Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a comparative study of two similar libraries in different peripheral São Paulo neighborhoods. As architect and anthropologist, I make use of ethnography to propose three different ways in which space interacts with everyday political interactions.

Paper long abstract:

The Unified Educational Centers (CEUs) have been built since 2003 in many of the most poor and peripheral neighborhoods of São Paulo metropolis, each of them offering a combination of educational, cultural and sporting facilities. The architecture of the first units defined open and large spaces, enclosed by transparent glass surfaces - characteristics historically associated with democratic practices. These first CEUs followed highly abstract and prescriptive goals related to liberty and to horizontal power relations, but in the case of CEU Butantã everyday interpersonal relations are scarce, and permeated by disagreement and contempt. In this paper I make a comparative analysis between the library of this CEU and the one from CEU Vila Rubi, a more recent unit that receives a large number of visitors and witnesses much more mutual agreements and understandings, although having an architecture of small and enclosed spaces.

As an architect and anthropologist, I make use of ethnography, photography and virtual models to understand how spatial characteristics are related to everyday interactions in the libraries of the two above mentioned CEUs. I go beyond univocal and manicheistic associations between space and politics - like the one that relates openness with democratic pratices, and closeness with anti-democratic practices - and propose the concepts of intensive/extensive/separative contexts, respectively related to induced interactions, free interactions and interrupted interactions. Each of these contexts play important and sometimes contradictory roles in the politics of everyday interactions.