In the disputed city, production of daily life, territory and conflict in squatted buildings

Abstract

This article investigates, through ethnographic research, different urban and political dynamics articulated and produced by a squatted building maintained by organized movements in downtown São Paulo. Three dimensions are analyzed: daily life, territory and conflict. The observation of daily life enables to understand the squatted building as a powerful gravitational field around which networks and circuits orbit, integrating and creating a political cartography. Both the gravitational field that is created with the squatted building and the political cartography produced by the gravitational field compose and configure a territory, which, in turn, is also crossed by conflicting forces marking the disputes that make the city.