Sustainable Village Project: the importance of leisure and public space for collective organization

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how the Sustainable Village Project (SVP), developed in a peripheral region of Curitiba-Paraná-Brazil, enables residents to take ownership of different leisure spaces autonomously. The study’s concern was to situate how SVP was set and its actions in the neighbourhood, to understand how leisure spaces influence or provide mobilisations, and to support the interventions of this project. As social ethnographic research (that used the techniques of participant observation, field diaries, and open and structured interviews as research instruments), we sought to know the different interlocutors and describe and interpret various phenomena to share meanings with others. The SVP was created by the Municipal Environment Secretariat of Curitiba and aimed to collectively establish sustainability practices as a process that allowed people to decide on their own choices, combining individual and collective well-being with the conservation of the physical environment. The proposal developed mainly in this community’s leisure time allows us to conclude that the experiences lived in the context of leisure can be decisive for human emancipation. Such experiences can promote, through dialogue, critical reflection and collective construction, the observation and resistance to injustice, giving us conditions to modify the reality in which we are inserted.

KEYWORDS:

• Public leisure spaces
• leisure activities
• citizenship
• community action
• Sustainable Village Project

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. According to the (UNDP. United Nations Development Program, 2019), Brazil is among the ten most unequal countries in the world.

2. Although the research was carried out in 2018, we remained in contact with the reality studied until March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began.

3. According to Souza (2003, p. 64), autonomy is ‘the ability of each individual to set goals with clarity, to pursue them with as much freedom as possible and critically reflect on your situation and on the information you have it presupposes not only favourable conditions, from the psychological and intellectual angle but also social institutions that guarantee effective equality of opportunity for all individuals.

4. We call the research participants as interlocutors, because, like Uriarte (2012) said, ‘the given word takes place in a dialogue context, in a dialogic relationship, and it is in this dialogue that the researcher gets the data’ (p. 5).

5. The designation of articulator instead of coordinator is one of the principles of the deliberative management, it is not just a matter of nomenclature, but of attitude towards a project.

6. lighting, sociocultural equipment, which become real public space for Borja and Muxí (2000), it is ‘[…] an action that improves the city’s public spaces, such as streets and squares in neighbourhoods with a low urbanisation level, such as gardening, new furniture, aces for collective use and provide quality of the city to these neighbourhoods’ (p. 43).

7. Planning and organisation strategy used in actions developed by Geplec members in the context of the Winter Festival of the Federal University of Paraná in Antonina. To learn more, check (Neca et al., 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gonçalves Felipe Sobczynski

Gonçalves Felipe Sobczynski, PhD student of the Graduate Program in Physical Education (PPGEDF) of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). Member of the Research and Studies Group in Leisure, Space and City (GEPLEC), coordinated by Prof. PhD Simone Rechia, linked to the same institution. Teacher at the estate and municipal teaching network of Curitiba/PR/Brazil.

Daniella Tschöke Santana

Daniella Tschöke Santana, PhD student of the Graduate Program in Physical Education (PPGEDF) of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). Member of the Research and Studies Group in Leisure, Space and City (GEPLEC), coordinated by Prf. PhD Simone Rechia, linked to the same institution. Teacher at the estate and municipal teaching network of Curitiba/PR/Brazil.

Simone Rechia

Simone Rechia, Associate Professor of the Department of Physical Education at Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) and coordinator of the Research and Studies Group in Leisure, Space and City (GEPLEC).