Fear and (in)security in urban margins

an interpretation of “live cornered” in stigmatized territories of Greater Bom Jardim

Abstract

This article interprets discursive productions about urban margins as spatiality of fear and insecurity, from the point of view of residents of stigmatized territories in the region of Grande Bom Jardim, in Fortaleza CE. This is an excerpt from my doctoral dissertation on the meanings of poverty and the place (s) created in the urban margins of this metropolis in the 2000s. I opted for qualitative research, with the adoption of participant observation and ethnographic interviews. I carried out a detailed socio-anthropological study in two territories in this region, which are subject to socio-territorial stigmatization and segregation and social disqualification of their residents in poverty. In these spaces, symbolic daily and intraterritorial struggles are outlined among its residents in relation to the meanings attributed to their places of residence. It is problematized, here, the aversion that conceives the lived territory as spaces of fear and insecurities attuned to topophobic practices of inhabiting them and sociophobic practices of social avoidance. This perspective marks the tendencies of “living cornered” in these spaces, demanding multivocal and polysemic reflections on living on the urban margins in contemporary times, considering the hybridized face of the welfare-punitive State operating in this region.