Sustainable Village Project: the importance of leisure and public space for collective organization

This article discusses how the Sustainable Village Project (SVP), developed in a peripheral region of Curitiba-Paraná-Brazil, enables residents to take ownership of different leisure spaces autonomously. The study’s concern was to situate how SVP was set and its actions in the neighbourhood, to understand how leisure spaces influence or provide mobilisations, and to support the interventions of this project. As social ethnographic research (that used the techniques of participant observation, field diaries, and open and structured interviews as research instruments), we sought to know the different interlocutors and describe and interpret various phenomena to share meanings with others. The SVP was created by the Municipal Environment Secretariat of Curitiba and aimed to collectively establish sustainability practices as a process that allowed people to decide on their own choices, combining individual and collective well-being with the conservation of the physical environment. The proposal developed mainly in this community’s leisure time allows us to conclude that the experiences lived in the context of leisure can be decisive for human emancipation. Such experiences can promote, through dialogue, critical reflection and collective construction, the observation and resistance to injustice, giving us conditions to modify the reality in which we are inserted.