(Re)writing the city with the body: visualities, dissensus, and urban co-authorship in Largo do Arouche

Abstract

This article analyzes urban visualities as a constant field of symbolic, political, and spatial contestation, bringing together queer practices (and theories), critical architecture, and urban ethnography. It draws on the notion of urban co-authorship to understand the city not merely as the product of institutional projects, but as an everyday construction shaped by bodies, uses, and forms of sociability. Drawing on frameworks from urban theory, urban anthropology, and critical architectural practices, the study investigates how regimes of visibility regulate who can appear, circulate, and exist within urban space. The empirical analysis focuses on Largo do Arouche in São Paulo, Brazil, highlighting how queer insurgencies produce a gay-friendly territory through the repetition of uses, the formation of sociability circuits, and the inscription of signs of occupation onto the urban landscape—thereby creating queer spaces. The research reaffirms visuality as a gesture, a mode of thought, an action, and a political act and writing one’s urban existence.