Elisa VERDI, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil
The construction of a Critical Urban Geography in Brazil involves reading the work of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. More specifically, at USP, this reading is located in the study group coordinated by prof. José de Souza Martins, from the Sociology Department. This group spent almost 20 years (from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s) reading works by K. Marx and H. Lefebvre, arguing that the latter would be the central extension to the 20th century of the work from the first.
However, it is worth differentiating the reception of the Lefebvrian thesis from overcoming an absolute interpretation of space in Brazilian Geography, which occurred at USP, before the group mentioned above, beginning in the second half of the 1970s. That overcoming is pointed out in the theoretical construction that space is a social production, present in the dissertations of Ana Fani A. Carlos (1979), Amélia Damiani (1984), Odette Seabra (1979), and Sandra Lencioni (1985). These pioneering works for Brazilian Critical Urban Geography walked in the same direction, building reflections on the contents and contradictions of a socially produced space.
For that, the authors used theoretical instruments of historical materialism to interpret the organization of space, distancing themselves from a perspective that analyzes space only by its superficial forms, considering it as a stage or receptacle for human activities, and thus not revealing the actual processes and social relations. This process led to overcoming the so-called monographic research, which comprises phenomena in isolation and not in a contradictory relationship. The proposal was to think about the totality of reality, a procedure requiring understanding multiple relationships.
This path led to the consolidation of the analysis of the production of space due to the relationships established between society and space, a historical product of the continuous transformation that results from the development of social relations.
Mots clés : Henri Lefebvre|historical materialism|Critical Urban Geography|University of São Paulo|production of space
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