POWER RELATIONSHIPS IN CITY-MAKING: JOINTS AROUND THE REFORM OF THE ORLA OF RIO VERMELHO IN SALVADOR - BA (2015-2019)
city-making; power relations; neoliberal urbanism; right to the city; public place; Rio Vermelho; Salvador.
In this work, I investigated how the various actors in the city have articulated themselves,
sometimes establishing power relationships, to have their interests contemplated in the citymaking
around and from on the first stage of the reforms carried out by Salvadors’s City
Government on Rio Vermelho’s shore, which were started in July 2015. With this analysis, I
sought to identify possible paths towards more equal and democratic cities. I understand citymaking
as the movements and the results of the movements of the various urban actors,
human and non-human, who continually (re)conform the spaces of the city. I propose that
power relations in the city-making correspond to the actions (movements) of actors that aim to
inhibit movements of other actors in the urban spaces as well as the constant
(re)conformations of the urban spaces that also inhibit movements of some actors. I mainly
used the propositions of Agier, Ingold, Foucault, Latour, Esposito and Lefebvre to reflect on
the city-making and the power relations that are established there. In order to better situate the
data obtained in the empirical field of the research, I traced a panorama of the city-making that
took place in contemporary public spaces, which allowed me to verify, in such public spaces,
the use of neoliberal principles to guide the city-making for and by the market and the
resistances which were established against this orientation and which have tryed to expand
the right to the city. To carry out the fieldwork, I used techniques and instruments which are
commonly used in ethnography – such as direct contact with the field, participant observation,
notes in the field notebook, recorded conversations, photographs, reading newspaper news
and other documents, so that I have composed, in the text, an ethnographic inspiration
description of urban transformations – in this case, the reform of Rio Vermelho’s shore and
some episodes that followed it. I followed collectives that were mobilized around the reform of
Barra's shore, which preceded the reform of Rio Vermelho’s shore and which influenced it
significantly. I followed collectives that were mobilized around the reform of Rio Vermelho’s
shore and the negotiations established to modify the reform projects in order to contemplate
the interests of some actors. I analyzed the city-making instituted in the reconfiguration of the
formal aspects and of the materiality of environments after the inauguration of the first stage
of the reform, with eventual establishments of power relations. I observed collectives that were
mobilized after the inauguration of the first stage of the reform, bringing new outlines to the
city-making, with occasional establishments of power relations. The research allowed me to
suggest some attitudes to be maintained, with regard to the work of architects, urban planners,
public managers, as well as with regard to the actions of collectives and other urban
movements, to go towards better cities for all. The research also allowed me to verify that the
neoliberal urban project will never be fully realized – which does not diminish its perverse
character – and that the right to the city is not fully and comprehensively possible in the city
we know; such verification should not weaken, but should invigorate the need to invent new
cities in which democracy and equity are the rule.