BACKYARDS PRODUCING CITY LIFE:

How cultivated spaces in the metropolitan region of São Paulo are configured as a movement for the construction of socialities and affections

Abstract

We start from an ethnographic practice based on an anthropology of the city in the sense elaboreated by Michel Agier where the city is not an a priori definition, but a relational and contextual construction, a complex and inventive urban practice as Michel de Certeau would say, to look at the cultivated backyards present in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, especially in Bairro dos Pimentas, Guarulhos and in the neighborhoods of the east zone of the city of São Paulo. We perceive a productive movement within the design of the backyard itself, but also a movement that starts from it outside. Movements of contraction and expansion weaving the lines that weave both the constitution of the person who plants and of an interspecific sociality. We are attentive in the sense of perceiving how these movements are articulated, seeking to understand, precisely, this tangle of circulation of lives – human and non-human (Ingold) – that produce urban life.