Urban Centers and Social Resistances in the Cuiabá-Várzea Grande Conurbation

Abstract

The city creates an urban situation which is formed by the diversity of human relations and manifested through union, reciprocity, and social resistances. The formation of centers and centralities relies on the production of urban space and on the assembly of socially constructed elements. Due to the centralizing characteristic of the means of production and the products of work relations, the city and the urban enable the production of urban centers. The latter becomes more than a plain conglomerate of means of production once it acts as a place of resistance, acknowledged by the social centrality. Thus, this article addresses the processes of center production and social centralities in the Cuaibá-Várzea Grande conurbation. It highlights the speakers/residents"™ speeches and problematizes the loss of social centrality – the ludic, the collectivity and the social use. This article aims to: conceptualize centrality; identify the social production and the urban centralities in social practices (concrete and moving); understand the relationship between center production and life reproduction. The methodology consists of critic analysis and conceptual definition, cartographic production and semi structured interviews with urban centers"™ residents and social leaders. The main results of this research expose the precarious work relations, human life degradation, coercion of social resistances actions and denial of rights. The potentialities given by the linking of urban centrality to a possibility of popular management, collective appropriation of socially produced goods and the formation of an anti-capitalist agenda is herein approached.