Urban Resilience and Resistance in the Neoliberal City: The Cases of Comunidade Coliseu (BRASIL – SÃO PAULO) and Es.Col.a Da Fontinha (PORTUGAL – PORTO)

The world is being urbanized; the urban space is being neoliberalized (Peck and Tickell, 2002) (Leitner; Peck and Sheppard, 2007). The space neoliberalized rise up social fragmentation, polarization and unequally urbanities. At the same time however, the neoliberal spirit and practice, akin a contemporaneous religion, also arouse renewal urban struggle dynamics, renewal place strikes. The neoliberal practices and discourses produces their own spatiality and that reality is in permanent retroaction with alternative, subversive, counter-hegemonic and resilient space production and space demand. Those are the assumptions and questions criss-crossing the present essay which aims is to add some contributes to the resistance processes analysis in the neoliberal scenario. How the neoliberal direction of space production may be revert by the local people activity and their creative urban production visible on social movements, more or less resilient, more or less resistant? How the neoliberalized space interacts with resilient and resistant space, what movements these processes engage and what are fragilities and lines of flight can they offer?

On approaching these questions, we take as case studies the Comunidade Coliseu, a São Paulo’s favela – a brazilian urban slum habitation type – placed on Vila Olímpia Neighbourhood, and Es.Col.A. da Fontinha, a squat-eviction process of an abandoned Porto’s municipal school transformed in an auto-managed collective space. Immerged on dominant urban governance directed to the privatization, to globalized plans, to the flux creation, to the attractively of city, to the urban marketing, those places and those people try to opposite that path, almost heroically.

Attempting those cases, the ambition is to underlying local/unprivileged urban population ways of coping with the neoliberal hegemony, understanding how people  shapes acts and discourses of their fight, viz. grasping urban resistance potentials in a neoliberal ambience.