Depreciative representations and space: notes on a case study

Abstract

The representations about the slum’s inhabitants as individual bearing certain attributes socially recognized as depreciative and discredited fall back into their living places. Through the groups’ characteristics the places are submitted to a certain classification. The system of available terms used to classify the ones who live in the slum – the dirt, the unemployed, drugs and theft – trace the limits inside one of the houses (“cortiço”) used as a living-place inside the slum. There can be noted a strong effort of separating, dividing the place and thus attributing to the “other” its negative characteristics. The places are made up by a system of representations which transcends their physical and morphological characteristics. By being used in order to classify the spaces of the house, the negative attributes constituting the depreciating representations related to the place build up and invent the various meanings of the spaces of the house inside the slum.