Democracy and environment “the new territorialities”

Abstract

Not all territories live and cement in the same way. Where there is a history and a common memory, the permeability and transparency between the private and the public is imposed. In populations with a strong territorial identity differences do not scare; They include, they incite to become part of the space, it goes through it, it transits it, but it is also constructed and inhabited.

When memory of a common history is found, space is favored to witness the community’s power. We can say then that the cities where poverty exists are places of going and coming, but also of meetings and of citizen convergence.

In spaces with memory, there is always a gesture of recurrent citizenship among the people who celebrate, who claim the state or exercise their right to voice. The cities of poverty, rather than the squares or venues built up by social policies, are the agora where public opinion of the settlers is enunciated and exposed.

But neighborhoods can also be taken  to  intimidate,  to  confront  and  to  rape,  as  often  happens  with the peripheries, with the edges. In our marginalized cities, populations, especially those we call villas, find it difficult to establish, preserve and take pride in a common memory and history.

Eradicated from different places and thrown to the outskirts of the city (like the ghettos) its in-habitants can not recognize themselves in a common identity that empowers them on the territory itself. On the contrary, fear and stigma often settle between them, transforming the periphery into a place of dispute and measurement of forces. The villas converted into “non - places” (Augé, 1996).

The neighborhoods of the new poverty can become no man’s land. And when this happens, the power and cultural control over the territory is weakened. Power then becomes the force or violence and fear that these marginalized neighborhoods generate.  This is the case of villages with fragmented, fragmented histories in their isolation and discrimination. Violent neighborhoods in their dispute for a space in the city. Locked up in the fragile plot of the village, without partners except themselves, the exasperation of feeling abandoned by the state itself, soon becomes part of all, all young men, women and children.

In populations with a history and a common past, the city, the neighborhood, always have a tacit regulation, the conventions of what should and should not be done. Agreements of the living, of the good way, of the good relations. However, when such agreements are still fragile, as in villages without a history and an intense identity, the city rises as an open territory, where divergences and dispute over the terms of those alliances are put into play. It is there, where the violence and the disagreement arise interrupting the rhythm of the routine.

It is well known that the creation of a town constitutes moments of crisis and uncertainties. It is at this moment that the tension between the aspiration to a better quality of life and the difficulties that the context of poverty offers them is revealed. Along with obtaining a home, certainties, knowledge, old beliefs and principles enter a phase of insecurity. The tension and contradictions between neighbors who are barely known begin to feel and reside in the territory itself.

The town, a group of precarious, narrow houses, built on the edges of the city and determined without any participation, does not always conform to the expectations that the villagers brought.

It is then when manifesting and making explicit the projects themselves and aspirations becomes a necessity for each of the families.

Identifying territory, erecting boundaries, affirming one’s identity are becoming a practice that is not expected from each other to distinguish itself from what one wishes to escape: poverty and exclusion. Identity and territorial boundaries that finally weaken the possibility of the encounter and of an ingrained community. The hope of migrating from these villas is directly associated with the mistrust and the fear of its inhabitants who are trapped in the poverty of always. Forgotten in the margins of the city, the despair of its inhabitants ends up transforming them into nobody’s territory; In a space detached from all social reality. Staying before others, with different ones, other non-poor, is an experience that these settlers, segregated in the edges of the city, often do not know.

The town and the city thus become a space of intercepted dispute. The new towns and communities warn us that in a segregated city the coexistence in the difference is always ambivalent and risky. The identity with the territory must be organized with and despite the contradiction that installs the social distance of the alteridad. Si the sense of the urban plot is to close and delimit access to unpredictability; In the villages the limits of their confinement are asserted. Urban plot of poverty, without secrecy, or shelter, without plazas or wide sidewalks that invite  to  be  and  belong.  In the villages, the entrails of their streets seem to have been conceived for the control of all over all, to go and not to be. In spite of poverty, as nowhere else in our cities, the power of resilience is summoned, celebrated, discussed, but also vanished.