O Bairro 2 de Julho, centro antigo de Salvador-BA: a dinâmica dos conflitos em torno do espaço urbano

Abstract

This work is the result of a 4-phase research on “urban development” through description and reflection on how social agents appropriate and interpret territorial dynamics. For that, I analyzed projects from public and/or private instances that focused on the 2 de Julho neighborhood, in the Old Center of Salvador, and the forms of urban resistance existing in Vila Operária Coração de Maria (VOCM), a space for housing and sociability in 2 de Julho, from 2000 to 2019. In the first phase of the work, I carried out a bibliographic research in the scientific literature on concepts such as "urban illiteracy", "biopower", "necropolitics", among others that guide the investigation and that also gave bases to the theoretical foundation; the second stage corresponded to documentary research with the collection and analysis of various types of documents, namely: photographs, files from printed newspapers or on electronic sites, letters, magazines, documentaries, official documents; the third stage was directed to intense fieldwork with participant observation and semi-structured interviews that allowed (along with the concepts), among others, to produce fragments of life stories. Next, I analyzed the dynamics of conflicts related to urban space when different social agents interpret and appropriate categories (“revitalization”, “requalification”, “rehabilitation” and “gentrification”) from the re-signification of such concepts in the practice of their speeches, which illustrates a gradual process of gentrification of the neighborhood associated with the concept of necropolitics.