Eco-commoning, food security and everyday environmental justice in Brasilândia, Brazil

Environmental (in)justice can be approached from many spatial and temporal perspectives. In this dialogical presentation we will focus on environmental inequalities and possible coexistence in a city like São Paulo. The peripheral green areas of the city have been constantly a target of irregular occupation becoming subject to environmental risks. Neighborhoods in the periphery of Sao Paulo have three times less threes per inhabitant than the ones in the center of the city. At the same time, population pays a high price to food that comes from long distances. Periurban areas such as Brasilândia neighborhood witness more intense impacts of the planetary climate collapse, such as flooding, and water shortage among others.
Ecocidade is a project working with agroecological food transition and transformation in periurban environments contributing to regenerative and reparative practices of urban environmental injustices. Working with everyday practices in local food production, local inhabitants form new relations to the soil, plants and the food ecosystems. Through audiovisual material gathered from Ecocidade’s process with residents in Brasilândia, the presentation will explore and discuss the notion of commons and eco-commoning as suggested by feminist scholars such as Puig de la Bellacasa, Gibson-Graham, Federici and Singh.
With the explorative presentation, we would like to discuss and open a dialogue on how eco-commoning negotiates environmental inequality, and how it takes place as everyday, situated and collective action among local the citizens. While Ecocidade’s collaboration with residents in Brasilândia is a local initiative bringing plural notions of environmental justice in play, we also argue that the project taps into broader planetary timescales negotiating linear time structures, development discourses and inequalities present contemporary urban life. We will also discuss how eco-commoning often holds frictions and inequalities between peoples, species and places, and how we can possibly grow other ways of being together in the process.