Metamorphoses in the City and the Place of Collective Memory: What Challenges?

  • Abstract:

    The cities define, every day, focus of different transformations, movements and flows. Analyzing how urban and social changes that emerge, gradually, especially in urban historical areas, imposes the understanding of distinct vertices of components to all the elements not included in the territories of the urban mesh. We consider the phenomena of urban rehabilitation and regeneration that have gradually become part of the restructuring plans and strategies of several European cities, it is important to understand the set of more subjective impacts that are widely triggered. We speak clearly of the domains associated with social networks and local bonds of proximity, abstract apanages of the human network present in the central urban centers. The reflection presented in this summary derives from a sociological and qualitative and ethnographic study (2015-2016) about the impacts of urban rehabilitation on local social recomposition, focusing on Rua das Flores, located in the Historic Center of Porto. The dynamics associated with the sociabilities and daily lives of local social actors are profoundly adapted, under the urban transformations and the emergence of more diverse and international publics, as well as more dispersed. The fracture of social bonds and affective networks, especially in the street context, hitherto in accordance with the current standards, are anchored in a progressive substitution of practices of support and proximity networks, based on the logic of globalization and internationalization of spaces urban history. The subjectivity of the analytical elements thus requires a reflection on the local social impacts of urban rehabilitation, considering the affective and collective content of the social actors involved in the recomposition processes.