Territorial disputes and the collective resignification of the habitat. Notes on the production of the common from the case of Parque Esperanza, Cordoba (Argentina)

Abstract

Cities today are going through a process that deepens socio-territorial inequalities based on the advance of the spatial materialization of financial capitals and the appropriation of urban territories as a profitability strategy. However, diverse social groups dispute the spaces that this capital captures through collective strategies of resistance and by raising awareness, highlighting the dimension of “the common”, giving the exercise of the collective, the collaborative and/or community-based senses. This article aims at analyzing and interpreting the resistance of the residents who have socially produced their territories from the common in the face of expulsion strategies derived from speculative real estate processes, within the framework of the particularities assumed by this dispossession process in the metropolitan region of Córdoba (Argentina). In particular, we present the analysis of the Barrio Parque Esperanza case, which when faced with a process of judicial eviction from its neighborhood in 2018, has stood its ground for 14 months in a process of collective resistance and negotiation with the provincial state towards making the right to land and housing effective. The epistemological approach recovers the idea of the dialogue of knowledge proposed by the southern and decolonial epistemologies, since it seeks to recover the experiences from the perspective of the players in their own territories, looking to contribute with knowledge to demonstrate a specific social reality situation characterized by processes of fragility and, at the same time, with potential to boost the production of the habitat from the common.