The public market: a key to understand Florianopolis

Abstract

The use changes experienced by architecture, as an environment built through urban requalification processes and the consequent preservation of this built heritage, metamorphose the public spaces. Along with it, the complex social and spatial ties that gathered people around it over the years are also changed. These ties are responsible for the collective memory of several urban groups that compose a society. It is the feeling of belonging to somewhere or to a social group that follows people almost as a shadow, which here we define as collective memory. The building of the Public Market, attached to the Florianopolis History Center, is part of the public history of the city in its main metamorphic moments. The expectation for its implementation and use as a locomotive for the upcoming progress of the middle of the 19th century turns it into an urban icon from its beginning. The idea is to search in the Florianopolis city’s territory and its extension, the island of Santa Catarina, marks of the transformation of a city through a preserved architectural permanence. However, the new uses of this architectural object moves it away from the collective memory of the social group involved in its history. The collective memory that is present and helps to understand a recent past hit by internal migration, is a result of the mode of production that leads the city into an abrupt acceleration in its population growth. Studying this theme, i.e., the complex capture of a public space with its social and spatial ties, by the globalization process and the later gentrification, led us to comparisons to identical processes in central countries. These comparisons reveal the mistakes and raise the need for social policies that redistribute our riches, promoting to the population a new level of life quality and coexistence to mitigate the conflicts between social classes.