Brasília, located in the Federal District, was built in the 1950s based on a modernistic urban plan developed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. The space is demarcated according to housing, government offices, hospitals, and leisure installations. Established as the Brazilian capital in 1960, it has already been investigated from an anthropological perspective (Holston 1989; Moser 2015). Family life was originally planned to take place in areas of the housing sector, called superblocks, where local shops and services would also be found. Also government run kindergartens and schools were built to serve the local community. However, nowadays the vast majority of children who live in Brasilia attend private schools, which over the years have settled in specific areas, both in the north and in the south areas of the city. Brasilia itself became the wealthiest administrative region of the Federal District. Also, government run schools have been admitting children from poorer administrative regions, who commute everyday with a hope of getting a better education than in their own communities. This project aims to investigate and compare spaces and times related to urban experiences of primary school children who inhabit poor administrative regions of the Federal District and come to Brasilia on a daily basis. The guiding research question is: how do children use and appropriate the city in its different processes of social interaction and socialization? Fieldwork will be facilitated through the approach already established between the research team and a government run primary school located in the north part of Brasilia. Alongside Ethnography other supplementary methods will be used (GPS, maps, use of time diaries, etc.) in order to capture contemporary childhood temporality and spatiality.
Team: Fernanda Müller; Brasilmar Ferreira Nunes; Estevon Nagumo; Lucélia de Almeida Silva; Rhaisa N. Pael Farias; Marta Morgade Salgado; David Poveda Bicknell
Funding agency: CNPq/Brazil
Period: 2015-2017