MARGINAL URBAN AREAS AND EXPERIMENTAL PROJECTS: SUBALTERN SUBJECTIVITIES AND THEIR TERRITORIALITY IN SAO PAULO'S NORTHWESTERN CITES/ÁREAS URBANAS MARGINALES Y PROYECTOS EXPERIMENTALES: SUBJETIVIDADES SUBALTERNAS Y SUS TERRITORIALIDADES EN LAS CIUDADES DEL NOROESTE DE SAO PAULO

Many cities in Northwestern Sao Paulo (Brazil) have developed with the arrival of the railroad and had great prosperity with the installation of agricultural and industrial plants near the railway line. However, successive crises of raw materials, such as coffee and cotton, and the lack of investment in Brazilian rail network led to the closure of factories and the dismantling of rail transportation. In cities like Presidente Prudente, Aracatuba, Birigui, Sao Jose do Rio Preto, Marilia and Assis, portions of the central areas became urban interstices with no specific destination. In these places, large industrial sheds, dilapidated railway villages, abandoned train stations, old and dry water reservoirs, old workshops of damaged locomotives and railroad carriages, are now the leaves of a golden, but decaying past, circumscribed in the center of these cities. Marginal places, with their transgressive uses, mostly occupied by wanderers, homeless people and drug users. In this context, our work has been the search of the cognition of these spaces by means of the reading of the tracks left by the subaltern subjectivities that inhabit these territorialities. To study them, we have tried to perform assembly and disassembly operations in these areas. Plural representations, sensitive cartographies carried out with the action-research method, in a participatory and experimental way, with the users of the site; results of an immersion in place by walking. Agencies that show the central areas of these cities from the perspective of the "other"; clear sensitivities away from the traditional focus of urban planning, government agendas and market interests. A process that stands in favor of a new urbanity's manifesto--of Histories and a new historicity--capable of connecting multiplicities, where one could not separate transgressive uses, divergent users, and a landscape infested with contrasts. Here arises the concept of "Marginal Architecture", which could generate, for example, essays in the counterculture of hegemonic space. That is, experimental projects for the areas and their dissident agents, perhaps capable of generating new information and new ideas about the territory and its territorialities.