Brazilian cities deal with severely unequal access to housing and infrastructure. This paper examines how popular housing movements in São Paulo respond to threats to access to housing, food, sociability, and citizenship, observing the Gera Juncal Community Garden in São Paulo. Originating from a housing rights movement, it has evolved into a multifaceted site that integrates food sovereignty with right-to-the-city claims and merges popular education, solidarity economy, and agro-ecological practices. Using a feminist and relational perspective, this study observes the community maintaining the garden, and their daily negotiations around membership, resource distribution, and political strategies shaping the garden's hybrid community. These interactions portray the garden as a political-ecological assemblage where the interaction of bodies, food, labor, and political engagement redefines urban commons boundaries. The findings suggest that like other social reproduction and care practices, they address urgent needs and promote individual and collective agency, sustaining the movement. The daily work in the community garden fosters connection and trust, as they leveraged opportunities to share and build a common language towards caring for the land, solidarity, and justice. This shared experience proved crucial, as the garden kept the group during an uncertain period. Building on this sense of community, they shift the focus from individual to collective demands broadening the housing concept to a co-produced shelter, and challenging urban dynamics that threaten the environment, habitability, and social bonds. They also shift their identity as the not-haves to the providers of services, building and claiming their autonomy as they establish diverse relations with the state and other networks. However, by merging productive and reproductive spheres, they replicate challenges like unequal labor division, devaluation of work assigned to female and non-white bodies, limited access to resources, externalization of socio-environmental impacts, and perpetuation of unequal power relations. Conversely, everyday work is also a realm of creativity and extraordinary, where strategies and relationships are critically evaluated. Movements connect the claim for the commons with their maintenance, thereby linking forms of struggle with forms of life. They can embed their sought principles and values into actions and practices, embodying prefigurative politics, and expanding present demands by collectively shaping the future.
