Culture, Temporary Uses and Unusual Spaces in Rio de Janeiro (original) (raw)

2018, Third International Conference of Young Urban Researchers

The city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) has various socially and historically marginalized regions lacking cultural and leisure facilities. Within its context of immense social inequalities, many of its urban voids and formerly degraded areas have been planned in line with the global trend of spectacular architectural and urban projects in vogue since the 1980s. Like in the USA or Eastern Europe, these projects are concentrated in regions perceived as strategic to the real estate market and/or cultural tourism, disregarding the places where the demands and needs are latent, such as the favelas (local slums) and the peripheral lower-class neighborhoods. It is in these places, relegated by the public policies and the private capital, that we have observed new ways of thinking and occupying the urban space. We speak of improvised, often temporary actions that represent alternatives to the more formal enterprises that seek mainly the creation of salable urban images. These initiatives usually emerge from collectives of artists or associations of younger people seen as (sub)cultural groups, who carry on cultural interventions in the existing "gaps" of the public space – underneath viaducts, in hidden alleys, or even in abandoned/empty sites. Examples of these interventions are diverse: blind girdles or building walls turned into movie screens and open-air cinemas; former dumpsites in turned into urban parks with award winning design; concrete slabs turned into theater stages; sites of demolition and eviction turned into resistance museums and so on. In Rio de Janeiro, these interventions are rarely the result of traditional urban projects and often represent bottom-up solutions that reflect the need of the inhabitants of poorer areas to transgress beyond the idea of scarcity surrounding them and focus on the notion of potency in places still unexplored. These actors are able to see opportunities and possibilities where others cannot in a tactical manner. Their diverse means of appropriating certain hidden places through art and culture also generate a transformation in the uses of spaces, which is representative of the contemporary era where functions are no longer strictly separated, but mixed. Ergo, in today’s reality, the road infrastructure of a peripheral neighborhood can become a temporary cultural center and a bicycle can become an itinerary library in a favela, breaking the strict division of key functions imposed by the strong modernist inheritance still so strong in Brazil, as well as in other countries. In our research, we refer to these examples of fluid appropriation and transformation of uses as “unusual spaces” (“espaços insólitos” in Portuguese). We propose to present this new object of study at this conference through mappings and reflections based upon the theoretical works of authors such as Michel de Certeau (about strategy and tactics), Milton Santos (about space-time relations), Franck & Stevens (about loose spaces), amongst others.