possibility of public life.
When women identify families at risk, coordinate community kitchens, monitor urban interventions, strengthen neighborhood networks, build trust among different actors, or preserve the collective memory of a territory, they are doing much more than caring for others. They are producing collective capacities without which democracy itself cannot function.
Care produces information. It produces coordination. It produces legitimacy. It produces cooperation. It produces territorial intelligence. In other words, it produces the material, affective, and political conditions that make democratic action possible.
Perhaps we should begin to understand care as democratic infrastructure.
This formulation carries an important implication. If care constitutes democratic infrastructure, it cannot continue to be treated as the private responsibility of women. Just as no society expects roads, schools, or water systems to exist solely because certain groups voluntarily sustain them, neither should we expect the everyday foundations of democratic life to depend upon invisible and unequally distributed care work.
Recognizing care as democratic infrastructure means more than symbolically valuing it. It means redistributing it. Among the state, the market, and society. Between women and men. Between public policies and communities.
The everyday production of democracy
Perhaps our traditional categories are no longer sufficient to describe what we are witnessing. This is not simply participation. Nor merely resistance. Nor only community organizing. What the experiences of women in housing movements reveal is something even more fundamental. They show that democracy depends upon the everyday labor of producing its own conditions of existence.
Democratic institutions deliberate, legislate, and govern. Yet they are only able to do so because there exists a social infrastructure that continually produces trust, cooperation, territorial knowledge, collective capacity, and the reproduction of life itself. Much of this work remains invisible because it unfolds outside formal political arenas and continues to be carried out, in profoundly unequal ways, by women.
Perhaps we might understand this process as the everyday production of democracy. Not because democracy can be reduced to everyday life, but because it is precisely there that its conditions of possibility are constantly produced, negotiated, and renewed.
Deepening democracy
This shift also transforms how we think about democratic deepening.
More democratic societies will not emerge simply by expanding participatory spaces or improving representative institutions. They will depend, above all, on recognizing and incorporating the knowledge produced in the territories where collective life is organized every single day.
The question, then, is no longer how to include marginalized communities within democracy. It becomes another question altogether: How might democracy itself be reorganized around what these communities already know?
Perhaps this is the most important contribution that women in housing movements offer to a world marked by increasingly interconnected crises. They remind us that democracy does not begin when the state invites citizens to participate in its decisions.
It begins much earlier. It begins when someone takes responsibility for producing, day after day, the conditions that make collective life possible.
The challenge for democracies in the twenty-first century is therefore not only to recognize this labor, but to ensure that it no longer remains an invisible burden borne disproportionately by women. Only then can we say that democracy has not simply learned from the margins, but has allowed the everyday work of sustaining life to reshape the very way in which we govern.