Do direito à cidade ao fazer-cidade. O antropólogo, a margem e o centro

Abstract

In this article, I define the anthropology of the city as an ethnographic exploration and reflexive understanding of the situations, places and movements that "make the city". City-making is the means for the instauration of the "right to the city" in the here and now. According to this view, certain polemical or, perhaps, minority practices (invasions, occupations) attain a radical sense from a theoretical point of view, since they give birth - from the edges, the frontiers, the precarious, the empty and the disorder - to a desire and a demand for a dream city, whether virtual or real. The movement of city-making is incited by an absence (in the claim that "the city is dead") and driven by an intangible image, a lost myth, a horizon. In this context, and according to a general principle of relativity, the anthropology of the city neither produces nor refers to any normative definition of the city per se, but conceives it as the continuous movement of its own construction and deconstruction.