SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND URBANISM

COVERGENCES AND DIVERGENCES

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between urbanism and urban social movements over the past fifty years. This paper presents the hypothesis that, in the context of Latin American city, the main challenge for these social movements was to bring the planners to find solutions to a problem that had not been resolved in Europe: the habitat of social groups without permanent labor links, then presenting differences with issues typical in terms of the worker’s habitat. Analysis of this trajectory in Recife, on the basis of founding documents of urban interventions, shows that the juridical and political achievements have not been accompanied by major innovations in the field of urban planning techniques. These gave priority to technical and functional conceptions until the appearance of strategic urban planning, as the mainstream of urbanism. Nowadays, great projects are guided by the vision of urban competition. This guideline seems to break the continuity of the social urban struggles which were so characteristic of the situation some decades ago.