INFÂNCIA E ESPAÇO URBANO Significados e sentidos de morar em posse urbana para crianças com idade entre sete e onze anos

Abstract

The present research has as study objects the meanings and senses of living in urban ownership for children of the popular layers. The meaning is conceived as the most steady dimension of the word, the synthesis of the communication and the thought. By the meaning, it is explicit the entailing of the person with its social group. The sense is the most singular dimension of the person, composed by affection and memories, aspirations and projects. Through these two concepts, critical social psychology has been studying the individual in the intersection with society and groups. To map the meanings and the senses for children of living in the urban ownership, it was opted to adopt, as privileged informants, children with age between seven and eleven years, resident in an urban ownership of Goiânia – Goiás. The adopted procedures to contact what the children think and feel in relation to that social space that they inhabit consisted in triangulation of procedures, with surveys of partner-demographic information, obtained in documents of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatísticas – IBGE) and of agencies of the Municipal City Hall of Goiânia. With such information it was identified the historic-social context in which such children are inserted. It was also used structuralized interview, photographic registers, focal group, as well as daily field registers, following the ethnographical research model. Fifty children were interviewed, among which five of them were chosen to participate of the structuralized interview. To live in the village for the children had double meaning. On one side, it is associated to the relations characterized for the kinship, neighborhood and friendship. Playing appears, in this context, as a privileged form of activity on the part of them, strengthening the triple qualified relations (kinship – neighborhood – friendship) and as vehicle of a set of affection that are part of the dynamics of these relations. On another side, to live in the village means to coexist with danger, to venture in the middle of the spaces of security and unreliability, and to coexist in a context that demands to be silent about it, and many times, to be affected by the vision of the barbarity. The senses of the social place that the children occupy also are configured by the tension between two antagonistic forms that objectify-subjectify in social life. On one side, the children feel the existing affection and protection in the significant relations, with the extensive family who inhabits the place, with friends, relatives and neighbors, what gives the child a sense of belonging : “I belong here”. On the other side, when in the pendulum between these two polar regions, the tragic sense prevails, the village starts to configure itself as a place of repulses and refuses, what produces the desire to search for another place. This other place is the utopia that the child elaborates in the process of temporizing and subjectivazing of the space. Such meanings and senses are expressions of the social dialectic exclusion-inclusion.