Seeking Other Urban Possibilities: Community Production of Space in a Global South City

ROLDÁN, DIEGO; GODOY, SEBASTIÁN

Journal of Peer Production

University of Canberra

Lugar: Canberra; Año: 2018 p. 1 - 12

2213-5316

Accumulation by dispossession is one of the driving forces of the flexible economies that emerge in the context of political decentralization and ascent of local governments. They quickly abandoned old communitarian ways to adopt strategic planning and corporate governmentality. Urban configurations have been impacted by the modulations of a political economy that places real estate market as a field for the development of prosperous business. Supported by local governments, investors and developers stimulated the process of both recycling and substitution of the industrial city?s infrastructures for those of a post-industrial city. These new configurations show strong urban contrasts, disconnections and incompatibilities between the fragments affected by renovation and the areas left to disinvestment. In part, this tendency in the interplay of forces that organizes what some have called neoliberal city is based on fragmented processes of renewal trough gentrification. This global tendency led to neoliberal urbanism as a path with no alternative. However, on a material level, this urban restructuring had to deal with and eradicate some alternative ways of life and production of the city. Also, on a symbolic level, it had to erase the traces of those experiences in order to establish the inexorability of its project, which sought to commodify the city by fragments, without dissidences and with full consensus.This work reconstructs, recovers and reflects on other possible ways of producing space through the hybridization of the trends of global urban development and some local cultural expressions. Its purpose is to contribute to the construction of models of urbanization that make participation something more that a subordinated inclusion, which aspiration is not to assimilate to dominate the other?s potentialities but to collectively produce a city as a ?meeting place? where its value in use becomes a priority (Lefebvre, 1968). Here we study the process of occupation, eviction, dispossession and concealment of two experiences of urban space production in a Global South city: Rosario (Argentina). We focus on the urban strip that has undergone the most transformations in the last twenty-five years: the Paraná waterfront. In that coastal space, the trajectories of two collective subjects will be analyzed. The first looks to the future, leans on the cultural production and is inspired by movements of resistance to the new capitalist governmentality: the okupas (Argentinian squatters). The other is linked to the traditional universe of both production and relation between man and environment: artisanal fishermen. Despite their differences, both communities presented alternative ways of producing and imagining urban space, brought up the need to generate differences around the corporate tendencies that commodified the city, its culture and its ways of life. They also collectively came up with new forms of producing, learning and sharing knowledge, in order to strengthen their self-organized communities. Trough their practices and everyday resistances, they showed alternative possible paths and futures in a genealogy and cartography of the urban present.