Know-How Liminalities in the Daily Production of Opaque Spaces

Abstract

By casting light on the hegemonic forms of space production and obscuring the opaque spatial tactics generated in the urban peripheries, urbanistic discourses and practices reinforce the symbolic and material privilege conferred on modern techno-scientific rationality. From this perspective, practices originated outside this domain are considered precarious, and non-specialists are seen as laymen, holders of knowledge considered hierarchically inferior. This work aims, based on a liminal perspective, to dialectically tense the different ways of know-how of the specialists - who know the urbanistic norms and conventional design methods - and also of the non-experts, who daily build their living spaces, gradually and with their own resources. This reflection materializes in an exploratory investigation about the gambiarra's potential as a tactical action, capable of destabilizing the separation between the act of designing and the act of building, indicating more horizontal connections between knowing and doing, and acting as a horizontal insubordination to the rationality of the hegemonic urban project. As a result, it seeks to glimpse in everyday subordinated tactics possibilities of dissolving the epistemic boundaries imposed by the dominant theory and praxis in the field of architecture and urbanism, challenging the understanding of the project as something finished and imposed from top to bottom.