Culture&Territories#3

CeiED | CULTURE & TERRITORY
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It is about taking steps to make change happen, and enlisting support from all
relevant stakeholders to act together to trigger sustainable change. It is relevant to
recognize that citizens’ commitment to a long-term benefit is easier to achieve when
citizens experience the immediate benefits – and the neighbourhood scale is best
suited to this task. According to GreenKeys (2008), greenspaces are a perfect
thematic anchor to attach people to urban development, and consequently to all
types of public spaces, as people enliven them, every day.They are a kind of stage,
where urban life happens.
To foster territorial capacity, there is a call to reflect on places and neighbourhoods,
which, as social and spatial urban unit, are dwellers’ first contact when acting in
the city.The neighbourhood is also more than a socio-spatial construct, as it has a
geographic, networked and sociocultural dimension. This requires an understanding
of the interdependence and relationships among these different dimensions.
The neighbourhood is therefore the place of greater convergence between the “soft”
and the physical dimensions, and it is ideally suited to strengthen both cohesion
and attachment to place - what will result in community empowerment. The
neighbourhood scale is also the one people are most interested in, it is the
immediate space that people use and appropriate through daily routines (in the
course of going to or coming or for leisure and recreation), therefore marking their
territory. The neighbourhood is also where changes directly affect people’s lives.
With the use of spaces, people inscribe them with meanings and attach values
to them. Within the cities, public spaces are a particular kind of land use; as public
realm, they offer the “places” for planned and unplanned interactions with peers,
other people and with the environment. In this understanding, almost any social
contact one makes in a city takes place in a public space, and this becomes the
spatial practice that shapes, and is shaped by, the environment as well as the social,
cultural, economic, or political space of a city.Thus, the urban fabric conditions every
action and exposes every conflict. Promoting debates about the place where one
lives, setting the dweller as a protagonist of change, and ensuring that every attitude
is a valuable contribution are first steps to increase the capacity. This goes beyond
formal education, as it has to do with perception, transformation, and raising
awareness; in other words, the way one looks at the city must change. Menezes &
Mateus (2017) suggest walking as a suitable and easy way to bring about this change,
as walking through the urban fabric promotes questioning the elements of a city.
Sharpening the views and moving towards observing and judging the environment
increases one’s interest in cooperating, fostering an urban environment that meets
everyone’s needs and expectations. The increase in local knowledge also results
in better knowing where and how to act, and this has an impact on city-dwellers’ own
attitudes and values. This in turn increases the awareness that each individual
attitude is capable of affecting human and urban development positively.