O direito à cidade

THE CITY IN BRAZIL "THE RIGHT TO THE CITY" The sociologist Robert Park has written the following: "The city is the most consistent and, in a general manner, the most successful attempt of humanity of remake the world it lives in according to its heart's content. But, if the city is the world humanity has created, it's also the world which it's henceforth doomed to live in. Thus, indirectly and without having any clear notion of the meaning of its task, when making the city, humanity has remade itself.

The right to the city is, therefore, much more than the right to the access of one individual or one group to the resources the city incorporates: it's the right to reinventing the city according to our hearts' content. Moreover, it's a rather collective than individual right, since the city reinvention inevitably depends on the exercise of collective powers over the urbanization processes. The freedom to make and redo our cities is one of the most precious, though neglected, of our human rights.

" If they try to knock you down Don't let them, don't let them You let them, you hit the wall And wiggle, and pull the strings And find your ways If the key isn't on the keyring Break the gate down And saw off the bars of this cell made of pain and darkness In helplessness, the amperage of revolt is a thousand volts The blood temperature pumping is a thousand degrees And withstanding pressure is the work of a hero But if Zumbi is us It's no longer personal So talking is cheap, I know This isn't a sermon That the choice shrink If there's no choice That the way fork And blur the vision But the guide is in the chest It's called heart Get everybody together to add up And there's no more me, him, you Now it's us Because only together that stupidity is fought Cry out to everybody Against helplessness And the shortage Goes to the streets, the asphalt Shout "Out, Temer! There's no scapegoat for coupists" It's many ideas coming But we need To set in motion Aside from the money We need the drive Strategy and tactics For nobody yet Has found the magic formula And we need to let go of the past Bury the hatchet Turn the page Overcome the binary system Expand the vocabulary Mould victory in the biggest dispute Which is for the imaginary New light, new actors New director, new scenario For there's no use in denying The new age has come It's real And it's called Aquarius. And if this is just poetry And the chest won't stop bleeding If words are just words And the pain won't stop If it's like a jungle And it makes me wonder How I keep going from under Hit the play on Stevie Wonder And let the wheel spin This certainly relates to questions which are specific to Brazil, in its present moment, but also with a kind of world zeitgeist.

"Zeitgeist" is this German expression which means the spirit of time. 66 00: 05: 08,433 -> 00: 05: 12,906 The spirit of time today points to springs, to Ocupaz, to activist movements, citizens who claim transformations in the city. So, from this point of view, the Brazilian movements participate in this idea.

And the early years of of my professional life were very oriented to this idea of ​​future. And I see now, when. .

. these people who had just been born when the Berlin Wall fell are getting active, intellectually and professionally, how their world is really different. The present is something very important.

How to transform this place, which is an expressway, into something cool, funny, I'll have a barbecue here at Minhocão and in the middle of Avenida Paulista, and it has to work well as a public space while I'm there. It's OK that in three hours there'll be cars passing here, but now it must have. .

. This brings extremely radical challenges for the discipline of urbanism. Urbanism has been consolidated as a discipline, as middle-to long-term interventions.

We need to take sanitation, take public spaces, make master plans, which are processes that will last for ten, 15 years to take effect. But the young people now don't want to know about getting involved in anything that will last for ten or 15 years. I want the city I can use, a city I can enjoy, where I can recognize myself in now, and I'll do whatever it takes to do this now.

In ten years, I don't know where I'll be, then I'll see what my challenge will be. I think the Brazilian society has historical difficulty with the concept of public sphere, it's a trait of our history, Brazil was a colony until the 19th century, Brazil was a slave trader until the end of the 19th century. And then Brazil entered the 20th century, developed, industrialized, retaining traces of segregation from colony times and slavery, unfortunately.

The name given to this, in sociology, is patrimonialism. What does patrimonialism mean? It means the practice of dealing with public affairs as if they're private.

This story, which is a social one, it has an evident consequence in the city; evidently, we don't have public spaces. Brazil has rehearsed some civility in the early 20th century, which was later sacrificed. That's something we must notice and expose.

São Paulo, again, as an example. Dom Pedro Park was a wonderful park. What's left of Dom Pedro Park?

Nothing. We look at the map and that's still named Dom Pedro Park. But that absolutely doesn't exist anymore as a park experience.

It's surreal that it has the name Dom Pedro Park on a thing that's an aggregate of highways, of viaducts and pieces of grass and weed with grids, etc. So Dom Pedro Park is one case, Praça da República, Jardim da Luz, there's a number of public spaces that were worthy. Marechal Deodoro Square was beautiful.

Nowadays it's Minhocão, a leftover, a surplus. Brazil has developed in a patrimonialistic way, from the urban perspective, it rehearsed some more cosmopolitan urbanity at a certain point, which was entirely destroyed throughout the developmentalism of the 20th century, fully endorsed in the years of military dictatorship. The city of São Paulo is very crazy, because, at the same time it hurts, it gives pleasure.

We kept thinking: "Why don't we have more pleasure than pain? Why don't people let us have pleasure, more pleasure than pain? " I think they're the arteries of our body.

When we cut a vein, we see ourselves bleeding there. I think São Paulo is bleeding by the periphery, the corners, the streams, the alleys, the passageways. It's where São Paulo bleeds, where São Paulo vomits, everything it drinks, all its arrogance, it vomits on us.

I see São Paulo like this, sad, arrogant, necessary. It's as if we had, the whole time, to ask for permission to come in, to be able to be happy, to be able to walk these streets, which our parents and grandparents built. It's as if it let us walk by giving us concessions, not out of attachment to freedom.

I think São Paulo is this, it's very weird, it looks like Brazil, the micro looks like the macro of Brazil. When I see ourselves say, "The colonels of the Northeast," I wonder, "Wow, but does it have more colonels than in São Paulo? " This here's not a protest.

Our fight is much bigger This here's not a protest. Our fight is much bigger We've been hearing a lot about the right to the city, in the past few years, and this idea already appears in the 1960s, it appears as a tax idea of ​​the student movements of 1968, and it changes. In the 1990s, the idea of right to the city was much approached in a universalization perspective of what the city has of good, what good the city has to offer us must be enjoyed by all.

And, in the last few years, the idea of right to the city has been revisited once more, it's been treated as an idea of the right to being in the public space and building the public space in the city in my likeness. Messy and never combed hair! Messy and never combed hair!

My hair is natural. . .

My hair is natural. . .

The right to the city are many things, it transforms as time passes. It's important our knowing of what the right to the city we're talking about, they're all good, the more rights, the better, but they're good in different ways, they answer different problems and also bring different challenges. It's been almost 21 years I've been using a bike as a means of transportation, I go from home to work by bicycle.

I find it wonderful what's been going on as a worldwide phenomenon. I think we must invest increasingly in that we already know, that the city is for people, not for automobiles, for the capital. People are much less dependent on cars than they were until some years ago.

And look what a funny thing, I spent some time in Curitiba just now, and I almost got ran over six, seven times in a week, because I walk, I cross the streets, I cross at a place where the car is leaving a garage with a degree of confidence the people from Curitiba don't have, people are afraid of cars, they respect them. This I've learned here in São Paulo, we need to face the cars, this is a daily war we have against them, it's the cars that must wait for me. I find it amazing to be able to formulate this question, and in my city, a city we've fought for for it to be like this.

Hi, my name's José Renato Bergo, I'm a videomaker, am part of the cycle city, and a cycle activist here of São Paulo. The proposal is as follows: that everybody shows their cycle way structure, or, actually, our cycle way structure, where we cycle, where we go to school, where we go to work, where we take a stroll with friends, anyway, we show the importance of this segregated space. Hello, I'm Adriana.

Two and a half years, I changed the car for the bicycle, and ever since I've done all my commuting by bike through the city. I'm here where Henrique Schaumann crosses Sumaré, I cycle by here every day, it's my countryside way, there's no bike path, and here I'm a victim of the same kind of attitude every day. I either am educationally closely bumped or am so violently cut that I'm forced to perform a radical maneuver and jump onto the sidewalk not to be crushed by a bus and a car.

I'm 36 years old, the bicycle is my means of transportation. I've always rode the bicycle in the city, but, after the bike path implementation, I've felt confident enough to carry this here, Catarina, two years old, and Sofia, five. I'm just here to say that we're going to resist.

We hope the city hall, the secretary, all qualified people I believe to work inside this city hall will see there's no reason to remove the bike path. Go to Belo Horizonte, go to Curitiba, go to other cities that haven't gone through this process of pedestrianization, then we understand how we've got this by force. I'm not saying that we're succeeding in solving this in all the aspects of our society in Brazil nor that the achievements are irreversible, rather that, in this particular aspect of urban mobility, we've managed to turn the wheel, we really have, I guess.

The city for the people means your living close, from your house's doorknob to the classroom's or the place's where you work at, you’re spending up to 20 minutes, preferably on foot, or by a non-motorized vehicle, a bicycle, but, of course, by public transportation, preferably on rails, because it organizes the city, it gives it dignity. It's important that urban rails are stimulated. Especially non-polluting means of transportation.

The tram, for example, and the real subway. The biggest issue we have here, even due to São Paulo's geographic dimension, is urban mobility. If we think that a youth coming on a train from Itaim Paulista, from Ferraz, from Suzano, the path he is traveling, there's both a social and a visual contrast, from his point of view through the train window, this is also a formation process that he can also access these spaces.

We're talking about the right to the city, the right to the territory, and this should be from a reciprocal point of view of society too, both this youth who accesses downtown, this gives another political context of formation, and these people who're used to living downtown, they should also move, go into the periphery, understand what the context of the periphery is and what these people think. "TAGGERS" The real vanguard is in the peripheries, and the periphery phenomenon's a terrible, cruel one, due to the imbalance of Brazil's city networks, we have very few municipalities in Brazil, by the size Brazil has, we should practically have five times that number. At the same time, the metropolization phenomenon of cities in Brazil is hard evidence of social injustice.

This phenomenon of downtown and periphery, which is very cruel, this downtown-periphery perverse pendulum will only be overcome thanks to the sophisticated action taking place in the periphery, which are the vanguards of the cultural artists' collectives and the struggle movements for the conquest of the place architecture, for the collective construction of their place, of cities' social spaces. I, for one, live in the city of São Bernardo do Campo. On a central square there, every Tuesday, there's even had activities yesterday, there's a hip hop crew, they get together every Tuesday, because they call it a battle, and they begin producing, on the spot, among themselves, without music, without anything, only through talent and speech and composition.

I'm the undeclared war in the vision of a slum-dweller Now you see who gives the message And now you won't represent the State Because it's not. . .

it's here I'm proud Go have fun Because for you seeing us is curious Only now You'll get sad And for you here there won't be any guesses About time, I think you started it Because this way you're rhyming In easy mode But easy there That you're just a boy I'm back and forth already From the extermination field I believe that you Can't challenge Because you're weak And now I have to say Your level is on the floor But you've never seen. . .

I've never been of extermination But I've learned to spank But the dove here can't land You see this is the reason And it already stops you There won't be information There's no information Because it came from you If it'd come from me There'd be aplenty For me to demonstrate And pay attention, you For you're weak It's the dove of peace So I'm of peace, opaque It's a causeless faction You get deceive in this Look at this here This is the youth of attitudes You got this ribbon And your mind The vocabulary limits It limits, pay attention I do poetry And I just keep the love from my heart And my mother is there praying For me while your rhyme Has just come to an end This, downtown, gathers several tribes, it's a space for the youth, created by the youth, not by the public power. In the public authority's absence in creating leisure and cultural opportunities, the population itself creates its own spaces. This wealth is what keeps the human and social relations so alive in the cities.

"Cinema na Laje" (Slab Cinema) takes place every other week, that is, alternatively. A partnership with Zé Batidão. We call the people showing the movie; we say, "Do you want to show it here?

" I think Cooperifa's already got respect for some people, who say, "It's interesting, show it there. " We call producers, actors, directors, to talk about movies, discuss cinema. The place where we discovered that, at the age of 60, there were people who'd never gone to the movies.

In a country called Brazil, there were 60 year-olds who've never been to the movies. It's a country where 60 year-old who's never been to the movies and watches it for the first time on top of a slab is a country that doesn't have a business license, it doesn't have a permit to be a nation. Isn’t that so?

I remember when I arrived at the black balls, in the late 1970s, early 80's, I couldn't wait to get in there, for I said: "Here's my place, here's my country. " Sometimes I have things to do over here, to this side, I can't wait for Itapecerica Road to come around the corner, Campo Limpo Road, for me to feel safe. This is very crazy.

And I'm not mocking anyone, no. I'm saying it's a passion. I don't need to speak badly of downtown to say I like the periphery.

For me, liking the periphery is already enough. And I'm not against it, I'm in favor of it, I've never done anything against it, against whites, against anything. I do this in favor of what?

Of our people, from our crew, of our literature. Sometimes some European comes wanting to visit the slums in Brazil. You take them there, and it's amazing how amazed they get with the culture of that place, and shape the way people relate to one another and how it's so different from their culture.

I remember that once I went to a slum, which isn't so big, with a group of Englishmen. Imagine how amazed they got. They entered the slum, there were those small goals of wood, and the children were playing ball.

Then they saw their happiness and said, "But why do the children play here and don't go to a field, a court? " "Because there's no field, there's no court. " "Wow, there's no basic sanitation here.

Wow, it's all energy hotwires here. And why are people happy? " If I think from my door inwards, it's all solved.

My mother, a maid, has got some structure, has a cool refrigerator, a cool sofa, a bedroom, a television, although it's all been paid in 70, 36 installments, anyway, this is our planning line. . .

My concern is how things are from this door outwards. There's no basic sanitation network, no education, no structure at all. And if I say there's no culture, I'll be contradicting all this I've just said.

What the periphery has the most is culture. But the managers, the mayors, the governors have. .

. from my point of view, there's a political and prejudiced shortsightedness, which is believing that culture has to be taken to the periphery. On the contrary, I think you must strengthen the local structure.

"ELECTRICAL BODY" Your being gay, lesbian or transgender in the contemporaneous city, a position that may even be extremely uncomfortable, is a possible position in relation to what it could have been 50 years ago, or that may still be today in a small town. Therefore, the big city is seen as a place where you can find your clique, your tribe, those things you talk about city. In everything that concerns identity, finding one's groups, the possibility of life, I'm very optimistic about this, I think the city is getting more and more receptive to this.

I think these are new agents, new characters the urban scene is receiving, and I think it's very important there to be such manifestations. It's difficult to say to what extent these manifestations can't be channeled by, let's say, more institutionalized forms of social representativeness. This may be over bureaucratizing these negotiation processes of conversation.

And it's clear that the spontaneous manifestation is a legitimate and very important field for the interests and the prospects and, above all, the needs to be clearly exposed. And thinking the city from this point of view, how can we change it, doesn't only depend on you, doesn't only depend on the others, doesn't only depend on myself, it depends on the willpower of all of us, this has to be a universal idea of change. Everyone is fighting their specific fight.

But what is our problem again? Our problem is changing the concept of State. Why are these people fighting these specific fights?

It's because there's either segregation, or discrimination, or there is a lack of public policies, or the three of them. These populations get together by affinity, by necessity, but they need the instrument to understand that the struggle is much more general than simply that specific fight of theirs. MY LOVE ISN'T YOUR FETISH I think we're also going through a time of purification, of acknowledgement, you know, "I didn't know you were gay, didn't know you were black, didn't know you were poor.

" I think there's a time of our recognizing ourselves as people, as people who're fighting against this whole system oppressive, violent that. . .

amputates our dreams. There'll come a time. .

. Because these languages, somehow, in the periphery, they're already talking. I think from up there we are also left without reference, we're used to always having those same people saying, "Now it's this, now it's that.

" And maybe now it's also a time to get empowered, revolutionize, those who want to change the world that they have the courage to start with themselves. I think we've now started looking a bit inwards too, self-knowledge started thinking, because we've got where we are by following the others so far. But I find it amazing that this will happen.

And it's not too far, no. It isn't too far, no. The social networks have shown this.

It's not too far from our recognizing ourselves as people and fighting against who doesn't like people. THE CITY IS OURS. SEIZE IT.

. . .

"Ocupe o Estelita" is the solution . . .

"Ocupe o Estelita" is the solution -Resist -Occupy -Resist -Occupy Recife doesn't need you! Why did you stop? Estelita doesn't need you Fucker mayor Contractors' doormat Fucker mayor Contractors' doormat Fucker mayor Contractors' doormat Fucker mayor Contractors' doormat Everybody's going to need education, they'll need health, public transportation, they'll need all the services the city has.

The construction of this narrative of the city we want has in the whole of this construction the specific struggles, but they're necessary, yes, the instruments that point to this more general struggle, because each one's fight's strong, but the fight of everybody together is much stronger, these are the ones that have the power of transformation. It's these various struggles, together, that can create a narrative of the city we want. THE ORCHARD ISN'T MINE.

THE ORCHARD IS OURS. COMMUNITY ORCHARD MEETING FROM VILA POMPEIA WELCOME TO THE OWLS' ORCHARD. It seems that one of the most looked after ways, in recent times, to reinvent the right to the public space crosses not only the major manifestations, the right to the street, the will of life along with this common good, that's of the city and that puts us in front of this conflicting field, impregnated with noises, misunderstandings, disturbances, has oftentimes organized itself in a cooperative field, which reinvents some basics of living.

It's in the community orchard, at the parties in Minhocão, in the cinema by Masp's span. It has a beauty that has been. .

. carefully built in this joy of living along, which, on the other hand, brings a certain. .

. caution, for me, which is also very typical of our time, as if all this living along occurred either by large claiming manifestations or by situations of partying, joy, happiness, life in the lived time of softness. There's something that still seems to need some fine tuning.

And this looks like a fundamental crisis, which is giving back the right to some quiet, to some silence, the place of melancholy, the place where living along is also becoming sad, or at least being moved or allowing that a funeral procession passes in front of you without your needing to demand it to be interrupted or run over. This moment in which sometimes the place of convalescence or of the deeper sadness requires you to find a small home, not a large square, not a sunny bench, the one in the shade, in some dusk. .

. that allows you to enjoy life's outcry without having to be crossed by its movement. I have the feeling that we must also find this measure.

Our goals when intervening in the city should have the idea of ​​a city ​​that is for everyone, like the horizon, like a utopia, like a dream, because, like Florestan Fernandes used to say, we must dream of the impossible to make the best possible, but, at the same time, we must know what our horizon of possibilities is here and now. And the immediate horizon of possibilities here and now is never that of producing the city for everyone, but, indeed, that of being able of producing for a few more people, just a few more, and, in a few years, an even few more. Since I can't get everything, what can I get now, what is possible to interfere with and focus in now?

I see the youths as the ones in better conditions of answering this problem than my generation when it was young. I think the great virtue of the city is living with the differences, and, along with them, building a place with environmental urban quality that fosters the collective and individual well-being. The major discussion is in the scope of the infrastructure of mentalities.

All the hardships we have in terms of financial resources to make physically spatial infrastructures possible, of basic sanitation, sewage treatment stations, tunnels that need to be built in parallel to rivers, all this is very difficult, but even more difficult is our investing in the infrastructures of the mentalities that are within us. Urbanism needs to answer this question, because more and more our town. .

. our society, and this comes much from the youths, but the youths are an indicator, these youths, in 20 years from now, are going to be elderly, be 40, be 50, be 60 years old, I'm not a prophet, but I think they'll keep wanting this city of here and now. Urbanism as an essential school subject it'd be wonderful, even because politics comes from "polis".

The word "politics", it means, in Greek, the exercise of the city. Politics is, in a way, citizenship, your exercising your citizen role. Polis is the city, then, don't forget there's a congenital link between city and politics.

And finally, we have to do the true one, people call it the urban reform, but it's a revolution really, because the cities. . .

and the urban reform is a part of the urban revolution. Because I, at least, understand as urban reform assuring all the infrastructure, public services and public policies the population needs. Now, the urban revolution is much more than that, for it encompasses the revolution of the city and of the person, and we'll only be able to get the city we want when we modify ourselves too.

It's about transforming in depth, reinventing urban life. . .

reimagining and recreating the daily life of cities, the daily life of all of us. In other words, it'll be necessary to assume, we'll have to assume, explain and deepen the democratic power of the city. BREAK THE CHAINS.

PLANT SEEDS. IF WE GET TOGETHER, THE DRUG WAR WILL FALL.