Territorial and Cultural Conflicts in the Renovation of the Waterfront, Rosario (Argentina)

Abstract

This work studies the process of occupation, eviction, dispossession and concealment of two experiences of urban space production in a Global South city: Rosario (Argentina). We focus on the Paraná waterfront, the landscape of two collective subjects: the okupas (squatters from Rosario) and the artisanal fishermen. Both communities presented alternative ways of producing and imagining urban space and identified the need to generate differences from the corporate tendencies that commodified the city, its culture and its ways of life. They also collectively came up with new forms of producing, learning and sharing knowledge, in order to strengthen their self-organized communities. Through their practices and everyday resistances, they showed alternative possible paths and futures in a genealogy and cartography of the urban present. Through a combination of ethnographic and historiographical hermeneutics, we studied the practices of resistance to the governmental formulas of urban renewal.