The myth of deterritorialization

In The myth of deterritorialization , Rogério Haesbaert questions the discourse of the "end of territories" and proposes the concept of multiterritoriality, observing deterritorialization as the precarious territorialization of groups such as the homeless and the landless .

"The myth of deterritorialization is the myth of those who imagine that man can live without territory, that society and space can be dissociated, as if the movement of destruction of territories were not always, in some way, their reconstruction on new foundations. Territory is focused here from a geographical perspective, intrinsically integrative, always in process, territorialization as dominion (political-economic) and the appropriation (symbolic-cultural) of space by human groups. Neoliberal globalization ended up spreading the myth of the "end of territories" (often confused with the "end of the State"), where the "annihilation of space by time" would be responsible for much of the "space-territorial prejudice" that increasingly enveloped territories in a negative charge, seen more as obstacles to "progress" and mobility, to the point of (theoretically, at least) submerging them in the sea of "fluidity" or networks that dissolve and disintegrate everything. The great dilemma of this beginning of the millennium is not not the phenomenon of deterritorialization, as suggested by authors such as Paul Virilio, but that of multiterritoriality, the exacerbation of the possibility, which has always existed, but never at contemporary levels, of experiencing different territories simultaneously, constantly reconstructing our own. Deterritorialization would in fact be the extremely precarious territorialization to which the "human clusters" of the homeless, the landless, and the many minority groups are increasingly subjected in their struggle for the "minimum territory" of shelter and daily comfort.