Luchas Urbanas en Barrios Populares de la Ciudad de Quito: Territorialidad E Historicidad desde las Voces de sus Protagonistas

In the psychosocial literature developed in Latin America, a reflective debate has been taking shape, inward and outward, around the conceptual tensions, meanings and institutionalized forms of community praxis, which have been grounded by Community Social Psychology (CSP) in the light of contemporary social problems. The present study, situated in this framework, aimed to understand the popular struggles for-place, based on the psychosocial factors that mediate the construction of territoriality and historicity, in the social production of popular habitat in the urban periphery of Quito. For this purpose, 33 qualitative interviews were applied to women and men social leaders of 30 popular neighborhoods. Through this exploratory approach to the process of popular struggle, we were able to identify certain conceptual limitations of the category of "community" widely used in PSC. At the same time, we reflect on the potential expansion of the comprehensive frameworks of the categories: historicity and territoriality. We conclude that there is an important theoretical deficit in the discipline, which is mainly built on descriptive categories tending to the homogenization of phenomena. This issue poses the challenge of revitalizing the corpus of existing knowledge in the region, and capturing the diversity and complexity of forms of social and territorial appropriation at the neighborhood scale.