Deslocamentos à Zona Sul de Porto Alegre (RS): experiências em turismo agroecológico

Abstract

The thesis investigate the processes of attribution to the properties, nature and products associated to the rural tourism of Porto Alegre city, capital of Rio Grande do Sul State – Brazil, in the transformation journey of these assets into public patrimony and heritage for tourism purposes. The analysis corpus consists of four initiatives linked to agro-ecological tourism projects in the far south of the city: “Sítio Tio Juca”, “Sítio Herdeiros”, “Sítio Capororoca” and “Granja Santantonio”. The selection criteria of these sites derive from two main aspects: the neighborhood and kinship social relationships and the fact they started the project named Rural Paths of Porto Alegre (“Caminhos Rurais de Porto Alegre”) as founding members of the POARURAL association. It is an approach developed in the methodological perspective of Van Velsen´s Situational Analysis (1987) and in the phenomenological perspective of Alfred Schutz (1979), in which the purpose is to transit through and understand various areas of knowledge in a n interdisciplinary way, coordinating and strengthening dialogues, especially the Rural Tourism, Cultural Heritage and Citizenship. The results point to the idea that the product process of the Rural Paths project generate simultaneities that produce references for new projects and correspondences. By organizing themselves as a group in the constitution of a tourism product for Porto Alegre, these players end up negotiating identities and promoting new citizenship actions and turn to assume several identities. It was observed the formation of a agro-ecological culture due to the meanings and the exchange of these meanings about nature, landscape, agro-ecology and ways of life that are produced there. Extending the concept of pedagogy it is possible to intuit that these sites produce “agro-eco-pedagogies”. By positioning themselves in an "agro-ecological culture", the leaders advance and problematize, enquire the space in which they are inserted proposing collective logics of action that deal with other forms of economic, political, social and environmental making and allow a participative management that stimulates the horizontal debate strengthening the autonomy, cooperation and the bonds of sociability among associates and collaborators of the project. These players or actors articulate themselves with other groups that have similar proposals and seek to preserve the landscape, nature, history and local culture in an attempt to minimize the impacts that public housing programs bring to the southern area of Porto Alegre city.