Exclusão socioespacial e a invisibilidade dos catadores de materiais recicláveis na cidade: o centro comunitário Maria Carolina como forma de inclusão e empoderamento

Abstract

SOCIO-SPATIAL EXCLUSION AND INVISIBILITY OF RECYCLABLE MATERIALS COLLECTORS IN THE CITY: THE CAROLINA MARIA COMMUNITY CENTER AS PATH OF INCLUSION AND EMPOWERMENT

This study derives from a strong and personal uneasiness which is increased by the great task of developing fairer, more inclusive and democractic cities (ODS 11) in such a unequal country as Brazil. A shift of perspective is then proposed: what desserves atention, but is invisible? Which inhumane realities have been trivialized? How to revert the breaking up of the urban community and the privatizing of society’s welfare? What is a sustainable city? This study leans on the idea that the social function of the land needs to be claimed in a immediate and collective manner, and that this mouvement is an essential path for the emergence of participating and well-organized communities. This perspective could be associated with the lives of the waste pickers, a community that serves as an example both because of their fight for the right to the city and because of their capacity of group organization as a means of gaining strengh. For this reason, the waste pickers became the key element of this study. This study seeks to understand, through theoretical research, the urban experience of this marginalized goup, so to be able to propose an architectural equipment. The reasearch is mostly based on data ofered by the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea), on the work of authors as David Harvey, Deleuze and Guatarri, and on the book The Trash Room, by Carolina Maria de Jesus: a black woman who raised by herself her three kids and was a waste picker (paper) and resident of the Canindé Slum, in São Paulo, in the middle of the 1960’s. The project is based on the Social Urbanism, regarded that this line defends that it’s through the activation of the land potentials and the implementation of public policies that the path to a full human development and to the advancement of a full citzenship is established. Minded this context, it’s understood that community centers are a structure that allow access to opportunities of social development and to the creative urban reality. Hence, after the analysis of Uberlandia’s (MG) territory and taken into account the necessities identified during this study, this work’s goal becomes the creation of a urban centrality: the Carolina Maria de Jesus Community Center (CMCC) is designed bordering an already existing waste picker’s association, near to an important bus terminal. Furthermore, a green space project is planned for the adjacent square. Also, interventions were planned in the association’s area, after a comprehensive understanding with its members was reached. CMCC’s core objective is the enhancement of conviviality, the commom good, and quality of life, through a program anchored in qualification, art, education, health, and leisure.