V!RUS is an open-access scientific journal (ISSN 2175-974X) published once a year by Nomads.usp, the Center for Interactive Living Studies of the Post-graduate Studies Program in Architecture and Urbanism, Institute of Architecture and Urbanism, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. It is currently ranked as A3 class by the Brazilian QUALIS system, on a scale from A1 to B5. V!RUS aims to be a locus of reflection and interlocution about contemporary topics related to the building, the city, and the society. It seeks to stimulate emerging ideas in various disciplinary fields, such as Architecture, Urban Studies, Design, Art, Cinema, Computer Science, Communication, Social, Political and Environmental Sciences, and Cultural Studies, among others, in a dialogue with Nomads.usp research subjects. The journal only accepts submissions in response to thematic calls, published periodically on its website, on social media and through emails to research associations, postgraduate programs, and researchers from Brazil and abroad. V!RUS Journal is an open-access journal. It only targets academic communication with no commercial interest and is shared under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Both publishing services and access to all published content are free of charge. The journal does not charge any fees for publishing articles or the services it provides, nor pays for contributions.
V!RUS 30 | MULTILATERAL DIALOGUES: PRAXIS, INTERLOCUTIONS, AND CONFRONTATIONS 30th ISSUE | 2025 | DECEMBER, 2025 Editor-in-Chief | Associate Professor Dr. Marcelo Tramontano, IAU-USP Adjunct Editor | Prof. Dr. Juliano Pita, IFSP Editorial Committee of 30th issue | Associate Professor Dr. Marcelo Tramontano, Prof. Dr. Juliano Pita, MSc. Lucas Edson de Chico, MSc. Pedro Plácido Teixeira, Arch. Ester Gomes, Arch. João Vitor Pereira, Arch. Amanda Soares Edition Assistants | MSc. Mario Vallejo, MSc. Isabella Cavalcanti, MSc. Thamyres Reis, MSc. Caio Nunes, Arch. João Iago Ferreira, Arch. Renan Teixeira, Arch. Bruna de Souza, Arch. Aline de Oliveira External Reviewers | The names and institutions of reviewers who kindly collaborated with us on this issue of V!RUS can be found on this page. Network and Server | Prof. Dr. Juliano Pita, Daniel Picon, Evandro Bueno Graphic Design | Associate Professor Dr. Marcelo Tramontano, Prof. Dr. Juliano Pita
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Multilateral Dialogues: Praxis, Interlocutions, and Confrontations
Multilateral dialogues: praxis, dialogue, and confrontations, the call for this thirtieth edition of the V!RUS journal proposes a reflection on this theme, based on two complex questions: How can we conceive a technical-scientific contribution to a multilateral world of increasingly multicultural societies in which the globalization of processes and products has accentuated practices of domination and power struggles in all spheres of life and areas of knowledge? How can we articulate differences, conflicts, and convergences, whether theoretical, historical, political, or cultural, through the simultaneous construction of reflection and action, ensuring the horizontality of dialogues and aiming at producing knowledge and social transformation?
Black People and a Five-hundred-year Silenced Dialogue
We present the interview Black People and a Five-hundred-year Silenced Dialogue, with the intellectual and activist of the Black movement, Casimiro Paschoal Lumbundanga da Silva, who discusses the historical impossibility of building dialogues between the Afro-descendant population, the State, and society, particularly in Brazil.
This text addresses the relationship between technology, sovereignty, and technodiversity. Among its objectives is to deconstruct the idea that technology is neutral, that massive data extraction is a path that must be followed at any cost, and that it is possible to develop independently of technologies associating with the native ecosystem of Big Tech companies. To this end, it draws on the key thinkers of socio-technical thought, from the emergence of cybernetics to the present day, and discusses the political implications of data-based Artificial Intelligence and presents important disputes surrounding the concept of sovereignty. It points to AI, data centers, and cloud providers as geopolitical instruments. It presents the perspective of digital sovereignty that enables technodiversity and the inclusion of other worldviews in technological development. This perspective aligns with the construction of multilateral dialogues related to data policy and the development of the AI ecosystem, within the scope of organizations such as BRICS, and confronts the imperialist position of the United States in attempting to impose on the rest of the world the business model and products developed by its Big Tech companies, increasing the dependence and subordination of countries in the Global South.
Fragments of 19th-century Rio: Misericórdia and its Thoroughfares
The Misericórdia neighborhood, located in the former freguesia (a historical administrative unit comparable to a parish) of São José in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, underwent profound transformations in its land use and occupation throughout its long trajectory, reflecting the social, political, and economic dynamics that shaped the city. This study focuses on the neighborhood and its streets, particularly during the 1870s, mobilizing a diversified set of sources — such as historical maps, images, news reports, advertisements, and excerpts from literature that address complementary temporalities and contexts — in order to shed light on the everyday life of the area through an approach that articulates both macro and micro spatial scales. In the second half of the nineteenth century, growing investments in urban infrastructure, combined with the exploitation of land as a source of profit, induced the subdivision of existing properties in the city center. The findings reveal a neighborhood characterized by a strong presence of commerce and services, marked by the coexistence of different forms of dwelling. By highlighting everyday practices and the uses of urban architectures, the investigation seeks to position Misericórdia as a strategic site for rethinking the city and its memories, while also demonstrating the potential of articulating primary sources in historiographical revisions aimed at recognizing actors and territories traditionally rendered invisible within Urban Studies.
The Repassos Exhibition and the Modern Interest in the Popular
The exhibition Repassos – Edmar and the Weavers of the Triângulo Mineiro was the culmination of a body of work marked by an accumulation of content and dialogues that confronted diverse theoretical-methodological, technical, and technological positions, presenting a stark reality of poverty that continued to reverberate across the following decades. The project presented at MASP shaped an investigation into the modes of making craftsmanship associated with a practice rooted in the region’s seventeenth-century colonial processes and which endured, up to the latter half of the twentieth century, as an expression of cultural resistance. Drawing on authors such as Lina Bo Bardi and her understanding of phenomena like pre-craftsmanship, this study aims to examine the exhibition as an opportunity for understanding Brazilian underdevelopment and as an alternative to both capitalist logic and hegemonic forms of modernity. The methodology articulated historical research and documentary analysis, combining ethnography with a technical study of making. The results indicate that, through the cooperative work between the artist and the weavers, a decisive opportunity was created for the preservation of knowledge and for interpretations relevant to contemporary theoretical debates, offering perspectives for the production of forms of knowledge committed to revising the structural hierarchies of Brazilian culture.
Yesterday, Your Future: The City Where I Am Today
In this photo essay, I retrace the steps of the 1995 documentary Retiro: two sides of the same neighborhood created by students from a school in Villa 31, one of Argentina’s most emblematic informal settlements. Shirley, one of the neighborhood's longtime residents, co-authored the documentary, which exposes the contrast between Villa 31 and its surrounding communities, capturing the edges and tensions where these two cities meet. Thirty years later, I record these exact boundaries. I aim to revisit the territory and engage in dialogue with the documentary, highlighting the settlement’s ongoing tensions and resilience amid attempts at erasure. My methodology uses walking and photography as embodied research practices, bridging time and creating dialogue between the present and the 1995 archive. Confronting images from the past and the present reveal layered meanings, showing how struggle has shaped the city and how the past continues to inhabit the present. This work connects to "Multilateral Dialogues: Praxis, Interlocutions, and Confrontations" by uniting tensions and diverse voices. It exposes disputes over how the city is produced and inhabited, and bridges perspectives and timescales, affirming the margins as active spaces of creation.
Female Guarani Mbya Vernacular Technology and Biodiverse Cultural Heritage
This article examines the vernacular technology of Guarani Mbya women’s architectural thought as a form of biodiverse cultural heritage and as a practice of resistance against architectural coloniality. It aims to foreground the concept of corpo-território [body-territory], in which nature, gender, and culture form an integrated system. To this end, the study departs from the examination of bamboo weavings used in artisanal practices and regarded as sacred, given their association with the myth of female creation. It analyzes how the imposition of hegemonic architectural models, particularly during the Jesuit reductions, erased ancestral construction knowledge and delegitimized non-Western modes of dwelling and cosmologies. The methodology is grounded in participatory processes conducted in Guarani villages, involving workshops and actions that integrate architecture, ethnobotany, anthropology, and gender studies, fostering horizontal exchange between oral and academic knowledge. The results demonstrate that bamboo weaving is not merely a material artifact, but a device of living memory and a political practice of cultural preservation. The research aligns with the theme of this edition of V!RUS journal by transforming historical conflicts into concrete, dialogical actions and practices. The work addresses the ecology of knowledges by articulating intercultural and insurgent dialogues, strengthening often invisibilized cultural heritage, and pointing to pathways for territorially rooted building practices in the face of epistemic domination.
The Epistemic Plurality of Territory in the Critique of Urban-Centrism
The centrality of city and urban as analytical, normative, and design categories has driven the standardization of models and problems in the field of Architecture and Urbanism, and conditioned spatial thinking to hegemonic and productivist logics. But how can we think about spaces and territories beyond the urban-centric bias and the categories that sustain it as an epistemological and design center? Debating Praxis, Interlocutions, and Confrontations, this paper articulates traditional and critical knowledge of the urban environment, aiming to confront the centrality of the city and the urban as hegemonic categories. The methodology is based on bibliographic review, case studies (Potiguara Indigenous Land and Paratibe Quilombo), and dialogue with dissident epistemologies. The results indicate that these territorialities challenge traditional urbanism by affirming practices based on collectivity, ancestry, and spiritual connection to the land. These experiences demonstrate that overcoming urban hegemonies requires multilateral dialogues between epistemologies, through a territorial praxis that articulates technical and community knowledge. It concludes that confrontations and interlocutions between different territorial rationalities constitute not only a methodological approach, but also a political and epistemic condition for pluralizing the field and confronting the power regimes that structure the coloniality of urban knowledge.
The Portrait Beyond the European Canon: Reinventions in Latin-Caribbean Art
In contemporary Latin American and Caribbean art, portraiture and self-portraiture become spaces of confrontation between identity and alterity, where artists rewrite visual histories and dispute regimes of representation inherited from colonialism. This article examines the strategies of Ana Mendieta, Firelei Báez, Leasho Johnson, Éder Oliveira, and Chiachio & Giannone, articulating visual description and critical interpretation through decolonial approaches. By observing how these works negotiate memory, body, and territory, the study highlights modes of producing subjectivities that activate interlocutions among different cosmologies, histories, and visualities. In dialogue with the theme Multilateral Dialogues: Praxis, Interlocutions, and Confrontations, it is argued that the analyzed practices establish sites of symbolic dispute in which cultural differences are articulated through tensions, frictions, and aesthetic reinventions. The methodology combines formal and contextual analysis, emphasizing how these productions subvert the Eurocentric paradigm of portraiture and propose visualities that confront structures of power, expanding the field of inquiry into identity and representation in contemporary art. The results indicate that these self-representational practices constitute critical devices capable of challenging Eurocentric representational codes and proposing new visual models for imagining identities and histories in the Latin American and Caribbean context.
Porto, between two Bridges: Images of a Space in Tension
This article engages with the theme of "Multilateral Dialogues" by exploring the tensions and interlocutions that define contemporary Porto (Portugal), a city emblematic of tourism-driven transformations. The study aims to present a critical and visual exploration of the urban tensions between the showcase city and the inhabited city. The methodology is an experimental praxis framed as a visual archaeology of the present. This praxis is based on an experimental urban walk that combines 360° video, smartphone photography, and 3D photogrammetry. The visual experiment adopts a reflexive "ethno-graphic" approach: the researcher's body is integrated into the image, questioning the stance of the observer as both tourist and critic, and serving as a primary site of interlocution. The main result is a visual essay that does not aim to document the city objectively, but rather to render perceptible the temporal, social, and material strata that constitute Porto's urban landscape. By attending to subtle details, ruins, and spaces, the study offers a situated reading of the conflicts, cohabitations, and (potential) resistances that shape the contemporary Western city. Ultimately, this work foregrounds the complex layering of life, memory, and commodification, revealing a space under the pressures of tourism-driven capitalism as a site of constant confrontation.
Teaching and Outreach: Housing Improvements in the Pequis Neighborhood
This article presents an university extension experience developed in the Architecture and Urbanism program at the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU), in the course Curricular Extension Activities – Integrated Project Workshop V (ACE – API V). The activity was carried out with fifth-semester students and consisted of preparing diagnoses and housing improvements in eleven homes in the Pequis neighborhood, a housing complex in Level 1 of the Minha Casa, Minha Vida (PMCMV) program, located in the city of Uberlândia, in the state of Minas Gerais (MG), Brazil. The objective of the activity was to propose design alternatives based on contact with the families' ways of living, identifying structural weaknesses and highlighting the importance of ATHIS as technical support for renovations and adaptations. The method involved technical visits, on-site records, qualitative observations, and the development of architectural proposals. The paper dialogues with the theme Housing and ways of living from the edition Multilateral Dialogues: Praxis, Interlocutions, and Confrontations, valuing the exchange between academic knowledge and the social practices of families, highlighting the encounter between the real demands of the territory and professional training. The results indicate that the activity favored the production of proposals accessible to residents, broadened students' critical perception of the social role of the architect, and strengthened a closer relationship with the community, generating impacts on the relationship between families and their homes.
Digital Challenges in Architecture and Urbanism: Video Games and Pedagogical Praxis
This paper presents a transdisciplinary methodology applied to the teaching of Architecture and Urbanism, which uses video games as a didactic tool to promote the incorporation of sensory and interpretative aspects of space, enhancing conceptual design instances. The research was developed within an experimental course in the Architecture and Urbanism program at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and proposes a new pedagogical praxis to build sensitive and ethical knowledge. The methodology articulates design practices with the interactive dynamics of digital games, anchored in the concept of Ambiances, and seeks to foster dialogues among different modes of knowledge production. The research objectives include describing the didactic experience, detailing the methodological procedures, and presenting the main results. The following results stand out: the affective reconnection of students with design practice; the development of a sensitive perspective on the subjective elements of places; the reaffirmation of architecture as a field of mediation of meanings; and the restructuring of ethical and moral thinking. By proposing a critical, multilateral approach, the paper contributes to the debate on praxis, dialogue, and confrontation in higher education, fostering social and academic transformation in architecture.
State-Produced Risk: Social Housing and Disaster Vulnerability
The intensification of extreme weather events in Brazil poses growing challenges to housing policy (HP), revealing structural contradictions in the State's actions. This study questions the role of public authorities in producing and perpetuating the exposure of Social Housing (SH) developments and territories to disasters. Despite the relevance of the topic, the analysis of Brazilian HP still lacks comprehensive investigations into the relationship between the location of these projects and socio-environmental vulnerability, remaining restricted to specific case studies. Thus, this article investigates, at the local, regional, and national levels, the relationship between state production of SH and exposure to disasters, with an emphasis on floods. By combining a literature review and a systematic survey of news reports, twenty-seven cases of SH associated with disasters were identified. The findings indicate that HP does not eliminate risks, but redistributes them, transferring the social and environmental costs of housing to the population. By highlighting the state-produced risk and the perpetuation of socio-spatial injustice, the study reveals the contradictions, conflicting conceptions, and divergent interests that shape public policies and the ways the city is produced. It demonstrates that, rather than correcting historical inequalities, housing policy reproduces them, consolidating exclusionary urban models.
Cities for Whom? Urban Life and Vulnerable Bodies
This paper systematically analyzes the spatial dynamics of unhoused people (UH) in Rio de Janeiro and New York City, based on research supported by FAPERJ and CNPq. The article explores and highlights the unpredictable, uneven experience of inclusion and belonging, which is undermined by the lack of rights and forced mobility. The methodology employed involves georeferencing UH through semi-structured interviews and photographic or drawing records. This approach, implemented in several neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro (RJ) and in Manhattan, New York City (NYC), enables more dialogue around the conflict and convergences in experiences across Latin and North American cities. The findings strengthen the spatial visibility of vulnerable populations, who remain part of the urban fabric while simultaneously facing systemic marginalization due to inadequate housing and planning policies. The findings demonstrate how UH communities form in urban areas, particularly in Rio de Janeiro, collectively constituting what we term as invisible city. The results also underscore the actors engaged in urban power struggles and the need for counter-hegemonic urban planning initiatives. With the support of David Harvey’s concept of the capitalist city, Anderson’s Affect Theory, and the framework of public dimensions by Lavalle, the collected data contribute to a realistic and forward-looking understanding of contemporary urban life.
From Colonial Gaze to Digital Visuality: Landscape, Power, and Collapse
This article investigates Landscape as a historical construction of power, in which cultural conventions are consolidated as natural expressions of the world. It aims to understand how the shift from the colonial gaze to digital forms of visuality both prolongs inherited hierarchies and opens pathways to other critical and poetic practices. The research is grounded in the hypothesis that modernity and colonialism remain interconnected in the technical and symbolic structures that shape contemporary perception. Methodologically, it combines theoretical analysis with interpretive readings of works that bring together art, technology, and ecology, privileging those that challenge the link between representation and control. The approach is interdisciplinary, integrating perspectives from philosophy, geography, anthropology, and visual arts, with emphasis on contributions from value-critique and decolonial thought. The results indicate that the digital gaze does not break with the colonial past but reconfigures it through algorithmic devices that regulate visibility and the production of meaning. In this context, art is understood as a practice of translation and confrontation between different forms of knowledge, capable of establishing dialogues between distinct cosmologies and techniques and of proposing other forms of relation among image, territory, and life. Such a perspective supports a praxis that unites reflection, sensibility, and social transformation.
Urban and Environmental Education as a Social Contribution
This article reflects on Urban and Environmental Education as an emerging social practice and political tool. It considers this field’s ability to connect technical-scientific knowledge, territory, participation, and social change, especially among children and youth. With origins in Architecture and Urbanism, this educational field examines issues related to cities, society, and the environment. It unites diverse knowledge and social roles. This approach encourages participant transformation by questioning established technical-scientific practices through more horizontal and dialogical actions. The article presents a strategy combining Affective Mapping and Urban and Environmental Education Workshops to listen to and engage students about their urban perceptions. The first uses forms for words or drawings; the second uses wish maps, memory games, and conversation circles. The discussion draws on concepts such as the social purpose of Architecture and Urbanism, educational territories, the Sociology of Childhood, and researchWITH. It aims to inform studies involving younger generations in debates on the built environment. The results show that Urban and Environmental Education—along with the chosen methodology—is vital for developing micro and intersectoral public policies that promote critical, city-focused citizenship.
Housing Financialization in Sharing Economy Contexts
Constructions of urban space in Brazil have been partially shaped by agents and sectors aiming to serve financial interests. Consequently, cities have become increasingly segregated and inequitable. This pattern of urban production is manifested through housing financialization, which was rooted in the 1970s onward. In this context, new economic dynamics with supposedly more sustainable purposes, such as the Circular Economy, the Sharing Economy, and the Creative Economy, have emerged, indicating the establishment of new paradigms in constructions of urban space. However, considering that the city is an object of dispute and interest, the entrenched logic of financialization in the production of space suggests potential tensions with these new economic dynamics. Thus, adopting a literature review combined with a critical discussion as its methodological approach, this essay aims to analyze the context of housing production resulting from financialization processes, contrasting it with the impacts of these new economic dynamics. As a contribution, this essay reflects on the tensions between the reproduction of inequitable cities in Brazil, embedded in new forms of housing production encompassed by financialization but presented under the guise of the sustainability agenda that has shaped many Brazilian cities.
Childhoods in the City: Tensions, Rights, and Inclusion Practices
This theoretical-critical essay reflects on how childhood is recognized in the production of the city and on children’s active role in transforming urban spaces. Drawing on Critical Social Psychology and on authors such as Milton Santos and Francesco Tonucci, it is argued that the right to the city must encompass children’s participation in the present, rather than rely solely on their imagined futures. Methodologically, the essay is inspired by Walter Benjamin, assembling a theoretical-critical montage to weave together fragments selected through close, critical reading of the literature. The invisibility of children in urban planning is discussed, along with play as a counter-hegemonic practice and strategies to enhance inclusivity for children in cities. Three fronts of action are presented as ways of expanding children’s protagonism: tactical urbanism, exemplified by the Mais Vida nos Morros program in Recife, in northeast Brazil; participatory budgeting, with attention to initiatives that meaningfully incorporate children into decision-making processes; and university outreach projects that bring academic and community knowledges into dialogue. The study's findings indicate that ensuring children's rights in urban environments necessitates a departure from hegemonic practices that have historically marginalized them. It emphasizes the importance of implementing inclusive public policies and acknowledging children as legitimate agents of social transformation. This essay contributes to the ongoing discourse on praxis, dialogues, and confrontations by elucidating the diverse experiences, knowledge, and agents involved in the production of urban space.
Between Images and Communicable Objects: Exhibition Space as Cultural Mediation
Drawing on the experience of doing-WITH solidarity kitchens, this essay offers reflections on the right to culture in peripheral communities through the participatory construction of two exhibitions. It describes an articulation among research, teaching, and outreach that united university actors and the communities of two solidarity kitchens: one in a peripheral area of Porto Alegre, southern Brazil, and another in an urban occupation in the city’s historic center. We present the exhibition design process as a dialogue among different bodies of knowledge that challenges dominant cultural processes. The goal is to share the experience and interpret the meanings that emerge from the challenges encountered during the development of the activities. This process was marked by recognition of the communities' political role and the intent to convert the exhibition space into a mechanism for cultural mediation and social transformation. The methodology was based on a participatory and collaborative process, supported by methodological tools that fostered interaction among diverse agents from the conception to the execution of the exhibitions’ proposals. In the process of composing this essay, we encounter successes, contradictions, and gaps, expanding perceptions that are fundamental to improving knowledge production and communication, as well as to supporting the kitchens in maintaining their own legitimate ways of producing culture.
Inhabiting the Common: Urban Poetics in Lefebvre and in the Theory of the Commons
This article stems from a research project that aims to identify the convergences between the Right to the City, as formulated by Henri Lefebvre, and the theory of the Commons, developed by authors such as David Harvey, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Christian Laval, and Pierre Dardot. Based on the distinction between habitat – understood as the technical-morphological configuration of urban space, often associated with private property – and inhabiting, conceived as a collective political and poetic practice, the article articulates these theories to critically reflect on their implications for the production of cities. A theoretical-comparative method of a critical-interpretive nature is adopted, aimed at identifying conceptual resonances and dissonances among the authors mobilised. The objective is to reconceptualise inhabiting as a poetic practice of the common, understanding the common – “a third level” that strains the relation between the public and the private – as the foundation of the right to the city and as a principle of a possible-impossible urbanity, expressed through collective and creative practices (praxis and poiesis). In dialogue with the theme of the call, the results indicate that inhabiting the common constitutes a multilateral horizon of emancipation, capable of challenging preexisting institutional structures and fostering insurgent forms of self-management and co-production of urban space.
The Dis-Re-Inhabiting in the Socio-environmental Disaster in Maceió-AL
This article presents a multilateral perspective on the conflicts between natural and built forces in a region currently experiencing what is considered the world's largest ongoing socio-environmental disaster, in the northeastern Brazilian city of Maceió, in the state of Alagoas, Brazil. The event resulted in the total or partial collapse of five neighborhoods in the city — Pinheiro, Mutange, Farol, Bebedouro, and Bom Parto — due to excessive rock salt extraction by the company Braskem. In seeking to understand the consequences of the disaster in terms of spatial (dis)occupation, the methodological approach adopted here is empirical, based on data collection (observation of post-disaster dynamics and photographic records) and a comparison between images, in order to identify landscape transformations caused by the forced displacement of residents from the affected areas. In this way, the article discusses the confrontations and insurgencies related to the disaster in the city, resulting in the recognition of persistent presences and traces of another way of inhabiting — whether through the vegetation that has grown, the writings on the walls left by ex-residents, the silence of the abandoned area, or the sound of demolition machines — highlighting the significance of the temporal and symbolic layers of this region in ruins. In this sense, we understand the disaster as a continuous process of territorial metamorphosis, in which presences and absences coexist. As a result, temporal contrasts are accentuated, and the relationships between space, time, and ways of life indicate the relevance of revising the concept of urban living. It is not only a matter of management but, above all, of sharing and coexisting in a more integrated way, through dialogue between beings (human and non-human) in different temporalities and within the same space, thus contributing to the construction of alternative
Case-Experience: Methodological Challenges in the Contemporary Metropolis
This paper aims to establish the case-experience method as a situated and critical alternative to the prevailing analytical approaches in Architecture and Urbanism. Drawing from empirical research on the Habitar en Igualdad program, which developed housing blocks for women and the LGBTQIA+ community in La Rioja (Argentina), we argue that urban knowledge is rooted in ethical engagement, attentive listening, and the researcher’s embodied presence. The case-experience method is implicated, adaptive, and responsive, positioning itself to challenge normative categories, incorporate corporeality into knowledge production, and address specific subjects and territories. Additionally, this approach supports critical dialogue within research in Architecture and Urbanism, particularly in connection with social movements, vulnerable groups, and diverse contests over housing. We found that this method is pivotal for capturing the nuanced content of research involving multiple and complex urban social strata, especially in cities of the Global South. Furthermore, informed by feminist, decolonial, and queer perspectives, we contend that re-examining urban epistemologies is essential to addressing the inequalities that shape Latin American cities.
Urban Parks Privatization and the Neoliberal Production of Space
The aim of this article is to investigate how urban park privatization discloses the neoliberal logic in the production of public space, revealing conflicts and contradictions between technical rationality, private interests, and social practices. The assessed phenomenon is situated within the debate on the commodification of the city, and it is introduced on two levels: the first one encompasses the general overview of concessions in Brazil, the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and the city of Porto Alegre; the second level deepens the analysis on Harmonia Park and Section 1 Guaíba River Waterfront Concession. Private management of these spaces reduces their use value and imposes commercial practices on everyday urban life, justified by claims of financial and administrative efficiency. In methodological terms, the research adopts a critical-dialectical approach based on Lefebvre's Three-Dimensional Production of Space. The research frames the privatization of urban parks as a field of dialogue, confrontation, and transformative praxis, identifying processes of elitization, commercialization, and segregation of public spaces, while also highlighting resistance movements that claim the right to the city and more democratic models of spatial production. Park concessions reflect neoliberal hegemony and indicate the urgent need for alternatives that value the collective use of public spaces and social participation.
This article discusses the processes of re-signifying everyday life through Art and Architecture. It aims to demonstrate that the convergence between disciplinary fields occurs primarily through the recognition of shared values and worldviews, rather than through technical–poetic strategies. The methodology employed involved field research (direct source), access to primary documents (documentary research), and a literature review. Author Unknown begins with the reading of an artistic and architectural work, attentive to its praxis and confrontations. Rochelle Costi displaces trivial objects, activating readings of place and memory. The project for the União Continental building, carried out by the architectural office MMBB in São Paulo, Brazil, values the ordinary and the preexisting. Rather than treating what exists as a datum to be preserved or surpassed, the cases analysed reveal modes of operation that enchant the banal and make visible the layers of experience that inhabit urban spaces. The text invites careful observation of what tends to remain at the margins, countering the logic of the tabula rasa and the emphasis on the exceptional, in dialogue with Georges Perec, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Walter Benjamin.
Francis Alÿs’ Green Line: Imperialism and the Limits of the Global South
This article discusses the concepts of imperialist states, colonies, and semi-colonies as developed by Vladimir Lenin, as well as those of strategy and tactics as presented by Michel de Certeau, and considers the limitations and relevance of these ideas for analyzing contemporary power relations. The study adopts a critical and interpretative approach, articulating theoretical texts, the artistic performance The Green Line by the artist Francis Alÿs, and the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This approach fulfills the objective of this article, which is to clarify the concepts introduced and to problematize the notions of the Global North and Global South, considered here as insufficient for fully understanding the dynamics of domination and resistance within a capitalist/imperialist context. Aligned with the theme of this edition of V!RUS journal, “Multilateral Dialogues: Praxis, Interlocutions, and Confrontations”, the tensioning of the notions of strategy, tactics, and imperialism, in the fields of art and history, seeks to highlight the relevance of these concepts for analyzing the multi-dimensional functioning of these power relations while exposing the colonial and imperialist character that continues to support them.
Urban Soils and Organic Farming: Conservation and Resilience
The article proposes an epistemological shift in the understanding of soil beyond its physical and agronomic roles, positioning it as a living interface that connects productive practices, symbolic regimes, and diverse worldviews amid the current ecological crisis. The research was conducted in Conselheiro Lafaiete, Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil, comparing the chemical attributes of soils under three different management regimes: agroecological organic agriculture, urban soil, and eucalyptus monoculture. It included the determination of pH in water, organic matter, remaining phosphorus, macronutrients, and micronutrients extracted by Mehlich-1, and exchangeable cations (Ca2+, Mg2+, Al3+) by KCl 1 mol L-1. The analyses revealed that organic agriculture promotes biologically active and resilient soils, while urban and monoculture soils show degradation and biogeochemical impoverishment, expressing extractive and fragmented territorial models. Through the lens of Intermedia Ecocriticism, soil is understood as an ecological medium and material archive of civilizational choices, reflecting tensions between science, poetics, and territorial politics. By broadening the view of soil as a symbolic and political agent, the study contributes to debates on environmental justice, food sovereignty, and the urgent need to reconceptualize the relationship between humans and territories, especially in contemporary urban and rural dynamics.
Racionais MC’s: The Constitution of Negro Drama as a Subject of Resistance
This essay aims to analyze, from an ethical-political perspective and drawing on contemporary theoretical tools, the musical production of the rap group Racionais MC’s, which provides the conditions for reflecting on a praxis of resistance, on certain interlocutions with the Black movement in Brazil, and on the confrontations that become necessary in light of such reflection. Methodologically, the essay is divided into three sections corresponding to successive periods of the group’s production, with the aim of showing (1) how the rappers initially take strong class-based positions, intensified in their critique of racial and social inequality, while simultaneously maintaining misogynistic stances during this early moment of their production; (2) how this first moment finds continuity in a second period also marked by social critique, incorporating what I call an “ostentatious-becoming” in the group’s production, during which we see the class critique diminish; and finally, (3) how this ostentatious becoming becomes even more evident in the third moment of their production, also characterized by a certain social critique and by the abandonment of their earlier misogynistic positions. This trajectory results in the idea that the subject of resistance possesses simultaneously subjugated and subjectifying aspects, expressing a subjectivity constituted both by external mechanisms of power and by the subject’s own ethical work of the self upon the self.
Topologies of Care: From the Clearing to the Park in Peter Sloterdijk
This article examines the articulation between biopolitics and zoopolitics in Peter Sloterdijk's philosophy, highlighting the centrality of the concept of anthropotechnics as the key to understanding the genesis of politics and civilization. Based on an ontogenealogy of domestication, the study aims to analyze how paleopolitics, understood as the original matrix of dwelling and co-immunity, allows for a rethinking of politics as the art of cohabitation and care. Methodologically, it develops a theoretical-comparative reading of Sloterdijk's works in dialogue with Heidegger and Luhmann, to reconstruct a genealogy of political space stemming from the spheres of domestication, surveillance, and interfaciality. The results indicate that anthropotechnics offers a post-anthropocentric model of multilateralism, in which care and technique are understood as mediations between the human and the non-human, the symbolic and the material. By investigating the topologies of care in Sloterdijk, the article also proposes a dialogue with the theme of spatial multilateralism, understanding anthropotechnics as a diversified practice of cohabitation and symbolic exchange between human and non-human natures. Furthermore, the reading of paleopolitics as a matrix of co-immunity reveals that every form of dwelling involves a praxis of negotiation among differences—cultural, technical, and environmental—establishing interlocutions and confrontations that configure the different modes of producing the common.
Data, Governance and Opacity: Toward an Informational Right to the City
This essay proposes a theoretical conceptual reflection on the informational right to the city, understood as a contemporary extension of Henri Lefebvre’s thinking on the right to the city. It takes as a starting point the urban transformations mediated by digital infrastructures and geospatial information systems, using BHMaps, the public territorial data platform of the city of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil, as an example of the tensions between transparency, control, and citizen appropriation of urban information. The analysis is grounded in the author's institutional experience at the Secretariat of Urban Policy (2015-2024), a period marked by the consolidation of GIS platforms and the digital transition of public administration. This experience provides a situated perspective on the relations between transparency, power, and informational curation. The text weaves together contributions from critical urban theory, critical cartography, and studies on digital urbanization, arguing that the informational right to the city involves not only access but also the collective capacity to produce, interpret, and contest the informational space, in dialogue with a praxis oriented toward the democratization of territorial knowledge. By recognizing the confrontations that permeate the production and use of digital platforms, the essay proposes rethinking these infrastructures as digital urban commons, guided by informational justice and collaborative governance.
Direito à Cidade, Inclusão Digital, Justiça Socioespacial, Governança Digital, Participação Cidadã.