To think about urban history: building cities and environmental conflicts

construção das cidades e conflitos ambientais

Abstract

This article analyzes some features in the historical formation of a peripheral neighborhood (São Dimas) of São João del-Rei Minas Gerais. It reflects about conflictive processes lived by the neighborhood residents as they attempt do built the urban and environmental conditions of their territories. By examining the history of a popular neighborhood, more than describe peripheral urban territories building processes, we try to gathering concepts that contribute to frame this processes analytically. Among this concepts we emphasize “espaciality” as an intrinsic dimension of the social life, the relationship between the hegemonic forms of capital accumulation and the systematic production of urban peripheries and, last but not least, the strategies, conflicts and forms of resistance protagonized by residents along the (open or veiled) disputes that they have to face in order to reproduce thenselves in the urban space.