Sentipensar a cidade: crianças e futuros possíveis

Abstract

Starting from the premise that children can challenge adult-centric logics and offer new ways of thinking and making cities, this thesis aims to investigate how children “sentipensar” the city, a notion inspired by Borda (2009) and Escobar (2014), which considers the integration of thought and feeling in the process of perceiving and understanding the world. Simultaneously, the research also sought to understand how the interaction between the researcher and the children transforms the way the researcher herself perceives, thinks, and acts in the city. The study is structured through a journey that included the construction of heterogeneous times through montage (Jacques, 2020), connecting the history of the "child researcher" to that of the current researcher, highlighting the influence of personal and academic experiences and encounters with children in the investigative practice. The research adopted the cartographic method, which allows mapping children's interactions with the city to understand their narratives about the present and to imagine possible futures. Workshops were held in the cities of João Pessoa (Brazil), Mexico City, and Cuernavaca (Mexico), with João Pessoa being the main field of experimentation. In these workshops, children of different ages shared their perceptions through speeches, drawings, and body movements. The body emerged as a central dimension from the beginning of the workshops, guiding children's interactions with space and influencing their perceptions. Analytical categories such as city, future, and technology were invoked throughout the process, contributing to identifying clues about how children construct meanings for the spaces they inhabit and how they imagine them. The children's speeches, drawings, and body movements showed concerns with issues such as pollution, traffic, and safety, as well as speculative ideas like floating cities, machines that clean the world, and the coexistence between nature and technology. The main authors who supported the debates were bell hooks (2021), Haraway (2023), Hundertwasser, Kopenawa; Albert (2015), Passos; Kastrup; Da Escóssia (2009).