Book Chapters / Urban Sociology

Conflictos sociales en la transformación de la ciudad fragmentada

Martínez, Miguel A. (2012) Conflictos sociales en la transformación de la ciudad fragmentada. In Luis Fco. Herrero García and Aitor Varea Oro (eds.) Permanencia y transformación en conjuntos históricos . Valencia: Universitat Politècnica de València.

El título de mi presentación es "Conflictos sociales en la reestructuración de la ciudad fragmentada". Como veis, usaré el término “reestructuración” a veces como sinónimo de renovación, renovación urbana, rehabilitación, etc. Soy consciente de que hay importantes –a veces sutiles- diferencias entre estos términos, pero en esencia se refieren a procesos similares. Así que dividiré mi presentación en dos partes. La primera parte es la consideración del tema desde un punto de vista sociológico . En segundo lugar, trataré los asuntos de los problemas sociales, la resistencia ciudadana y la autoorganización vecinal.


My conference deals with the sociological dimensions of such processes. I will use the term restructuring sometimes similar to renovation, urban renewal, rehabilitation and so on. I’m aware that there are important differences, sometimes slight differences between this terms but in essence they refer to similar processes. So I will divide my presentation into two parts. The first one is about the understanding from a sociological point of view about all the things involved in the process of urban restructuration. Secondly I will deal with the problem of social conflicts, citizenship resistance, self-organization of neighborhoods and so on.

After several years of analyzing these processes and being involved in some of them, finally I conclude that we need to recall three essential dimensions. The first one is integrality and interdisciplinarity: that means working together, urban planners, architects, legal experts, economic advisers , social workers, social analysts and so on. And all of them should be, in my opinion, aimed to get an internal development of the area and especially if this area is a marginalized one, to get a positive action in order to solve all the social problems involved in the area. The second main dimension is what I call “livability” or the capability to live in these places because some of these processes may end in such a museistic area or just a service exclusive area. Hence, we should keep people to live there, specially the people who lived there before and to open opportunities for some other people to also reside there, but that should occur in a negotiated manner. The third dimension is plurality and diversity. If we want to live in good cities in livable cities we need to combine functions, social groups, typologies of the buildings, different spaces. However, these dimensions are dependent on the capabilities of the people to improve and to propose new things in a cooperative manner.

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Published: 1ro de enero de 2012
Keywords: Activism, Spaces, Theory, Participation