Peripheral tactics, materialization and the politics of the ‘future city' in Rosario

The urban peripheries of the global south stand as a testing ground where contrasting modalities of building and occupying urban space define a new arena for social and political contestation. In marginal settlements, often clustered around terrains deemed non-suitable for urbanization, deprived urban dwellers struggle to defend their right to the city from expansive public-private developments and the multiplication of closed neighbourhoods. In these settlements, different organizations and social movements are using construction and the instance of materialization as a way of questioning the procedures and socio-economic conventions that organize the social forms of appearing in the city. Around and through construction practices and the material modification of local settlements, social movements entangle communities in the projection of alternative urban futures. The need to adapt and transform the infrastructural and spatial conditions of deprived and irregular settlements, serves to delimit a field for activism and the actualization of new forms of sociability. Through the invention of novel material and constructive practices, different social organizations consolidate a multi-scalar regime of associations and solidarities, challenging the terms of urban political debate and establishing new parameters for the production of alternative urban peripheries. Relying on the experience and interventions of Giros, a social movement acting on the peripheries of Rosario, in Argentina, this presentation explores construction and the instance of materialization as political categories. It illustrates how material and constructive tactics initially developed to defend and protect a community from eviction, turned into mechanisms for questioning the norms regulating the process of territorialisation. Through the examination of the group’s project for a ‘Future City’, the paper highlights the role of material and architectural typologies in the assembling of alternative urban peripheries.