The production of everyday life public space

Abstract

The paper is an excert of the author's Masters thesis about the production of everyday public spaces. Instead of addressing the public spaces in general, in its historical or institutional sense, it seeks to investigate the spaces left when private and closed lands are subtracted. They are sidewalks, streets, central walkways in main roads, small neighborhood parks, residual spaces and other open spaces that can be occupied or even physically transformed by the neighborhood dwellers. However, as urban planning usually prioritizes the circulation of cars, commodities and people, this possibility is limited and rarely explored.

To inform the discussion on people’s engagement with the production of such spaces, this paper describes a specific case in Belo Horizonte — one of the largest Brazilian cities. It is the case of an interrupted stretch of street that is abandoned, located in an upper middle class neighbourhood. In order to test the degree of engagement or passiveness of the neighbours, a tactic of distributing leaflets directing people to a blog created to discuss what to do with this public space was adopted. This paper describes the evidences raised by the discussions in the blog concerning people’s everyday passivity and the habitual delegation of decisions about public spaces to third parties. Our findings inform a discussion on an alternative urbanism that relies on tools with which people might engage in the production of public spaces.