Narratives and collective practices for the right to the city

interactive projects at the periphery of Salvador

Abstract

In the tension of institutional urbanism after the City Statute in Brazil, with figurative master plans, advance of neoliberal urbanism and dismantling of social policies, several narratives of resistance and collective practices that expand the historical movements of claim and struggle for the right to housing and the city emerge in the last decade. The article focuses on these insurgencies, welcoming them as a sign of new interactions in the appropriation of the periphery territories. Preliminary results of an interactive project involving community and university for the implementation of an urban park in a peripheral housing area in Salvador, in Bahia, are used as reference. The consequences of the conquest of this public space are discussed, analyzed in the dimensions of tactical actions to expand the public sphere, in a collective project that boosts social and urban impacts. By bringing physical improvements of microaccessibility on a trail on the edge of the area of the future park, this initiative reveals, in addition to its immediate functionality for residents, a provocative impulse of proactive actions in vulnerable territories for the production of more inclusive cities.