Space, Place and Memories

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of the production of space in rural and urban territories and the dialectical relation with agency and environmental activism. The data came from a collective ethnographic action research conducted at the Unified Educational Centre Uirapuru and its surroundings in the periphery of São Paulo in Brazil. In this article, I analyse the narratives which are part of interviews with a primary teacher and a community leader, one responsible for the Green Unified Educational Centre Project and the other for the vegetable garden of Vila Nova Esperança. Both subjects have become environmental agents or transformative activists. I inquire if this has to do with their memories of places and their importance of such memories for their praxis and personalities and asked about their rural past or another situation which may have produced their environmental awareness. Focusing on concepts such as production of space, place as a lived and felt space, and perezhivanie, I analyse the dynamics of transformations through these narrative interviews.