The Mooca district: urban revitalization, social and spatial segregation and social memory

Abstract

The aim of this project is the analysis of the relations among urban renewal, socio-spatial segregation and social memory in a deindustrialized area. The region of interest, placed between center and outskirts of the city, is the Mooca district. It is one of the first territories of the city industrial modernity, which occurred in the turn of the XIXth to the XXth century. For the last two decades, this district has been the subject of urban dynamics that look for the recovery of its past - its ruined or abandoned urbanism and architecture, as well as its cultural manifestations, tied to its ethnical formation, national and labor identities. These dynamics involved revitalization and preservation projects implemented by the State, the real estate, companies, civil society and multipartite organizations. We look for the meaning of the practices and discourses of these different actors in the occupation of these old terrains, either for living, consumption of leisure. We will also study the various forms of appropriation and processing of the past used by these different forms of occupation, and how this past is frozen in material and immaterial heritage, and its relation with the social memory. Other important point will be the process of creation of new forms of socio-spatial segregation and/or the reproduction of old ones by these processes of occupation and appropriation of the past, as well as their connections to urban gentrification. Finally, we will focus on the ways that these constitutive conflicts of the urban space and their negotiation tactics build or not a democratic public and political agora. (AU)