Public spaces in Cartagena popular sectors

Encounters and disencounters places

Abstract

From a sociocultural perspective, the study of uses and perceptions of public spaces in the popular sectors in Cartagena, facilitated a closer understanding of the interactions between social individuals and their environment, based on their everyday practices of social, economic, and religious integration, and the recognition of their vitality and the role it plays in building social relationships. This article presents a reflection from the voices of those who are immersed in that everyday life, about the meaning granted to public space as a meeting and vanishing point, and their claims regarding the ways they in which they relate to it. This qualitative research exercise with an ethnographic perspective employed participatory observation and semi-structured interviews geared to community leaders and users of public spaces during the course of field work. The article is structured as follows: The first section deals with initial considerations of research, the second describes the situations in which public space is a place for social encounters and disencounters, the third discusses theexpectations created around it, and the last section posits final considerations regarding the multiple uses of public spaces as well as the importance of the dichotomy of use in order to give vitality to the above mentioned spaces and the conflicts that emerge from different ways of territorializing space.