"THE ORDINARY CITY AS A STAGE FOR CULTURE, CREATIVITY & SOCIAL INCLUSION: A study of the social circus in Brazil & Latin America in the first decades of the 21st century"

Grounded in the 21st century globalized-urbanized-reality, this research aimed to investigate why and how the social circus represents an example of resignifying the cultural-creative economy/industries (CCIs) into the right to the ordinary cities in Latin America. This region has the highest rates of urbanization and social inequality in the world. Globally, ‘categories of cities’ (at issue mainly the ‘global city’ and the ‘creative city’) have been created seeking to improve and renew urban life conditions. Those projects and the one of its instruments, the cultural-creative economy and CCIs, have negatively impacting the making of post-colonial societies, particularly in uneven pathways, when under the neoliberalism model. City labels have limited the scope of imagining alternative-possible urban futures. Moreover moving the CCIs discourse way from the ‘neoliberal policy prescription’, ‘stretching’ it to a de-westernized understanding of social rights, a view of ordinary cities is the most suitable to the social circus take place as a socio-cultural tool creatively transforming the socioeconomic and spatial segregated Latin American urban reality. Ordinary cities are diverse and account with the cities own capacity to foster creativity, which is can be found in any street, i.e.: someone juggling at the traffic light. Historically, the circus have arrived in the (ordinary) city; and, as a performance art, it is part of the cultural-creative sector. When liked to social interventions, suppressing the lack of opportunities to youngsters in place of socioeconomic exclusion, this art represents a CCIs in broad meaning of the (social) right to the (ordinary) city. With a postcolonial effort and the exercise of ‘Epistemologies from the South’, literature on both urban studies and cultural-creative was reviewed and analyzed to comprehend the ordinary cities as a stage performing CCIs towards social inclusion. The main actor - the social circus - was empirically studied through a combination of methods: analysis of secondary data, mapping, different interviews, oral history, and photographs. Within a qualitative approach, this master’s thesis have sought to deep the comprehension of those practices role for its diverse actors: students, collaborators, and the urban territory, in a search to draw all the nuances of the social circus in Latin America in the 21st century. The practices were acknowledged as a space of dreams. In the uneven region, the magical reality of the circus permits ‘dreaming with the eyes open’, bringing alternatives perspectives to conquer the right to a more equal urban life in a more inclusive city, in which the youngster gain protagonism, using culture and creativity to obtain social emancipation.