Understanding Bottom-Up Territories of Culture in Unequal Cities
Abstract
‘Contestation’ is a term often used to describe various kinds of conflict in 21st-Century urban
areas. Yet Urban planning literature lacks a cultural approach to such resistance — an oversight
that this paper seeks to redress. We argue that the concept of ‘contested territories of culture’
plays a key role in the informal construction of urban areas, highlighting them as heterogeneous
drivers of ‘contestation’ and the fight for rights in Latin America’s inequality-riven cities. The
authors use two methodological approaches to define said ‘contestation’: (1) contextual analysis of
the literature on the concept of ‘territories’ to discover their cultural character, and (2)
ethnographic analysis of a case study on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The example of the Realengo
Flyover Cultural Center, a cultural appropriation of a leftover site under a flyover on Rio’s
outskirts, shows the complexity of improvised, bottom-up squatting through cultural activities. The
study reveals the need to understand these territories in order to draw up more equitable public
policies and urban plans. It also highlights that such territories are both culturally rich and
socially vulnerable.
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