Creating thresholds for exploiting the boundaries of ‘neighborhood-cities’: sensations and experiences of the young people who inhabit ‘Ciudad de mis Sueños’ [City of my dreams]

MARIA BELÉN ESPOZ DALMASSO

Gotemburgo, Suecia

Congreso; XVII Congreso Mundial de Sociologia. ISA; 2010

Some of the reflections here presented are the result of a doctoral thesis research which purpose is to investigate the case of ‘subjectivities and poverty contexts’, anchored within the category of ‘youth(s)’. ‘Ciudad de mis sueños’ -name given to a ‘neighborhood -city’ which is the result of a social habitat policy that has been put into practice since 2004 in the city of Córdoba, Argentina- is one of the symptoms of the current ‘strategic town planning’ that portrays the urban design decisions in Latin America. The local program “Mi casa, mi vida” [My house, my life] -among others- re-charted the profiles of the city of Córdoba, based in a social segregation strategy, where the couple body/class is constituted in the grounds that regulate the possibilities of types of sociability and experiencing of the young (intra-inter/class) and its subjective consequences. This new habitability condition occludes spaces, times, bodies and senses that are tied to a special symbolic weft, in a summarized chronotope in the name of that ‘‘neighborhood -City’. In this paper we will bring into operation two threshold states (Bajtin, 2006) as an opening of those tensions in order to read some experiences accounts of the young that inhabit that context: the first one related with the chronotope ‘district-city’ that is inaugurated by the analyzed Social Habitat policy. The second refers to both the chronotope ‘youth’ and the subjective and corporal inscriptions that occur in this background of exclusion-expulsion.