A Cidade do dissenso e da diferença

Resumen

This paper was presented in the Symposium Cities, Citizens and Citizenship in the Globalized Society, organized by the University of Porto Rico, in 2000. Its theoretical approach originally analyzed the transformation in the spatial representations of contemporary Western cities as cities of difference, in the context of American cities. This framework offers the possibility to also think about the situation of Brazilian metropolises. The claim for political acknowledgement of alterity must be seen as part of the practice of democracy and of the redefiniton of the role of citizenship and its important relationship to urban spaces.The argumentation is based on two contemporary approaches. On the one hand, the relationship between city and citizenship has to be reviewed according to the transformation of global geographic boundaries, and the traditional role of nation-states and cities in the definition of rights of membership. On the other hand, the exercise of a politics of difference must foster the revision of democratic participation, through the dialogic practice of dissensus which opens up a possibility to better problematizes difference in the production of urban spaces