Notas sobre la transformacion de la significación cultural del espacio vivido

RODRIGUEZ MARIA CARLA

San José - Costa Rica

Simposio; Ciudad, cultura y procesos de segregación urbana-II Congreso ALA; 2008

Asociación Latinoamericana de Antropología

In this paper I analyse the role played by the cultural significance of the lived space in the discursive and propositive constitution of ?the right to the city?. My work is based on the experience about cooperative self-management, collective property and mutual assistance acquired by the CTA?s Movimiento de Ocupantes e Inquilinos (Squatter and Tenants Movement, Argentine Workers Central Trade Union), that arose in the central areas of Buenos Aires severely affected by trends that deepen urban socio-spatial segregation (Barracas, San Telmo). Participant observation and a socio-semiotic analysis of in depth interviews integrate an ethnographic register in which ?inner? and ?outer? glances combine tensely, due to my double condition of intellectual researcher and militant member of that Movement. The paper shows how the reorganisation of everyday life within cooperative practices develops new reflexive competences and mobilises affections that make the re-signification task possible. The cultural dispute entails reconfiguring the cultural significance of the space forged in the experience of transformation of its uses at different scales (project or group, micro neighbourhood, urban) and displayed in the abilities to act and to exercise the right of speech ?and of learning how to listen- in the urban socio-political scene. The ?construction? of the ?right to the city?, together with its vocation to re-enact what is universal, emerges in this way as from the transformation of everyday life as a distinctively cultural product; i.e. a complex task of exchanges and translations; a milestone in the political dimension of social organisation and its contribution towards the re-creation of the public sphere. Right to the city ? lived space ? self-management.