Direito à cidade, colonialidade e território: a disputa pelo Cais Mauá, em Porto Alegre

Abstract

Brazilian urban planning is marked by land use practices that privilege certain places to the detriment of others, consolidating and deepening socio-spatial segregation; while privileged places have the support of municipal administrations, others who live outside the official and formal system of property are spontaneously established on the gaps of the state. The urban planning model in Brazil seems to turn to certain interests, which do not correspond to the fundamental directives of the juridical-urban order, founded on the principles of the full exercise of citizenship, the democratic management of the city and the social function of the city and the urban property. In this context, the traditional logic of the territory as a space of state sovereignty becomes insufficient in the face of the demand for rights that go towards a new conception of territoriality. The hypothesis of this thesis is that the territory is a concept that serves to immunize spaces necessary for the realization of claims that can not be privately appropriated, in the same way as it makes possible the claims of places and rights and must thus be incorporated to urban struggles for a democratic and inclusive city. Hence the concern to carry out a socio-spatial analysis of the legal phenomenon that responds in that the use of the concept of territory, taken in a geographical sense, can question the urban policy, its basic characteristics and the aspects of its implementation or violation, in order to create possibilities for the realization of the right to the city in Brazil. The research was carried out under the inductive method and the study case of Cais Mauá, the pier of Porto Alegre city. Its starting point is the analysis of a social fact, the city, from an empirical and transdisciplinary perspective. The theoretical reference that leads it is that of descolonial thinking, through the epistemic perspective that allows possibilities to break with paradigms and modes of thinking forged on a modern/colonial pattern of power. Finally, these premises are related to the methodological contributions of historical materialism to the realization of a critical approach that articulates thought and action in the observation of the social phenomenon as a historical process inherent to the object of study. The thesis is divided into three main moments: the first describes the construction of the urban space in Porto Alegre, culminating with the empirical analysis of the "revitalisation" process of the Cais Mauá; the second analyses the capitalist production of urban space and the corresponding geopolitical hegemonic tendencies, as well as conceptualizes and identifies the Brazilian normative framework of the right to the city, in order to answer the extent to which the production of space is determined by the need for circulation of capital; the third conceptualizes territory and, in view of the coloniality of power category, explores its potential for the realization of the right to the city. Having established the contexts, concepts and categories that are intrinsic to the investigation of the research problem, a descolonial approach is proposed in the construction of alternative proposals to the urban planning and the accomplishment of the right to the city.