Urbanization in Brazil has long been tied to disputed visions of citizenship, including in the formalization of a “right to the city” in Brazil’s 2001 City Statute. Imaginaries of modernization often included the destruction and construction of physical infrastructures along with the social and cultural forms that they facilitated. Examining cases in the Southeast and Northeast regions and drawing from federal, municipal and local archives along with print media, oral history and community research, this panel discusses the relation between urban space and urban citizenship in Brazil. Our cases span early twentieth-century São Paulo’s proliferating theater scene, urban renewal and ethnoracialization projects in mid-century São Paulo, and public housing construction in Recife and Natal during the second half of the twentieth century. We analyze these histories of contrasting manners of occupying the city to illuminate the threads linking sociability, informality, and social inequality. By bringing together these four case studies, several themes emerge that show how different processes in particular social and political contexts fostered similar outcomes. Our panel reveals how, throughout the twentieth century, Brazil's urban environment was tied to contestations over power and competing (racialized, gendered, classed) visions of social modernization. More than that, these studies demonstrate the contrasting manners in which class, race and gender manifested within processes of urbanization and modernization, shedding new light on how citizenship was understood by different social actors such as communities, authorities, and elites. Our panel also dialogues with current debates regarding visions and practices of urban studies, cultural anthropology, and the intersections of social, economic and labor history while blurring the boundaries between bottom-up and top-down histories. By showing a diverse amalgam of connections between urbanization and social belonging, our panel contributes to new understandings of racial segregation, social inequality, urban renewal, housing provision and urban citizenship in the twentieth century.