Feminising Urban Dialogues in Four cities in Brazil, South Africa, Tanzania

Abstract

In this presentation we want to discuss how feminising and race urban struggles shape the relations with State through participatory institutions such as housing forums, councellers, government institutions. We'll put in dialogue four cities - Salvador/Brazil, São Paulo/Brazil, Johannesburg/South Africa, Dar es Salaam/Tanzania - where we have been visiting to exchange political experiences and social technologies tha organized women use to produce urban peripheral territories. We'd like to present a knowledge exchange results of encounters with those directly involved in everyday urban production and care in the territories – with relevance and potential impact beyond the academic environment, such as in the social, technical, economic and cultural realms. We aimed to construct new critical feminist epistemologies through analytical framings that consider intersectionality, transdisciplinarity and diversity about gender and identities in space production. In the encounters we faced similarities and different advocacy strategies from each social movement we visited in each city. So this work aims to present the resulting reflections about women empowerment and theirs strategies to transform territory. Contradictorily, we saw State producing different forms of (gradual) dispossession due to forced eviction, as well as their associated struggles, insurgencies, (re)constructions and potentialities. Also the practices of collective care and circuits of solidarity as a response to different forms of social, political and spatial marginalisation and we think these practices shape spaces that women occupy.