A cidade e a mulher : segregação urbana feminina em Santa Cruz do Sul/RS.

Abstract

The relation between woman and the city is marked by inequality and segregation, but also resistance and transformation. The present paper has the intention to describe how public housing policies end up perpetuating the patriarchal hegemonic thinking. And as the mercantilist relations of (re)production of the urban space are subjecting the poor and the social minorities to that constraints, provoking resistances and (re)actions that produce the non-normative city. Based on feminist epistemology, the methodological procedure adopted seeks to give voice to poor and segregated women, resettled in the residential complex Santo Antônio, in the southern suburb of Santa Cruz do Sul - RS, built with resources from the Minha Casa Minha Vida program. These women were heard about the resettlement process, the formation of their networks and their perception about the their on situation in the context of segregation, through observation, questionnaire and interviews. Expanding the concepts and theoretical contributions of Flávio Villaça and Eduardo Marques on urban segregation, lending them and other authors a gender perspective on urbanism and the city. It proposes a multiscale and multifactorial perception of urban segregation, transcending the difficulties of access to public services and mobility, incorporating the spatial dimension to the constraints imposed on the female reality. Similarly, it seeks to understand the collateral effects of public habitational politics on the condition of poor and segregated women, which perpetuates the social role imposed on the female gender, conditioned to private spaces and unpaid domestic work. These relations emerge from the object in the confrontation between the women's speeches, the direct observation and the bibliographic reference adopted. The implementation of the public habitational politics at the level of the city corroborates this reality. The silencing of the specific situations of the female gender and the perception of women about their own problematic within the urban studies in the ambit of architecture and urbanism and the regional development reaffirm the relevance and novelty of the work presented here. Finally, the research concludes that women segregated from the periphery of the city act as a force of resistance and transformation of the city, in a constant struggle in search of rights, dignity and citizenship.