The Power of the Body in Public Space: The Urban as a Deprivation of the Right to the City

Abstract

This chapter is based on the hypothesis that space production is a central element to understand the modern world, both from the viewpoint of the cumulative process of capital realization and of the reproduction of social life, insofar as production of space is the condition, medium, and product of social reproduction in its totality. The transformations of the city today are marked by the contradiction between what is necessary to the reproduction of capital and what are the needs/desires of a society that makes the city a place of conflicts, since urban praxis continually restores the inequality resulting from the process of valuation that creates the city as segregation. In Brazil today, as in various parts of the world, we live a time of demonstrations in streets and squares (as a reaffirmation of the public space). They have been unfolding in struggles for the city fueled by the need to appropriate urban space for the accomplishment of another life (which is basically urban) where the deprivation lived by a significant part of society is overcome. Manifestations will be understood as the form with which the residues present in daily life struggle against that which imposes itself as hegemonic and is opposed to the realization of urban life.