Céline Felício Veríssimo
@portal.unila.edu.br/mestrado/politicas-publicas/english/program
Associate Professor, Architecture and Urbanism Department, CITAD-ILATIT
Federal University of Latin American Integration
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Céline Veríssimo is an architect, researcher and lecturer concerned with the political dimension of cities’ challenges, environmental impacts and socio-racial inequalities, specifically the urban context of Mozambique and, more recently, of Latin America.
Scopus Publications
Scholar Citations
Scholar h-index
Scholar i10-index
Scopus Publications
Elia Apostolopoulou, Dimitrios Bormpoudakis, Alexandros Chatzipavlidis, Juan José Cortés Vázquez, Ioana Florea, Mary Gearey, Julyan Levy, Julia Loginova, James Ordner, Tristan Partridge,et al.
University of Arizona
In this article, by drawing on empirical evidence from twelve case studies from nine countries from across the Global South and North, we ask how radical grassroots social innovations that are part of social movements and struggles can offer pathways for tackling socio-spatial and socio-environmental inequality and for reinventing the commons. We define radical grassroots social innovations as a set of practices initiated by formal or informal community-led initiatives or/and social movements which aim to generate novel, democratic, socially, spatially and environmentally just solutions to address social needs that are otherwise ignored or marginalised. To address our research questions, we draw on the work of Cindi Katz to explore how grassroots innovations relate to practices of resilience, reworking and resistance. We identify possibilities and limitations as well as patterns of spatial practices and pathways of re-scaling and radical praxis, uncovering broadly-shared resemblances across different places. Through this analysis we aim to make a twofold contribution to political ecology and human geography scholarship on grassroots radical activism, social innovation and the spatialities of resistance. First, to reveal the connections between social-environmental struggles, emerging grassroots innovations and broader structural factors that cause, enable or limit them. Second, to explore how grassroots radical innovations stemming from place-based community struggles can relate to resistance practices that would not only successfully oppose inequality and the withering of the commons in the short-term, but would also open long-term pathways to alternative modes of social organization, and a new commons, based on social needs and social rights that are currently unaddressed.
Céline F. Veríssimo
Palgrave Macmillan US
Following Mozambique’s conversion to globalization, the post-colonial ‘cement city’ is now the core of neo-liberalism, as a node of the global economy, where foreign donors and international market economy control national political economy, exacerbating the premise of the negation of self-sufficiency that continues to evolve resiliently at its margins. The adoption of a neo-liberal model of development during the 1990s completely bypasses the realities of Mozambican society. This paper argues that the strategy of self-production of space regarding the household/Outdoor Domestic Space, which existed previously as a resistance strategy, has become a successful strategy for survival, as the building block of the decentralized Agrocity, in the face of a global economy which totally neglects both the people and the land.