The Urban Pedagogy of the Festas de Agosto: Between the Sky of Ribbons and the Ground of Fences

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the 2024 Festas de Agosto in Montes Claros, Brazil, this paper examines how the city center becomes an educational space, revealing the urban pedagogies that emerge from festive practices. Between the shimmer of ribbons and the steel of fences, Praça da Matriz turns into a laboratory for learning coexistence, belonging, and exclusion. By contrasting José Guilherme Magnani’s observations with recent field notes, the study highlights the shift from a precarious square inhabited by the vulnerable to a revitalized, beautified, and surveilled urban landscape. This new configuration, shaped by an aesthetic of control, reflects what Adela Cortina calls aporophobia, while the festival temporarily reclaims the right to stay and to share the commons. The city thus appears as a symbolic field where both discipline and resistance are learned.