Periferia e senso comunitário: o bairro Carapina em Governador Valadares/MG na contemporaneidade

Abstract

The protagonist of this work is the Carapina neighborhood, located in the city of Governador Valadares/MG. The general objective is to investigate self-organization in this area, as a community, in terms of collective organization; the specific objectives are: to investigate Bairro Carapina from its historical-territorial formation to the present day; to interpret Bairro Carapina's sense of community and part of its identity, then to get to know sociability and highlight some representations of leadership. The methodology adopted was documental, bibliographical and included field research, developed through semi-structured interviews. With regard to the main theoretical contribution, we highlight the studies focused on: centralities with Frúgoli Júnior (2000); Santos (2006) on the division of labour; Santos (2013, 2018) through the analysis of unequal urbanization; D'Andrea (2020) for his contribution on the historical retrospect of the Brazilian "peripheries" and Piccolo (2006) on the "lacks" of space. With regard to the sense of community, Venâncio and Portilho (2020); Simmel (2006) and Frúgoli Júnior (2007) on sociability, Magnani (2012) on contributions to urban anthropology; Cunha and Rocha (2020) on collective memory; Tuan (1974, 1983) on topophilia, Hubner (2021) on the aspect of interactions between subjects and Faustini (2020) on interpreting leadership figures in peripheries. As a result, the field research revealed that a sense of community is a kind of link, a "mainspring" that connects residents and the community. It was concluded that, in fact, the sense of community makes it possible to move a large part of the socio-spatial dynamics, since collaboration reflects the scenario of solidarity between one resident and another, either because it is a legacy that has passed down through generations, or because it is a gesture of altruism and kindness, or because it is a biblical teaching or because of necessity, although the residents said that this link is somewhat weakened in contemporary times, due to the improvement in the quality of life of the residents. Consequently, interaction is also linked to the sense of community, as it corresponds to the process of materializing exchanges and mutual aid, and sociability is even imbued in this arrangement, with leadership figures, even if they don't reaffirm themselves in this role. That's why we realized that the major theme of community sense is broken down into others such as identity-sociability-leadership. Therefore, it is hoped that this work can contribute to the development of possible public policies, promoting interventions in the neighborhood, such as improving the quality of life of local residents through social projects that promote critical reflection and the exercise of citizenship by Carapina residents.