Sentidos da diversidade em São Paulo e Lisboa: patrimônios e alteridades nos centros urbanos

Abstract

The present study delves into the meanings produced by the cultural heritage buildings that make up the urban landscape of central Lisbon and São Paulo, where the ongoing presence of minoritized social groups and their everyday life habits leave imprints. It also investigates to what extent these practices contribute to shaping the production of meaning of these places to the brink of adding new layers of memory to public spaces and challenging prevailing identity narratives. To this end, we conducted a comparative study on the visibility points of material/ immovable cultural heritage assets in the public spaces of these cities, with an approach in the light of Greimasian semiotic theory and its developments, in dialogue with the concepts of Cultural Studies. In this way, we intended to identify identity aspects and present or absent narratives that represent or not the populations and ways of life that inhabit these spaces in order to understand how these heritage assets interact with these groups and to what degree they go through a resemantization process at the present time. Moreover, we pursued the central hypothesis that the cultural heritage assets that occupy public spaces in these areas are not in sync with the current global appeal for cultural diversity and, on the contrary, translate dominant identities that mobilize different forms of coloniality and semiotically produce differences that are put into effect to preserve the exclusion or to make politically minoritized groups invisible. The study is divided into two parts: the analysis of discourses and events that historically play a part in the construction of a dominant identity that remains noticeable in the heritage of the two cities; the identification and analysis based on the researcher's presence in the places that constitute the corpus, in their historical centers and adjoining areas, where the presence of minoritized social groups that establish relationships with these heritages assets is observed. The results show that, although the reaffirmation of dominant identities persists in the landscape of both cities, the resolute presence of these groups and their life practices provide discontinuities in the dominant logic of urban space and create modes of prefigurative politics there, revealing ways to produce an urban environmental heritage more aligned with the social reality of the contemporary capitals