This essay provides an overview of urban issues in Brazil from the point of view of the construction of a national order that accrues for the organization of urban space and their dilemmas concerning the issues of dwellings. We tried to investigate the construction of an ideal of nation and which are the desired features for the composition of this national order, that is constituted as a factor of Brazilian identity. We looked support in the Brazilian literature, used in dialogue with scholars who are dealing with the question under historical and social focuses, through works such as O cortiço, by Aluízio Azevedo (1890), Capitães da areia, by Jorge Amado (1937), and the shot story "O cobrador", by Rubem Fonseca (1979). These fiction works allow us, in specific historical moments, to verify how the matter of social exclusion in the country was handled, and as we had, gradually, an increase of those considered undesirable in the share of the construction of an urban order and of the idea of a nation.
city; literature; social representations; order