Políticas do urbano na contemporaneidade: experiências cotidianas em uma feira natalense

Abstract

The current master dissertation aimed to investigating some expressions that the experience displays in the scenario of the city, especially those that take the everyday scenes of an open street market in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte. In the experiments carried out in the heart of the city, the research also attempts to discuss the reverberations of urban policies currently affecting the capital of Rio Grande do Norte in its daily functioning. Thus, we selected the open street market of Alecrim (Feira do Alecrim), which takes place in a homonymous neighborhood, in the east of Natal. This place is listed as an important and traditional neighborhood, and its open street market consists of the most traditional in current operation in the city. This study is composed by an ethnographic inspiration and relied on the composition of narratives and images as research tools. Using experience as an operative concept and, mainly, based on the propositions of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, the research constructions discuss the connection of people in the spaces and practices related to the open street market, which is credited with promoting to the support of popular tradition in the city and to strengthen the dissemination of its spaces as public ones, by introducing diversity into the urban scenario. In the same fashion, based on proposals made by Michel de Certeau, everyday minutiae are inventoried by which the city operates, using its spaces of diversified, creative and multiple forms, regardless of life and urban territory management devices, demarcated in attempts to regulate disorder at the open street market. In these everyday experiences, inventive and astute ways of resisting prescriptions and regulations are forged in the different ways of doing an open street market and being a marketer, or in the plurality of relationships that take place there, making the nets of the open street market and the city the places of multiplicity and creativity, expanding the possibilities of expression and occupation in/of the city.