A self-managed task force and the context of the democratic experience revisited

Abstract

This paper is about the trajectories of the residents of a housing estate on the outskirts of Sao Paulo made by a self-managed task force. This task force occurred in the context of the democratic experience of the 80s. The hypothesis is that the forms of sociability and the trajectories of these residents, influenced by the discourse of autonomy and participation, are called into question: on the one hand, the possibility of invention, of the production of a house through an autonomous action and, on the other hand, the permeability of that experience to a certain sociability enclosed by the limits determined from outside and inside the its own set. To this end, we made a series of interviews and tried not to lose sight of the context that determines a reduced field of possibilities. This perspective enables one to collect not only the action of these movements, but also how the poorest of the city are organized to confront this social inequality produced in urban areas.