Práticas e processos de produção do espaço urbano: descentrando perspectivas

Abstract

This essay opens the dossier "Practices and Processes of Urban Space Production: Decentring Perspectives" and takes this tension as a premise. The classical perspective that apprehended and analyzed the city as a terrain of civil progress, of the development of human potentialities, or as a stage for the reverberation of "modern" suspicions and fears, has lost sight of a series of urban life experiences that have accumulated and developed in the peripheries of global capitalism. These experiences are marked, on the one hand, by the colonial past, and therefore by the effects of transatlantic slave trade, massive desterritorialization of people, slavery, genocide, and racism, which historically interconnect the "North-South" and "South-South"; on the other hand, by the persistent legacies of this past, which hinder the resolution of contemporary problems such as segregation, inequalities, lack of infrastructure, problems in urban-environmental regulation and management, etc.