No encontro da vida cotidiana, novas descobertas em bairro e vida de bairro

Abstract

The present thesis considers the social-spatial dynamics that historically constructed the neighborhood of Nova Descoberta in Natal, Brazil, from the second half of the twentieth century. To make it possible, the thesis addresses the relation between the neighborhood construction and the neighborhood´s life, and supports itself in the theoretical-methodologic basement created by the french philosopher and sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, that proposes a vison of an urban social life that uncover into the neighborhood as a privileged fragment of a social life core, only understood in its city relationship. The thesis starts from the following question: how to include the differential space, thought by Henri Lefebvre, into the analysis of the neighborhood and neighborhood´s life from the study of the Nova Descoberta reality? And it raises as hypothesis, the claim that the existence and the reality of Nova Descoberta district is determined and only explained by the simultaneous and contradictory movement of its conceived, perceived and lived space. The thesis constructs an analysis of Nova Descoberta as a differential space, produced by the convergence and simultaneity of different logical and dimensions that uncover into its space production and bases itself in the study of the quoted writer about the neighborhood, the everyday life and the urban social life, as well as his regressive-progressive dialectical method that proposes spatial-temporal analysis of the confrontation between the modern life, the past and the possible, affirming itself as a qualitative research, based in interviews, in loco observations, images capturing, public agencies consulting and in old empirical scope registers. Walking through research tracks that helped us to understand the formation of the district in the city, we show the process of consolidation of the initial cores of occupation of Nova Descoberta and Morro Branco, and we face the construction of an institutionalized perceived and lived neighborhood from the networks of living that support the individual and collective memory, the notion of belonging and the residents’ consolidated identity of the living space in the city. In this context, the new discoveries realized confirmed our hypothesis that Nova Descoberta as an official part of the city can only be understood in its totality, as a concrete spatiality, as institutionalized unity and as the core of social life. In other words, as a product of simultaneous and contradictory dynamics of production of its conceived, realized and lived space that allowed the perception of the neighborhood as a differential space. This finding, allowed us to affirm that the current institutionalized district of Nova Descoberta presents two different social-spatial references: Nova Descoberta and Morro Branco, that points to a coexistence, sometimes conflicting, between the official and the everyday neighborhood, where one does not negate the other, but adds itself to each other as part of the same reality. Finally, the paper highlights the possibility of inhabiting the neighborhood as redemption and reaffirmation of urban social life, contributing to further studies on the relations between neighborhood and town, daily life and urban social life into the city currently.