Da Desigualdade Social Nos Espaços Públicos Centrais Brasileiros

Abstract

Resumo As ciências sociais dedicadas à desigualdade social nas cidades brasileiras ressaltam o papel que a distribuição residencial dos grupos sociais no espaço urbano tem exercido na produção e/ou reprodução das assimetrias de posicionamento social, com a aceleração da globalização econômica desde a década de 1990. Mas o que ocorre em espaços receptivos à diversidade social como a Praça da Sé, em São Paulo, nos dias úteis da semana? Submeto dados etnográficos registrados em 39 tardes de segundas e sextas-feiras úteis em 2013 ao prisma metodológico dialético e fenomenológico lefebvriano e goffmaniano. Busco responder como e por que o uso que os pedestres fizeram corporalmente desse logradouro então pode interferir na (re)produção da desigualdade social na São Paulo desta segunda década de século XXI. Virão à tona, assim, seculares desigualdades comportamental-corporais e morais.

Espacios públicos y fragmentación socioespacial, reflexión teórico-empírica sobre Río de Janeiro

“…Não obstante, na virada do século XXI, o tema dos espaços públicos passou a ocupar um lugar de destaque. Estudos sobre o convívio da diversidade (Páramo et al, 2021), especialmente, em logradouros públicos centrais (Barros, 2016;López & Vieyra, 2021), demonstram como muitos espaços públicos, apesar das novas formas de controle e restrição (Andrade, Jayme & Almeida, 2009), continuam sendo utilizados por públicos diversos (Fernández, 2014), conferindo visibilidade à grupos e indivíduos que, geralmente, são invisibilizados (Robaina, 2011), excluídos (Frehse, 2016a(Frehse, , 2016b e marginalizados (Sposito, 1993). Nesse contexto, é crescente o número de pesquisas que reflete sobre o papel fundamental que os espaços públicos desempenham na suscitação de debates diversos (Valverde, 2018).…”

Relational space through historically relational time – in the bodies of São Paulo’s pedestrians

“…Hence, adjustments are necessary – and a methodological combination with Goffman’s conception of ‘rules of conduct’ becomes possible. Given this article’s limits, my choice for developing the theoretical issue at stake in Lefebvrean terms is to analytically concentrate on one specific empirical dimension of the body relations on which I have been working in ethnographic terms regarding particular places of downtown São Paulo from 2013 to 2014 (Frehse, 2013a, 2013b, 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, forthcoming; Frehse and Vidal, 2016). I mean the rules of what I call body conduct by pedestrians in this city’s public streets and squares in these two years, i.e.…”

“…A second alternative would be to resort to structural principles of class. My field notebook contains many allusions to the body idiom attributes of non-passers-by indicating a material deprivation of goods; and at least to poverty in the economic sense of the term (for details see Frehse, 2016a: 140). Furthermore, since the 1970s São Paulo’s downtown has been a space for work and housing by economically poor population sectors amid an urbanization process that brutally restricts the economic and social opportunities for those who live far from the city centre, where land rent is lower and poverty prevails (Frehse, 2014: 257).…”

“…Furthermore, since the 1970s São Paulo’s downtown has been a space for work and housing by economically poor population sectors amid an urbanization process that brutally restricts the economic and social opportunities for those who live far from the city centre, where land rent is lower and poverty prevails (Frehse, 2014: 257). However, on the one hand, the body idiom of the non-passers-by reveals social positioning asymmetries that were (re-)produced among such pedestrians, although they were all materially poor (Frehse, 2016a). On the other hand, if structural class categories may help to explain why non-passers-by frequented Praça da Sé, then they do not explain why this presence was mediated by this specific rule of body conduct.…”

“…The second section, in turn, presents a peculiar methodology for addressing the issue based both on Lefebvre’s regressive-progressive method, which this author developed in order to cope in operational and conceptual terms with the relations between historical time and (body-) space, and on Goffman’s phenomenological approach to the rules of conduct in situations of verbal and non-verbal interaction (1963, 1967, 1970, 1983a, 1983b). Indeed, this has helped me in analytical terms in the framework of wider documentary and ethnographic researches on the everyday ‘bodily’ experiences of pedestrians in the São Paulo downtown streets and squares from the early 19th to the 21st centuries (Frehse, 2005, 2011, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, forthcoming; Frehse and Vidal, 2016).…”