Tensions and fractures in the territory

Socio-territorial processes of rural habitat in the province of Córdoba, Argentina

Abstract

The article presents a conceptual structure aimed to understand socio-territorial processes to fully account the different levels and dimensions of habitat complexity, and to recognize tensions and fractures caused by the development model. We understand these processes at their micro and macropolitical scales, paying special attention to the second one for the analysis. Methodologically, this supposes a double critical cartography: an epistemic one, trying to recognize the scope of the macropolitical dimension in its definitions; and a territorial one, giving an account of the ways in which this matrix is expressed in Córdoba. The perspective offered by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, from the Epistemologies of the South, provides us with elements to deepen the analysis. The author's proposal, aimed at recognizing forms of epistemic occlusion, in the interplay that he proposes with the category of abyssal thought, will allow us to recognize territorialized forms of exclusion. Throughout the article we try to address the way in which the development model produces fragmentations in the notion of rural habitat, generating the propitious framework to generate public policies reduced to housing and, in broader terms, how that condition the sustainability of local ways of living, giving rise to the dominant macropolitical processes, articulated in agroindustrial extractivist practices.