Direito à cidade como lugar de Festa: afetos engajados no Parque Augusta, em São Paulo/SP, e no Parque em Rede Pedra de Xangô, em Salvador/BA

Abstract

This research addresses the right to the city in the Party dimension, as conceived by Henri Lefebvre (2001), the city being built by discontinuities and ruptures, by convergence and divergences of groups that are rivals in their love for it in the dispute of agendas that move between their use value and their exchange value. The Party, with a capital P, as the author puts it, implies the use, enjoyment, and appropriation of the city in its fullness, which thus provides affective and political relations in cultural practices as an expression of urban life. And the Party, here, is a strategy of struggle and resistance in defense of public spaces for meeting, leisure, contemplation, religious practices, preservation of material and symbolic values and political dispute: the party for the Party. Like large laboratories, the Brazilian cities of São Paulo (State of São Paulo) and Salvador (State of Bahia) presented two cases of struggle and resistance movements that transformed public and private spaces into municipal parks – Parque Augusta and Parque em Rede Pedra de Xangô, respectively –, demonstrating that the right to the city, in current times, present urban reform imperatives that go far beyond the demand for housing and urban services. The research presents a snapshot of how affective and political engagements took place to conquer public spaces, having Lawrence Grossberg’s (2012) notion of affection as a central theoretical reference, a constitutive force of articulation of desires and transformative forces. Through bibliographic research and interviews, maps of importance and affections were prepared with a view to understanding what mobilized the actors to engage. Social mobilization is presented based on the theory of José Bernardo Toro (2005), intertwined with the discussion of rationality and emotions by Humberto Maturana (1997). Finally, the struggle and resistance movements and the disputes evidenced are discussed from the perspective of Viveiros (2020), by transversal axes that bring the right to the city in the relationship between scales and mutual constitution of civil society and the State from interactions, articulations, convergences, divergences, and conflicts. This view is also made through categories that analyze the formation and articulation of agents; the construction of political ethical principles and the formation of collective identities; the arenas and disputes of agendas; and the lexicon dispute in urban politics. The results show that the shared imagination of a totally green park without buildings and overcoming racism and religious intolerance ancewith a sacred The Afro-Brazilian space being demarcated and preserved has become reality through the articulation of affections and desires factors who, in turn, putthem in articulation with the close and distantorder, exercise their rights to the city and the Party.