Cercamentos sociais e Assepsia urbanística:

conceitos para pensar Brasília

Abstract

In this article, I intend to explore, through an occasional dialogue with some works of urban sociology, concepts that allow us to think of Brasília in the context of a long trajectory of invisibilization of black and poor people. To this end, I have organized some notes and separated them into three groups. In the rst, I discuss, based on the idea of social enclosures, how the use of public spaces in the cities by blacks was restricted through the criminalization of cultural manifestations that depended on public meetings, such as samba and capoeira, and by the persecution of religious meetings. In the second section, I re ect on how this strategy of preventing meetings and occupation of public spaces by groups considered dangerous (or undesirable) is often based on a concept of order put into practice by the State through its police agencies. Finally, I deal with the way in which the private lives of the so-called undesirable classes gradually became invisible by transferring their dwellings to distant places, in the name of hygienization (or asepsis) of the cities. In conclusion, I argue that the concepts of social enclosure and urban asepsis allow us to see the modernist project of the construction of Brasília as one more step in this historical path that marks Brazilian cities and their inequalities.