PRAXIS (Social Practices in Urban Space) is a CNPq research group, hosted by the Department of Projects (PRJ) and the Graduate Program in Architecture and Urbanism (NPGAU) of the School of Architecture, UFMG, with projects funded and/or supported by Fapemig, CNPq, Capes, PRPq and ProEx/UFMG, Ford Foundation and FUSP.

Since its creation in 2009, the PRAXIS-EA/UFMG group develops research, extension and teaching with a critical perspective about the relations and forces that constitute the practices of urban space production, with special attention to the action of urban planning and design, but working at the interface between these two fields and in the construction of transdisciplinary dialogues with other fields, including geography, sociology, economics, law, history and psychoanalysis.

We consider the assumption that urban space is a structured and structuring medium that carries a set of information (social, economic, cultural, territorial, environmental and political) that is presented through practices, therefore, born from the structural features of society and the strategies employed when agents make choices, take decisions or fight for individual and collective interests. The aim is to embrace theoretical, methodological, empirical and propositional approaches, constituents of critical transdisciplinary thinking, in different aspects of research on the contemporary city: (1) conditions of production processes; (2) instruments, mechanisms and languages of representation, interaction, reading, intervention and existence present in (self) constructed territories; (3) socio-territorial networks; (4) system of exclusion; (5) state-capital association.

Specifically in the interface between the field of planning and urban design, we adopt a theoretical and methodological alignment interested in the articulation between the analysis of power relations that structure the practices of planning and urban design and the analysis of external determinations coming from the economic, political, cultural, environmental and institutional fields, with two objectives: (a) to understand the crisis of the neoliberal city model and the way the processes of entrepreneurialism and financialization impact on urban planning and design, including the relational analysis of major projects, urbanistic instruments and technical-specialist production; and, (b) to advance the reading of place and construction of a more just city through the practices, instruments and tools of analysis, representation and intervention in urban space.

Site: https://praxis.arq.ufmg.br/

PARTNERS

  • City and Housing Network (IPPUR/UFRJ, PROURB-FAU/UFRJ, PRAXIS-EA/UFMG, LabCidade/FAUUSP, Instituto Pólis/SP, PUC/SP, IAU/USP, Peabiru/SP, UFRN, UFC, UFPA)
  • Human Rights Network UFMG
  • International Social Housing Network (Federal University of Minas Gerais, University of Kent – UK, University of the Free State – South Africa)
  • Citizenship Poles / UFMG
  • LabCidade and Observa SP / FAUUSP
  • Movement of Struggle in Neighborhoods, Villages and Slums (MLB/MG)