Dos trabalhos coletivos aos coletivos de trabalho: uma experiência agroecológica em uma ocupação urbana

Abstract

The contemporary city in the logic of capital accumulation, has been produced in a segregated form, preventing most of its population to access housing. The urban occupations are emerging as a way to stand up to this problem. Here, we do not summarize housing in the dwelling standards. In this study, housing must be understood as social space of everyday life reproduction, which overflows and dynamically reshapes the boundaries of what is private, of what is public and what is common in a given territory. In this research work, which comes from the knowledge accessed and produced in my militant experience in movements centered in urban space, I seek to contribute to the debate about development of urban agriculture and agroecology. In particular, I am interested in the collective actions of groups that engage in social demands of families facing the struggle for the right to housing and to the city; in particular, those families who organize themselves in urban occupations. The collective ‘Agroecology in the Periphery’ is one of these groups of facilitators and challengers; a set of individuals who acts in order to work the city in their ecological, productive and inclusive dimensions, for believing in urban agriculture and agroecological practices as a real alternative to the promotion of quality and sustainable life in large urban centers. As a result of this relationship and method of intervention, a project of a group of residents of the occupation Tomas Balduíno emerged: the construction of a community/grouped vegetable garden, case that will be deepened in this dissertation. In this work, I intend to guide the analysis to how the process of constitution and emergency of that productive groups is done, in this relationship between external actors and residents of occupations; and how these impact on the lives of the conjunct of families and, also, how the fact of being inserted in this context interfere or reverberates in its constitution. The organization of the collective work observed shows clues of how to walk towards the necessary approximation of the productive dimension, which in capitalism is centered on the accumulation of surplus value, and the reproductive dimension of life, which in this regime is reduced to the reproduction of the workforce. In this way, it seems to us that the organization of the work observed in the constitution of the collective vegetable garden in the occupation Tomás Balduíno leads us, thus, to think about the possibility of an not-estranged work and of greater appropriation of the means of (re)production of life, or, in other words, the self-regulation of the forms-of-life by the residents of the occupation involved in this experience.