Urban conflicts in Medellín and São Paulodevices, courses of action and regimes of engagement towards the right to the city

Resumo

This thesis seeks to understand how the actors involved in urban conflict situations interact in order to change urban practices. It also analyses if these interactions have the potential of strengthening the right to the city, in its radical perspective. The focus lies on urban conflicts in Latin American cities, as the continent presents a challenging scenario of urban growth and inequalities, which increases the possibility of conflicts that emerge – amongst other reasons – from the imposition of urban policies. Combining two theoretical lenses – the right to the city and the sociology of public problems, part of French pragmatism – an analytical framework is developed to help make sense of conflictual urban situations. Such framework sheds light on the following aspects: the problematic situation; its publicization; the publics that form the public arena; the courses of actions taken by them; and the different engagement regimes that coordinate the actions of such publics. Having in-depth case studies as methodology, the displacement of two neighborhoods in Medellín and the displacement of three blocks in São Paulo are analyzed as urban conflict situations. Fieldwork was conducted in an 18-month period, resulting in two comprehensive corpora formed by interviews, observations and documents. A deductive and inductive coding process was undertaken, and critical hermeneutic principles guided the analysis. The thesis advances in four contributions. The first is the development and application of the hybrid framework for the analysis of urban conflicts. The second is the identification of devices and courses of actions from the perspectives of different publics involved in urban production. It is from these devices and courses of actions that the interactions amongst the actors emerge. Some of these interactions strengthen the assumptions of the right to the city: the collective struggle, the political learning, the bottom-up idealization, and the relationships with the intermediary public. On the other hand, courses of action in the opposite direction were identified, such as the narrow view of participation; the individualization of rights; the exclusion of non-rational or legal modes of interaction; and the exclusion of the public arena, fostering the individualization and commodification of the problematic situations. The third contribution is the identification of the temporal and emotional dimensions of the problematic situation and how they affect the public arena. The last is the the delineation of a colonial common world as a crucial component of urban conflicts in Latin America: the decolonization of urban practices is crucial for achieving the right to the city.

Ficha do documento

Tipo

Tese

Ano

2020

Instituição

Fundação Getulio Vargas

Fonte

Repositório da FGV

Idioma

Inglês

Acesso

Acesso aberto

Identificador

oai:repositorio.fgv.br:10438/29058

Temas

Planejamento Urbano

Palavras-chave

Urban conflictsRight to the cityPragmatismSociology of public problemsColonialityConflitos urbanosDireito à cidadePragmatismoSociologia dos problemas públicosColonialidadeConflictos urbanosDerecho a la ciudadColonialidadAdministração de empresasViolência urbanaSociologia urbana - São Paulo (SP)Sociologia urbana - Medellín (Colômbia)Cidades e vilas - Aspectos sociaisProblemas sociais