Contested and Contesting:

Abstract

‘Contestation’ is a term often used to describe various kinds of conflict in 21st-Century urban areas. Yet Urban planning literaturelacks a cultural approach to such resistance — an oversight that this paper seeks to redress. We argue that the concept of‘contested territories of culture’ plays a key role in the informal construction of urban areas, highlighting them as heterogeneousdrivers of ‘contestation’ and the fight for rights in Latin America’s inequality-riven cities. The authors use two methodologicalapproaches to define said ‘contestation’: (1) contextual analysis of the literature on the concept of ‘territories’ to discover theircultural character, and (2) ethnographic analysis of a case study on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The example of the Realengo FlyoverCultural Center, a cultural appropriation of a leftover site under a flyover on Rio’s outskirts, shows the complexity of improvised,bottom-up squatting through cultural activities. The study reveals the need to understand these territories in order to draw up moreequitable public policies and urban plans. It also highlights that such territories are both culturally rich and socially vulnerable.