Reflexões sobre rua: tensões entre memória e imaginação em experiências nas ruas soteropolitanas

Abstract

The intention to study the street, specially Brazilian and soteropolitan streets, was motivated by theoretical concerns about the transformations of the world and the city, emanating from Walter Benjamin and Richard Sennett's oeuvre. Therefore, their reflections about the transformations in the urban quotidian and the deepening of modernity in its various aspects, from alteration in social relations to the implications in urban life itself, resonated with my own urban experiences. In the scope of geographic studies, with some exceptions, the street is a self-presented phenomenon, considered through a perspective of urban morphology or as the center of action and life, but rarely is the main point of discussion. In this sense, I sought to build this research considering the street, its main geographical scale, and the object of analysis because the focus on the street makes transformations of the city visible and allows an understanding of the ongoing processes and the spatial practices of inhabiting the city. Hence, I pursued an approximation between phenomenology and dialectics to connect individual circumstances and social structure to ponder the street as a circumstantial phenomenon of the urban experience. Accordingly, memory and imagination were the two categories chosen to articulate the temporal and the spatial dimensions of experience, which revealed thoughts and actions of people towards their future and their hopes for society through their relation to place and landscape. This investigation was affected by the pandemic, which demanded changes in its scope. I needed to rearrange the methodology to suit the ongoing context of Brazilian quarantine and social distancing. Thus, I chose to systematize and analyze news, covering the period between March 2020 and May 2021, as sources of information about the city and its streets. Furthermore, 11 interviews aimed to answer the question "what is this: the street?", considering the particularities of each interviewee, their various social-spatial-temporal contexts, their possibilities, and circumstances, to contribute to urban studies and particularly to urban planning. The results show the potential of the street to reveal the dynamics of city life through the tension among public and private. The street supports the creation of images of the city hence negotiated between individuals and the collective. Individuals' narratives about the streets transform them into cityscapes providing them with sense and strength of place. Finally, it presents various meanings that are circumstantial that relate to both the world's structure and its particular conjunctures, being at one-time singular and transversal to understandings of the city. The news revealed the importance of the media as creators of social narratives because they unify fragments of the city, constructing positive or negative hegemonic representations about neighborhoods and streets.