Por uma Ciência da Informação urbana: lacunas do conhecimento e da mediação política com a população em situação de rua

Abstract

The dissertation aims to produce knowledge, in the light of Information Science, about participatory policies with the street population, a polysemic phenomenon that requires interdisciplinary examination. The information field has not yet given due attention to the urban theme, but it can contribute to the heuristic gaps in the Brazilian information regime: the national census, main method of collecting official data, has been carried out since 1872 but through a housing configuration, resulting in the lack of data about mobile populations. After centuries of repression towards the social issue labeled as mendicancy, the 2009 National Policy on Street Population represents a milestone in this debate. The regulation summons IBGE, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, to incorporate this social segment into the 2020 census. This research first case study deals with the pilot test conducted by the institute in 2013, with support from social movement "facilitators". IBGE faced operational difficulties and kept the final report internal - a summary was obtained through the Access to Information Law, shared in the annex. Since then the demand has been pending, no unfolding has been disclosed yet. The second case study analyzes the São Paulo City Plan for Street Population, launched in 2016 by Fernando Haddad's administration. The plan was built with civil society participation and counted on an autoethnographic survey, whose researchers were then living or had already lived the street situation, an innovative opportunity of political representation for a historically silenced segment when it comes to their own life narratives. The final report indicates contradictions in the information flow between municipal offices of the same administration. The plan faced ruptures once the city hall leadership changed. The new mayor João Doria already in his first month arbitrarily altered laws that had been formatted along years of discussion with civil entities. The dissertation methodology involved the production of primary data and access to secondary documents (among then unpublished, the autoetnographic research and the pilot test summary), participant observation at the São Paulo Committee of Street Population meetings and public hearings, open and semi-directed interviews with the autoethnographic researchers, IBGE technicians and committee coordinators, as well as juridical and media analysis. The theoretical study is based on Marxist concepts and the political economy of information, connecting to notions such as mediation and intercultural ethics. The imbrication between polis, politics and police is discussed as a system that reiterates worldwide the alienated information society, the occurrence of relative superpopulations and cities based on the architecture of segregation. The events raised are articulated with macro elements, regular to globalized capitalism, indicating the complementarity between singular, particular and universal aspects, in order to avoid epistemological fragmentation and to deepen the understanding of the case studies. Proposing an Urban Information Science, it is pointed out the validity of enduring this incipient object of study, marginalized in society and, therefore, also in politics and science.