Urban trajectories and production of "poor housing spaces": The construction of a research

This text is a first approximation to the empirical field of a doctoral research in progress. Inserted into the debates about poverty and production of urban space in Brazil, such research proposes to investigate, in an exploratory way, the possible links between socio-spatial mobility, housing displacement, family dynamics and urban policies in the processes of production and appropriation of "poor housing spaces" in non-metropolitan urban contexts. This work, specifically, intends to apprehend, based upon narratives of women in poverty situation which, in recent decades, have been passing through the city of São Carlos (São Paulo/Brazil) in search of housing, some dynamics that make up its urban trajectories: residential and occupational courses, daily movements that take place in the connection between work, housing and urban services and the dew points of their everyday spatial practices. In this sense, seeks to illuminate the processes of production of "poor housing spaces" in the city in focus starting from the spatial practices of their agents and the disputes they engender, taking the hypothesis that such an approach would allow to recognize and analyze the existence of specific modulations of socio-spatial configurations generically called "slum," "outskirt," "illegal city", "informal city", as well as peculiarities of these processes in a non-metropolitan urban context. Considering that most studies have focused almost exclusively on the metropolis and in the phenomena of favelas and outskirts and, therefore, both the aspects of homogeneity and heterogeneity - and, more broadly, the increasingly diverse "poor housing spaces" in the cities - could stay unnoticed, it is expected to contribute to an increase in the comparative debate on such processes, in addition to the metropolitan circuits.