O que é o urbano, no mundo contemporâneo

Abstract

Central concepts of contemporary life-politics, civilization, and citizenship-derive from city form and organization. The city expresses the socio-spatial division of labor and Henri Lefebvre proposes to think of its transformation on the bases of a continuum that extends from the political city to the urban, when and where it completes its domination over the countryside. The city's transformation into the urban was marked by the industrial takeover that brought production - and the working class - to that space of power. The city, locus of the surplus, power and the fiesta, a privileged scenario of social reproduction, was thus subordinated to the industrial logic. The city thus suffered a double process: its centrality imploded upon itself and its outskirts exploded upon surrounding areas through the urban tissue, which carried within it the germ of the polis and the civitas. Therefore, the urban praxis, formerly restricted to the city, has now re-politicized social space as a whole. In Brazil, the urban had its origin in the concentrating and integrating politics of the military governments that gave sequence to Vargas's centralization and expansionism and Kubitschek's developmental interiorization. Today, the urban-industrial process imposes itself virtually over all social space, along the extended urbanization of our days.

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