VIRTUAL: Livable Cities – New York
Abstract
The paper discusses the project Solidarity Communication Agency, carried out by the NGO Agência de Iniciativas Cidadãs and the Federal University of Minas Gerais: an initiative that develops and offers, free of charge, tools for the construction of communication strategies by popular movements that struggle for the right to the city – the right, denied to poor populations, of democratic access to the processes of production and enjoyment of urban space. The aim is to strengthen the communication of networks that denounce the processes of literal and symbolic exclusion of poor and peripheral populations from public spaces and structures that guarantee rights, concentrated in the central areas of cities, which it is not by chance are the territories with the greatest wealth. The project promotes experimentation laboratories, aimed at the development and dissemination of tools to facilitate diagnostic, planning and implementation of communication strategies. Those laboratories give rise to autonomous and singular processes of implementation, by movements and networks, of systematized scopes of communication actions with the main publics of interest. For Avelin Buniacá Kambiwá, leadership of the Committee to Support the Indigenous Cause, participating in the ACS means a “true creation of new ways of fighting, reinventing strategies and languages, in order to translate indigenous causes to interlocutors beyond the ‘bubble’ of sympathizers”. In Avelin’s evaluation, it was possible to build an understanding of which dialogues are important and of possible strategies to weave them, opening the way to break the invisibility and to enable increasingly consistent network actions.
Rafaela is a journalist, Master in Information Science and PhD student in Communication (Federal University of Minas Gerais). She is one of the founders and presides the Agência de Iniciativas Cidadãs – AIC, an NGO that since 1993 has fostered and facilitated dialogue between groups, collectives and networks that work to promote citizenship, as well as between such initiatives and society. She is one of the creators and managers of the Solidarity Communication Agency project. She works in feminist and anti-racist groups, as well as in networks that denounce the genocide of black youth.
Musso is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Doctor in Collective Health from UFMG, he is also one of the founders and is a member of the management council of the Agência de Iniciativas Cidadãs – AIC. He works in the development of projects that combine psychoanalysis and social mobilization in the construction of perspectives for confronting the genocide of black youth – such as the Desembola na Ideia project, of which he is the creator and coordinator.