The ECOCIDADE Community Climate Resilience as Territorial Co-Production in São Paulo's Peripheries

Resumo

This paper examines the ECOCIDADE project, a community-led urban resilience initiative operating in Brazil’s marginalized peripheries, implemented by the NGO The City Needs You Institute. By centering on care practices, circular economy, and grassroots climate adaptation, ECOCIDADE challenges traditional technocratic approaches to resilience. Drawing on fieldwork in Brasilândia, São Paulo, the analysis demonstrates how the project reframes sustainability as a process of insurgent citizenship and shared governance, where informal settlements reclaim agency in the face of environmental and political crises. The article argues that ECOCIDADE’s four-phase methodology—capacity building for autonomy, network activation, policy prototyping and cooperation, collective and intersectional care—constitutes a powerful strategy for territorial co-production. This strategy offers a critical alternative to mainstream climate urbanism and posits that such co-productive strategies, which treat peripheries as sites of epistemic innovation rather than deficits, are essential for the renewal of democracy in contexts marked by deep inequality, transforming vulnerable territories into spaces for radical democratic praxis.