The govern of conflict in the production of the contemporary city: the case of São Paulo

• Grant number: 15/05639-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: April 01, 2015
• End date: December 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Urban Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Vera da Silva Telles
• Grantee: Evelyn Moreira Januário
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 13/26116-5 - The govern of conflict in the production of the contemporary city: the case of São Paulo, AP.TEM

Abstract

Based on recent urban changes that have been occurring in the State of Sao Paulo (Capital and selected Municipalities), this research project aims at investigating the different links that might articulate the govern of urban spaces and populations, the emergence of security technologies and the creation of market opportunities. It intends also to elaborate a political cartography of the new configuration of conflicts that takes place in these urban spaces. The analysis will focus mainly on the trend towards the adoption of increasingly militarized strategies of governing urban spaces perceived and constructed as risk spaces. These strategies are closed related to the expansion of the social and penal control nets and the use of legal measures of exception. In order to comprehend the new dynamics that shapes this trend towards militarized urban strategies of govern, the work will research the main changes that take place in the informal and illegal sectors of the market, the patterns that informs the operations of urban interventions and the effects of the policy of mass incarceration in these urban spaces. Taking into account the previous patterns that have been shaping Brazilian social control practices toward the adoption of recurrent military strategies, this study will try to emphasize the contemporary face of these processes through the mapping of the connections between these historically rooted practices and the emergence of an urban militarism ofa new kind. From this point of view, it seems important to highlight the challenges that these processes of reciprocal reinforcement between the old and the new - both local and global - might mean to the political reconfiguration of the urban landscape as well as to the resistances that they might trigger off.