From Stigma of Decay to Emblem of Democracy:
Art, Public Space, and Urban Revitalization in São Paulo
Master Thesis submitted to the Graduate School of Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Research Master’s in Cultural Analysis awarded by the University of Amsterdam
Flávia Dourado Maia 11104228
Thesis rMA Cultural Analysis Supervisor: Daan Wesselman
Second Reader: Niall Martin 15 June 2017
Table of Contents
Introduction ... 3
Chapter 1 – The Narrative of Culture-led Revitalization: The Place of Art in Place-Making 10 1.1. Introduction ... 10
1.2. Building on Ruin Imagery: Overcoming Urban Decay ... 11
1.3. Aestheticizing Urban Revitalization: Tapping into Subversive Art ... 18
1.4. Surfing the Wave of Creativity: Bridging Discourse and Practice ... 22
Chapter 2 – The Narrative of Re-appropriation of Public Space: Equating Privatization with Spatial Democratization ... 28
2.1. Introduction ... 28
2.2. Reinventing the City: Blurring the Boundaries Between Private and Public Spaces ... 29
2.3. Forging Publicness from Privatization: Staging Universality and Inclusiveness ... 34
2.4. Hijacking the ‘Occupy’ Tactics: Appropriating the Precept of Re-appropriation ... 42
Chapter 3 – A Step Forward, Two Steps Back for Regaining the City: Enacting Dissensus to Restoring Consensus on Neoliberal Urbanism ... 48
3.1. Introduction ... 48
3.2. Between Politics and Police: Disrupting the Symbolic Distribution of the Sensible, Fostering the Material Partition of Space ... 49
3.3. Over-Identification and the Spirit of Capitalism: The Antidote to Urban Subversion Lies in the Very Poison ... 57
3.4. The Mirante as an Urban Enclave: Disguising Conformism and Dissipating Nihilism 61 Conclusion ... 68
Works Cited ... 72
Introduction
This thesis explores what happens when critical art is deployed in a revitalized public space, with focus on the tensions between resistance to and complicity with neoliberal urbanism that stem from the intersection of aesthetic and spatial practices. The space in question is the Mirante 9 Julho1 – a mix of art gallery, cafe, restaurant, and open-air cinema
situated in a state-owned historic building in São Paulo city, which was left abandoned and remained disinvested over decades. Inaugurated in August 2015, this self-entitled ‘cultural space’ is the result of a public-private partnership between the municipality and a group of entrepreneurs through which the run-down structure – a sort of belvedere constructed in the early 1900s – was regenerated for commercial ends. The artworks, in their turn, comprise the Mirante’s opening exhibition Ocupação Artística ‘Rolê no Mirante’ (Artistic Occupation
‘Rolê at the Mirante’, in English) by the collective of street photographers Coletivo do Rolê,
which centered on criticizing São Paulo’s urban decay and endemic socio-spatial
marginalization. The exhibition encompassed an ensemble of artworks based on different artistic supports – wheat-pasted posters, a video-installation, a photo-installation, and backlit photos –, which expose the naked reality of the city’s neglected spaces, the people that circulate by or inhabit them, and the battles over changing this panorama of omission.
My interest in this crossroads of politicized art and urban change was born from my perplexity at the widespread celebration of the Mirante – that is to say, at what I took as a generalized lack of criticism towards the model of urbanism entailed in the belvedere’s revitalization. In the face of such a consensual reception, I wondered: why did the idea of a public-private partnership not raise controversy even among those who were supposed to be watchful in regard to this matter, i.e., social movements and people at the left of the political spectrum? My claim is that such ‘unanimity’, so to speak, is lubricated by the amalgam of
critical art and a subtle form of spatial privatization strategically disguised in what I define as a narrative of ‘culture-led revitalization and re-appropriation of public space’. This
combination, I contend, opens avenues for reflecting on the intricate ideological mechanisms by which spatial commodification veneers the “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, “Rebel Cities” 55) it entails and thereby manages to become more ubiquitous and less
conspicuous, more supported and less disputed despite of their negative effects. In this sense, my object boils down to the meanings that spring from the interplay between the Mirante’s revitalized space and the exhibition: how do these meanings affect, either supporting or contesting, ossified perceptions of the production, reshaping, occupation, and distribution of the city’s space? To be more specific: in what manner and to what extent do the synergy between these two realms – artworks and the physical apparatus of showcase – plays a part in recasting the colonization of the urban space by capital?
In order to unravel these questions, I take the exhibition as intrinsically context-bound – that is, as a sort of site-specific artistic practice, “in which the meaning of art is constituted in relation to its institutional frames” (Deutsche, “Evictions” 264). And, once assumed that “the setting and context of art conditions and frames it, it is necessary to question why works are created and for whose interests” (Mathews, “Aestheticizing” 669). That is to say that, in analysing the exhibition, I take into account the its conditions of existence in the realm of the belvedere’s revitalization – how its conceptualization relates to the locus of display and how the artistic discourse intermingles with the institutional one –, as well as of global trends and local conjectures regarding urban policies. For, as Deutsche notes, “the significance of an art’s exhibition is not simply given or discovered, it is produced”, inasmuch as “the meaning of a work of art does not reside permanently within the works itself but is formed only in relation to an outside – to the manner of the work’s presentation” – and therefore is “contingent rather than absolute” (Deutsche, “Evictions” 295 and 264).
By the same token, I take urban space – and, by extension, the Mirante’s space – as neither neutral nor natural, but as a politically contested field: as a locus, a (re)producer, and a product of contradictions, deeply marked by competing meanings and representations
concerning to its role in society and in the economic system. In this sense, I follow Lefebvre in rejecting the conception of space as something that exists by itself – as a fixed, innocent, and empty thing, an objective container ready to be filled by contents (36) –, apprehending it rather as a social construction bound up with the capitalist modes of production (53). Hence, I focus on the social production of the Mirante – on looking into the forces in the boil beneath the apparent coherence of the space, that is, the ideological instruments of dominance and homogenization that both masks and repress the conflictual nature of urban spaces (307-8). Further, I build on Deutsche’s assertion that space is not only materially constructed, but also discursively constituted, dispensing thus a “strict opposition between physical social spaces, on the one hand, and discourse or representation, on the other” (Deutsche, “Question n.p.). For space, she reminds us, “is not an entity but a relationship” (n.p.).
Tapping into these remarks on how space frames the meaning-making process in art and how art partakes the production of space, I will adapt the methodology proposed by Bal to explore the narrative dimension of art exhibitions. According to her, the way of showing artifacts – the gesture of exposing – is always a way of telling, so that the museum display consists in a sign system in the midway of verbal and visual, information and persuasion (“Telling” 561). Coming from this, I will take the gesture of exposing in the exhibition as a discursive act, more precisely, as a constative act – in a narrow sense, a statement, an argument (“Practice” 7-8) –, bearing in mind that such gesture is embedded in power
structures, insofar as “only those who are invested with cultural authority can ben expository agents” (10). Such an approach requires me to account for the three elements involved in the exhibition, as Bal suggests: the “first person” – the expository agent embodied by the museum or curator; the “second person” – the visitor; and the “third person” – the object on display
(“Double Exposures” 4). According to her, the gesture of exposing entails two discursive acts by the first person: presenting – the act by which the first person points to things on display, inviting the second person to look at them (158); and informing – the act of “telling” by which the first person asserts his/her epistemic authority. In affirming that “what is presented here is the truth”, the first person endows the exposed objects with particular meanings (2).
In analyzing an object that crosscuts language and image – “an verbal imagery” object (Bal, “Visual” 22) –, I will take the act of presenting and informing as encompassing not only the exhibition per se, but also the Mirante’s space and its institutional discourse2. Therein the diversified nature of the thesis’ corpus: the exhibition’s artworks and curatorial text, the belvedere’s revitalized space, texts and images extracted from the Mirante’s website and its Facebook fan page, and also statements by the development’s partners in news pieces. Hence, the combination of textual and visual analysis of space, art, and discourses is the starting point for me to delve into how the exhibition plays a part in the production of the Mirante’s space.
Also calling on Bal, I will take this corpus as a ‘narrative text’ – the “particular medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings, or a combination thereof” (“Narratology” 5), through which a story is told. By story, in turn, I understand the
presentation of the events regarding the Mirante in a certain manner, that is, as the “particular manifestation, inflection, and ‘colouring’” of the “series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors” (5).
Drawing on this conceptualization, I will dissect the Mirante’s narrative of ‘culture-led revitalization and re-appropriation of public space’, taking it as a dominant narrative among other possible ones – namely, as a “cultural apparatus that directs the reading and writing of
2 In this vein, it is noteworthy that Bal takes museum and galleries’ booklets as part of the museum
discourse in some of the analysis she brings in the book “Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis”. Likewise, while applying Bal’s methodology to the analysis of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Murat Aydemir resorts to the museum’s guide.
the urban through a series of images and meanings” (Mathews, “Artcetera” 2852). By so doing, I will explore “the social embedding of the narrative – in other words, its relationship to reality” (Bal, “Narratology” 189). I am interested mostly in exploring the rhetorical effect of the Mirante’s narrative in providing an account of what happened with the belvedere – what it was, how it was transformed, and what it became –, thus circumscribing the
possibilities of interpretation. For, as Bal suggests, the most important aspect to be disclosed with regard to a narrative is “what, in the game of make-believe, is being proposed for us to believe or see before us, hate, love, admire, argue against, shudder before, or stand in awe of” (“Narratology” 229). In the case of the Mirante, it is worth investigating because “often the power to impose a coherent vision of a space enables a group to claim that space. This is a framing process” (Zukin, “Cultures City” 279).
In order to structure my ‘line of thinking’ along this thesis, I will divide it into three chapters by means of which I will take three broad argumentative steps that complete each other: I will start with the most generic aspects of the interplay between the Mirante and the exhibition – how it situates in a global trend bound up with the guidelines of neoliberal urbanism; then I will go into the particularities of such intersection – the degree to which it attunes to São Paulo’s local conjuncture in the realm of urban policies and politics; and, finally, I will get to what I consider to be the most specific and revealing facet of the relationship between the artistic and spatial practices at stake – the incarnation of an anti-capitalist critique as a form of preventing criticism and reaching consensus.
Following this division, the first and the second chapters will be dedicated to explore the ways by which the exhibition substantiates the two backbones of the Mirante’s narrative. Chapter 1 – “The Narrative of Culture-led Revitalization: The Place of Art in Place-Making” – focuses on how the exhibition fuels a romanticized ‘ready-made’ story of ‘culture-led revitalization’, in which the belvedere’s renewal figures as a form of redemption of urban decline through culture. Throughout the chapter, I will resort to theories by Dora Apel,
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalyn Deutsche, Sharon Zukin, and others to contend that the exhibition’s wheat-pasted posters portraying São Paulo’s ruin imagery and the Mirante’s narrative comprise a synergic effect that contributes not only to legitimating and naturalizing the appropriation of a public space by capital, but also to aestheticizing the belvedere, creating an alluring sense of uniqueness and authenticity. Further, by drawing mostly on Jamie Peck’s critique to Richard Florida’s ‘creative city paradigm’, I will discuss how this art-based place-making strategy yields a disguise for the spatial commodification that suits harmonically to the tastes of consumers eager to conflate an anti-establishment ethics and a counter-culture ethos with a materialist and comfortable lifestyle.
In chapter 2 – “The Narrative of Re-appropriation of Public Space: Equating Privatization with Spatial Democratization”, I will center on how the Mirante and the
exhibition builds on São Paulo’s urban conjuncture and localized creative policies to entail a ‘tailor-made’ story of ‘re-appropriation of a public space’. In order to support the argument that the synergy between the Mirante and the exhibition repacks the appropriation of belvedere’s space by the capital as the re-appropriation of an urban space by the city’s dwellers, I will firstly call on theories by David Harvey and Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner to discuss the ways by which neoliberal urbanism adapts to different contexts and institutional frameworks, smoothly extending its tentacles into initiatives focused on the promotion of collective social good. Coming from this, I will follow Cara Gendel Ryan and Rosalyn Deutsche to explore how the exhibition corroborates the Mirante’s claims on the publicness, inclusiveness, and diversity of its space by means of the aestheticization of poverty. And, in the wake of this rhetoric, I will explore the manners by which the Mirante and the exhibition hijack the meanings attached to ‘occupy tactics’ as a means of associating the belvedere’s revitalization to the actualization of what Henry Lefebvre defines as the ‘right to the city’. By so doing, I will draw upon Alexander Vasudevan’s and John Hammond’s remarks on the meanings attached to the ‘occupy movements’.
My approach to the synergy between the Mirante and the exhibition will slightly change in chapter 3 – “A Step Forward, Two Steps Back for Regaining the City: Enacting Dissensus to Restoring Consensus on Neoliberal Urbanism” –, for I will not look into how such synergy produces a narrative that justifies, naturalizes, and glosses over the privatization of a public space, but into how such narrative produces the Mirante’s space by legitimizing conflicts over regaining urban spaces, endorsing radical urban subversive actions, and staging an anti-capitalist critique. To be more precise, I will investigate which sort of space such criticism produces. In order to do that, I will rely on Jacques Rancière’s accounts on the distribution of the sensible to investigate to what extent the exhibition foments dissent by promoting a symbolical re-distribution of the urban space that paradoxically contrasts with the material spatial order which the Mirante entails. In the realm of such discussion, I will draw upon works by Pablo Ortellado, Marília Budó et al., and Rodrigo Carreiro on the dynamics of black bloc tactics. Then, following Matteo Pasquinelli and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, I will scrutinize the ideological mechanism by which the exhibition fuels dissensus from the ruling urban order only to dispel further criticism and to contain the anti-capitalist forces, thereby lubricating an uncontentious privatization of the belvedere. Finally, calling on Manuel Delgado, I will get to the core argument of the chapter: the idea that dissent and criticism redound to the construction of the Mirante as a ‘space of consensus’, which invigorates the illusion of hypostatizing a theoretical space – the idealized construction of public space – into a physical space.
Chapter 1 – The Narrative of Culture-led Revitalization: The Place of Art in Place-Making
1.1. Introduction
“From forgotten to unforgettable”3. This short slogan, highlighted in the Mirante’s website homepage, encapsulates what I refer to as a ‘narrative of culture-led urban
revitalization’. In a similar vein, the sentence following the catch phrase entails a sort of epilogue that summarizes the belvedere’s trajectory from a liability to an asset: “an
abandoned place, rediscovered to be transformed into the cultural space most unexpected of the city”. One can say that this epilogue unveils the extent to which the Mirante’s narrative echoes a well-known storyline pervading initiatives of urban change around the world: the previous state of negligence, the redemption through culture, and the beginning of a new era marked by uniqueness. A comparison between the belvedere’s past and present comes to give substance to this basic argument by implying that the Mirante represents an opportunity to exploit the space’s overlooked potential – the building, it has been argued, went from a run-down structure to a distinctive cultural amenity by means of an adaptive reuse of a valuable architectonic heritage. This is made plain in the section Past, in which the contrast between the belvedere’s historical value and its erstwhile underuse state is stressed: “Since its opening, in 1938, the tunnel of the 9 de Julho Avenue4 keeps a secret. What were supposed to be a belvedere, a saloon, an observatory, turned out to be nothing along 76 years. A space so privileged that ended up empty of all life”. This contrast is deepened in the section Present, which emphasizes the virtue of actualizing the belvedere’s latent attributes by endowing it
3 This and all the following fragments extracted from the Mirante’s website and Facebook page were
translated from Portuguese.
with an invigorating, convivial atmosphere without losing sight of its cultural significance: “The Mirante rebirths as a polyvalent cultural space, restaurant, and cafe open to the public for free. A space where different initiatives can dialogue: urban art, musical projects, open-air exhibition of films, and independent fairs”. This idealized view of the belvedere’s
revitalization is reinforced in the section dedicated to the cafe: “We are providing a new look for something that has always been present and visible but that went unnoticed in our day-to-day. It is about the valuing and re-signification of space, culture, and history” [emphasis added]. In this regard, it is worth recalling that the belvedere was a token of urban decay before being revitalized, as mentioned in the thesis’ introduction: the building was left abandoned by the municipality for decades, when its physical structure was deteriorated and its very existence as a space available for use remained ignored by society.
In this chapter, I will look into the ways by which the exhibition substantiates this romanticized discursive construction of the belvedere’s revitalization – which, by itself, may sound as a mere storytelling piece for brand marketing, without much credibility. By so doing, I will center on three aspects: 1) The artworks’ representation of São Paulo’s ruin imagery and its role in legitimating the privatization of a public space; 2) The deployment of art – particularly street art – to create a counter-cultural reputation and forge a unique sense of place; and 3) How the synergy between the exhibition and the narrative yields an ideological cover for the commodification of city in sync with the expectations of ‘creative consumers’.
1.2. Building on Ruin Imagery: Overcoming Urban Decay
Looking into the synergy between the exhibition and the Mirante’s narrative requires one to explore the interplay between the artworks and the space where they are showcased – namely, the belvedere’s revitalized structure. For, by using the Mirante’s walls as a physical
support to display wheat paste posters depicting São Paulo’s run-down spaces (see fig. 1, 2, 3, and 4), the exhibition bolsters up and, I would even say, reifies, the contrast between the building’s past and present – that is, between the past of ruination, oblivion, and underuse, and the present of rehabilitation, social function, and cultural activity. In this sense, I would like to scrutinize artworks that stand out for representing São Paulo’s shabby, neglected, vacant spaces: the inner area of a crumbling mall – the wreckage of a escalator surrounded by a wholly decrepit structure (see fig. 5); a cracked sport court with remaining rubble and a metal structure on the foreground, and the façade of a decayed, abandoned building with broken windows on the background (see fig. 6); a tumbledown construction with dilapidated walls and a hole in the rotten ceiling (see fig. 7); a bleak wasteland entirely covered in litter, having a city’s skyline as a backdrop; (see fig. 8); a deteriorated auditorium full of rubbish, whose derelict, dirty walls are coated with graffiti (see fig. 9); and a sort of ballroom, with graffiti-covered walls and scattered debris on its classy chess style floor, whose exterior is being taken by growing vegetation (see fig. 10).
Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8 Fig. 9 Fig. 10
Created from photographs, these wheat paste posters yield a sterilized ruin imagery of São Paulo: destitute of contextualization, they present urban decay as a visual spectacle, investing in the aesthetic allure of the city’s disclaimed spaces, eliciting a voyeuristic gaze, and arousing the ‘poetry’ of the ruined cityscape. This sublimating effect of ruin imagery – particularly, of ‘deindustrial ruin imagery’ as a photographic genre – is thoroughly discussed by Apel in the essay Ruins of Capitalism. Coming from Detroit’s case, she inquires into how the ruin imagery of a city that went from the ‘capital of auto industry’ to a decrepit
deindustrialized land somehow triggers and at the same time displaces the fear of the
disastrous outcomes of capitalism. According to her, “the romantic narrative of the beauty of decay in the ruin image produces pleasure by containing and controlling the anxiety of decline through the safety and distance of representation” (n.p.). Key to engendering this sense of detachment is the absence of an urban populace in the spaces portrayed, in that this ‘lack’, so to speak, effaces the element of human suffering that usually induces the mechanism of identification. In the wheat paste posters, the São Paulo’s ruins are depicted as essentially devoid of people and as disconnected from the city’s ‘functional’ daily life, thus promoting an erasure of the dwellers surrounding these urban areas. And, as Apel contends, “if the victims of the city’s decline disappear, the discourse of ruination becomes one about architecture and landscape […] Photography that focuses only on the beauty of decay in architecture thus distances the viewer from the effects of decay on people and obscures the ongoing crisis of poverty and unemployment” (Apel n.p).
By the same token, Arnold observes that ‘urban decay photography’ fetishizes places of ruin, instilling them with a “tragic beauty” (334). According to her, this sort of imagery freezes the depicted object in a remote, melancholic moment that evokes death – that is to say, that conveys an “impression of disaster and sudden ruination” bound up with an ‘apocalyptic imagination’: “the once heavily occupied spaces lie empty in such images, stripped of any human presence. This produces an impression of cataclysm, of some temporally distant
upheaval that resulted in the abandonment of the building” (333-4). In this vein, the absence of people – and, I would say, of life as a whole – on the wheat paste posters, allied to the images’ contrast with the belvedere’s revitalized structure, suggest that the represented spaces, neglected by the state and overlooked by society, are “already dead and mummified” (Apel n.p), just waiting the time of ‘resurrection’.
One can say, then, that, by juxtaposing São Paulo’s ruin imagery, marked by
emptiness and lifeless, with the belvedere’s revitalized building and recreative atmosphere, the exhibition presents at once the disease – urban decay, and the remedy – urban
revitalization. For, if on the one hand the artworks feed the anxiety of decline and the
apocalyptic imagination by exposing São Paulo’s ruined cityscape, on the other they do it in a sanitized way, that is, glossed in beauty and placed in the safe environment of a regenerated space. In this regard, Apel notes that “yet just as ruin imagery challenges the logic of neoliberalism and the capitalist state as an effective protector of its citizens and a source of progress and rationality, it also challenges us to consider how our declining cities may be reclaimed and reimagined” (n.p.). Hence, the Mirante emerges as a sort of anxiolytic, of a herald of a new world: the ruins are a backdrop that points towards an overcame past – to post-apocalyptic ashes; while the present of the renewed belvedere points towards the
incoming future, that is, towards the hopes of a fresh beginning for the city. In this sense, the wheat paste posters come to evince the redemptive potential of ‘culture-led revitalization’.
On top of that, the poetic contrast between past and present, which forms the backbone of the Mirante’s narrative of revitalization, is implied in the exhibition’s curatorial text5 itself, in that it refers to São Paulo as a “tattered urban fabric” haunted by “bits of the past that keep on surfacing”, and even alludes to a process of deindustrialization – “lights that go through
5 The fragments mentioned here were translated from Portuguese.
the gaps of the toothless roof and design geometries on the floor of the factory that is no longer working” –, calling attention to the seeming contradiction between the city’s blighted spaces and its rhythm of urban sprawl: “In a city that expands out of control such as São Paulo, it is almost unbelievable that there are plenty of unused spaces, wastelands, abandoned buildings, forgotten areas”. The anxiety that may spring from the ruin imagery this text evokes is quickly alleviated by the establishment of a direct relationship with the belvedere’s revitalization: “Reconstructing this fabric, weaving with devotion, taking care of open
wounds, looking fondly at the rotten areas under overpasses, are the themes that bind all those who participate in the Mirante’s rescue”.
Coming from these remarks, I would say that the wheat paste posters and the
curatorial text do not explore the roots of the ruin imagery they spotlight. For, the pictures and the text that was supposed to enlighten them obsess “on the moment of obliteration, the ruins that remove a place from its (current, historical) time and space” (Arnold 335). In this vein, Leary points out that ruin photography is about “pictures of nothing and no place in
particular”, which provide “a mass of unique details that fails to tell a complete story”, fueling historical oblivion while feeding into “the exuberant connoisseurship of dereliction” (n.p.). According to him, such imagery do not shed light on the conjuncture in which ruination unfolds and therefore “present no way to understand our own relationship to the decline we are seeing. After all, this is not Rome or Greece, vanished civilizations; these ruins are our own, and the society they indict is ours as well. As a purely aesthetic object, even with the best intentions, ruin photography cannot help but exploit a city’s misery” (n.p.). Apel, by the same token, claims that “photographs of crumbling neighborhoods explain very little about the complex causes of decline or the ramifications of ruination for the city’s future” (n.p).
As a result from this lack of further context and explanation about the forces on the boil in the realm of urban decay, the exhibition gives the illusion that São Paulo’s ruined spaces stem from past events rather than from an ongoing process, thus implying that urban
decline is a natural – and therefore inescapable – phenomena, so that the best way to cope with it is to focus on the ‘cure’ rather than on the ‘prevention’. This chimes harmonically with the Mirante’s narrative, which refers to the belvedere’s physical deterioration and
abandonment in terms of an accidental heedlessness – a “forgotten”, “unnoticed” space that is “rediscovered” and “rebirths”. Such naturalization plays a key part in diverting attention away from the fact that spatial ruination is generally bound up with the systematic dynamics of corporate investment, disinvestment, and reinvestment – translated into a ‘see-saw’ of development, underdevelopment, and redevelopment –, which sets the real estate market in motion as capital jumps from one space to another. For, as Lees et al. highlight, “capitalism is always creating new places, new environments designed for profit and accumulation, in the process devalorizing previous investments and landscapes” (51).
It follows that the synergy between the ruin imagery yielded by the artworks and the Mirante’s narrative somehow anestheticizes one’s critical understanding of what underlies urban decay – social, economic, and cultural causes and outcomes, and interests entailed –, thereby glossing over the very nature of the revitalized belvedere: a privatized public space turned into a consumable good through corporate capital investment. Therefore, the exhibition contributes to recasting the commodification of space as a necessary and intrinsically positive process – a ‘rescue’, as the curatorial text stresses. For, as pointed out by Apel, ruin imagery allows “the real agents of degeneration – corporations and the capitalist state – to evade responsibility and justify the city’s takeover by the state, its forced bankruptcy, the attack on workers’ pensions, the privatization of city services, and other threatened austerity measures” (n.p). As regards the Mirante, the emphasis on São Paulo’s ruined cityscape rests upon instigating a sense of urgency and inevitability: the reference to the belvedere’s past of abandonment comes to attest that the public-private partnership behind the building’s revitalization is the only viable way of recovering the place and embedding it into the city’s cultural life, so that is may be offered up to the dwellers. This is worthy noting because, as
Dikeç observes, “urban policy is guided by particular ways of imagining space, and different ways of imagining space have different implications for the constitution of perceived
problems and proposed solutions” (“Badlands” 171).
However, the exhibition’s synergetic effect with the Mirante’s narrative exceeds the ruin imagery built by the wheat paste posters. As we shall see in the next section, the artworks’ potential to bring to light the need, and therefore the benefit, of revitalizing the belvedere also encompasses their very aesthetic dimension – the simple fact that they are art.
1.3. Aestheticizing Urban Revitalization: Tapping into Subversive Art
The exhibition bolsters the Mirante’s narrative not only by building up a self-referential ruin imagery of São Paulo that depict “existing urban conditions as inevitable” (Deutsche, “Evictions” xii), thus corroborating the imperativeness of recovering decayed spaces, but also by materializing, in its aesthetic form, the claim of a so-called culture-led regeneration. For art, per se, regardless of what it might represent or the intentions behind it, entails an argument in favor of urban restructuring – one more proof of the superiority of the present of revitalization over the past of ruination. In this vein, Deutsche observes that “art’s supposed universality and autonomy – actually a constructed relation of exteriority to other spaces – has permitted ‘the aesthetic’ to legitimate all kinds of oppressive economic and political systems” (“Art and Public Space” 42). By the same token, Zukin observes that “culture can also be used to frame, and humanize, the space of real estate development. Cultural producers who supply art (and sell ‘interpretation’) are sought because they
legitimize the appropriation of space” (“Cultures of Cities” 22). Drawing on these remarks, I would say that the wheat paste posters are converted into ‘seals of approval’, so to speak.
After all, who would be against art? Who would question an artist’s endorsement? And who would oppose to a space that fosters culture?
One can say, then, that the exhibition’s legitimating power lies on the presupposition that arts and culture as a whole, rather than capital, is the driving force behind the belvedere’s revitalization. In this sense, the artistic interventions come to tinge the privatization of a public space with a gloss of aesthetic enhancement, thus allowing for repacking the
commodification of the city as a cultural development – in other words, for “framing urban change through the aestheticization of space” (Mathews, “Aestheticizing” 667). Underpinned by the same reasoning brought into play in many other initiatives of urban renewal – evoking a panorama of narrow escape from urban decline and presenting cultural upgrading as a magical solution –, the symbolic operation entailed in this framing approach is by no means new: it is part of a pervasive strategy that involves “reinventing the city, turning its pervasive image of decay into an emotionally and aesthetically satisfying, and sometimes even cool and glamorous, lifestyle” (Zukin, “Naked City” 222). Such ‘reinvention’ reflects a rejection of standardized, conventional, dull urban spaces – a distaste that Zukin attributes to “an
influential turn in consumer culture that aestheticizes the city’s gritty authenticity, in contrast to the bland homogeneity of corporate offices and suburban homes, and praises the found authenticity of do-it-yourself performances by artists and musicians” (“Naked City” 37). In this vein, the choice of wheat pasting is strategic, in that it infuses the belvedere with an ‘ur-landscape’ of grittiness. For, being embedded in the comprehensive aesthetic practice of street art, the wheat paste posters are supposed to be yielded by means of independent, grassroots, spontaneous, counter-hegemonic interventions in the spatial environment (Schacter 164-5), and therefore are, to a great extent, regarded as a counter-cultural artistic manifestation, averse to the commodification of art and the privatization of public spaces. Coming from this, I would say that the option for wheat pasting signals a commitment to fostering unconventional and non-institutionalized aesthetic practices – that is,
artworks bred and exposed outside conventional art venues, which are not part of the elitist art canon –, such as suggested in the website’s section Gallery when describing the Mirante as “a transitional space to expose without necessarily hanging paints. Immaterial art that is not bi-dimensional neither traditional. Art to projecting, intervening, reforming, integrating spaces,
and provoking the public” [emphasis added]. This is particularly relevant if one takes into
account that the Mirante is located behind the MASP (Sao Paulo Museum of Art) – São Paulo’s major art museum and one of the city’s architectonic landmarks. Hence, I would say that the exhibition makes a counterpoint to the scene of mainstream art, serving as a marker of the Mirante’s uniqueness and thence confirming its self-proclaimed identity as an alternative, experimental, and mostly anti-establishment cultural space. Therein lies the key role of “the aesthetic of street art – untainted by corporate influence, a willful expression of self” (Banet-Weiser 104) – in fueling the Mirante’s narrative. In the website’s section What is it?, the belvedere is described as trendy and at the same time nonconventional, and comes even to be raised to the status of ‘centrality’: “it is popular but not always mainstream. It is plaza to meet, table to work, screen to watch, food to try, party to celebrate. A center in the center of
everything” [emphasis added]. By the same token, the section Cinema describes the open-air
movie theater as a space “unlikely as the city, which features everything but what is already
featuring out there. Mix styles and thematic programing that involves music and arts”
[emphasis added].
This synergy between the aesthetic of the wheat paste posters and the narrative is to a great extent underpinned by “the seemingly contradictory quality of street art – its
simultaneous reliance on ‘dangerous’ street cred and its insistence on sustaining a ‘legitimate’ place in culture” (Banet-Weiser 104). From this follows that street art boosts the Mirante’s identity as a non-mainstream cultural space also for being acknowledged as intrinsically subversive, that is, as an unsanctioned aesthetic practice that enacts an artistic
but also as part of the artworks and as a political statement. Ironically, this branding potential, so to speak, comes precisely from the street art’s alleged “morality of antibranding”, in that this aesthetic practice “associates with graffiti and tagging not just aesthetically but also in terms of the ethos of vandalism, secrecy, illegality, risk” (Banet-Weiser 96). And, as Harvey highlights, fostering transgressive local initiatives allows for “the valuation of uniqueness, authenticity, particularity, originality and all manner of other dimensions to social life that are inconsistent with the homogeneity presupposed by commodity production” (“Art of Rent”
107-8). Regarded as intrinsically rebellious and politically engaged, being commonly associated with the tenets of reclaiming the city and challenging the commodification of urban space, street art redounds to building the Mirante’s putative reputation as an “arena[s] for counterculture, for ‘raging against the machine’, for female liberation, for gay expression, for aesthetic creation, and for artistic experimentation” (Lees et al. 123).
Hence, I would say that the wheat paste posters transform the Mirante’s space in physical and symbolic ways: they endow the belvedere with a gritty, authentic visual mark of distinction and with a gloss of ‘anti-status quo atmosphere’ vis-à-vis the clichéd real estate-made façades and the technocratic urban environment bound up with mass culture, thus yielding a unique, remarkable trait. Needless to mention that, mobilized in redevelopment strategies, street art “is often smoothed of contestation and served up for aesthetic delight” (Mathews, “Aestheticizing” 669). This is particularly symptomatic in regard to artworks that seem to have been placed in outer areas of the belvedere precisely to create an underground, edgy look (see fig. 11 and 12). Reduced to image-making instruments, they end up playing a merely beautifying role and converting the Mirante into an “object of visual consumption” (Zukin, “Cultures of Cities” 28). In this sense, street art, as deployed in the Mirante, “create[s] the impression of affluence, vibrancy, conviviality, change and regeneration, while at the same time being used to mask the increasingly fractured and polarised social and economic realities that characterized life for the majority of urban dwellers” (Hall 50).
Fig. 11 Fig. 12
Next section, I will dig into this masking operation, focusing on how the wheat paste posters not only deviate attention from the corporate takeover of a public space, but also fuels selective forms of elite consumption and sociability that underpin what Smith calls “the class remake of the central urban landscape” (“Urban Frontier” 37).
1.4. Surfing the Wave of Creativity: Bridging Discourse and Practice
One can say that the Mirante – a space that results from a corporate-governmental partnership and whose identity is built upon its uniqueness – comprises what Peck ironically describes as “hipsterization strategies” designed for “celebrating culture and embracing growth at the same time” (“Struggling” 740 and 765). The sarcastic neologism was coined in reference to Richard Florida’s ‘creative city paradigm’ – a blueprint for cities development that raises a privileged class of consumers, that is, their lifestyle, needs, and preferences, to the forefront of urban regeneration. Rest upon the idea that “creativity has become the principal driving force in the development of cities, regions, and nations” (Florida 1), this paradigm focuses on bringing forth a cultural, unique, socially diverse, vibrant urban atmosphere with potential to allure and nurture what Florida define as ‘creative class’ – an
affluent, free-spirited, tolerant, and nonconformist segment of society “whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and new creative content” (7-8).
Stemming from this ‘recipe’ arises the policymaking credo that the cities’ potential to prosper in the global economy depends upon the magnetism of their urban spaces and the quality of the cultural milieu they offer up – a guideline that has greatly been understood in terms of revitalizing central areas and engendering recreative spaces, leisure facilities,
flagship art venues, cultural amenities, and trendy neighborhoods that suit the tastes of hipster consumers6. This may include parks, art galleries, stylish new retail stores, vintage clothes shops, small scale boutiques, shabby chic cafes, indie music venues, gourmet food markets, themed restaurants, among others spaces that inspire novelty, induce vitality, and incite buzz. In this vein, I would say that the Mirante incarnates a sort of microcosm of the urban space envisaged in the realm of Florida’s paradigm, for it comprehends a patchwork of authentic, alternative, non-mainstream cultural attractions – music, cinema, food, and arts – that are said to be ‘curated’. At the time of the Mirante’s opening, two curators performed this work of curatorship, so to speak: one was in charge of monthly choosing, from outside the established
6 In this vein,Schacter observes that cities all around the world has succumbed to creative-based
public polices. According to him, “unless you want your city to go the way of Detroit – the habitually used urban bogeyman – you must attract Creatives (that most horrific of new common nouns), you must build bike-paths and bohemian creative quarters […]. From Berlin to Barcelona, from Buenos Aires to the Bay Area, city authorities have, like dominoes, lined up and fallen flat for this redemptive creed” (163). By the same token, Mathews argues that the creative city paradigm provides a dictum for public policies and city’s programs of urban regeneration pivoting around arts and culture, which focus on “investments in cultural flagships – museums, galleries, precincts – to harness public consumption” (“Aestheticizing” 667). Peck, for his turn, remarks that these creative policies involve the creation of ‘cool’ neighborhoods teeming “‘authentic’ historical buildings, converted lofts, walkable streets, plenty of coffeeshops, art and live-music spaces, ‘organic and indigenous street culture’, and a range of other typical features of gentrifying, mixed-use, inner-urban neighborhoods” (“Struggling” 745).
gastronomic scene, a chef to prepare the menu of the restaurant O Mirante Efêmero7, thus placating the foodies appetite for gourmetized newness; and the other, of carefully selecting artists, musicians, and films to feature in the place’s events, happenings, pop-ups, and performances. The Mirante’s inauguration program, for instance, counted on three DJs from São Paulo’s alternative music circuit, one of them known for mixing dub, soul, funk, afrobeat, Brazilian music, and EDM; on the screening of Terra em Transe (Entranced Earth), an avant-garde and experimental film from 1967 reavant-garded as an icon of ‘Cinema Novo’ – Brazil’s new wave cinema movement (see fig. 13); and, naturally, on the exhibition. To these curated ‘attractions’, one may add the originality and exclusiveness of the cafe: as stated in the website, it is the first sale point of a branded ‘gourmet’ coffee, “considered one of the best grains in Brazil and present in the best coffee shops in the world”. I would say that the café incarnates the Mirante’s ethos: the refinement of selected grains is softened by the once unfashionable tradition of filter coffee – it is cool, but not snobbish (see fig. 14).
Fig. 13 Fig. 14
Coming from this, one can say that the Mirante’s revitalized space and its ‘curated’ ensemble of attractions are meant to suit the tastes of the so-called ‘creative class’ – a group that I take as comprising creative consumers rather than creative producers. I would say that
such consumers’ ethics invigorates what Boltanski and Chiapello refers to as ‘artistic critique’ – a systemized and incisive demand for authenticity, freedom, and autonomy, inspired by the bohemian lifestyle of the nineteenth century and motivated by a profound dissatisfaction with an over-commoditized life8 (xviii). Stemming from the 1960s’ counterculture movement, the ‘artistic critique’ targets on the alienated consumption spurred by an increasingly
dehumanized capitalism, in that it “foregrounds the loss of meaning and, in particular, the loss of the sense of what is beautiful and valuable, which derives from standardization and
generalized commodification, affecting not only everyday objects but also artworks […] and human beings. It stresses the objective impulse of capitalism and bourgeois society to regiment and dominate human beings” (Boltanski and Chiapello 38).
I would risk saying that, by offering up a unique experience outside blatantly commodifyied spaces attuned to a homogenized mass culture – namely, an experience
through which one can enact an anti-establishment morality and non-conformist values –, the Mirante responds to the claims comprised in the artistic critique. I would go even further to assert that, in the face of the possibility of engaging in such a ‘non-mainstream experience’, the very act of consuming and being at the belvedere arises as a way of creatives not only satisfying (and stating) their distinctive tastes, but also supporting new modes of occupying and experiencing the city, while rejecting the conventional market-oriented, capital-driven, technocratic forms of planning, shaping, and inhabiting urban spaces.
However, this romanticized view of the Mirante – bolstered by its narrative of
culturally sensitive urban restructuring and underpinned by its consumers idealized self-image –, clashes with the public-private machine behind the belvedere’s revitalization. For, as Peck
8 Boltanski and Chiapello suggest that the reign of the ‘artistic critique’ since the 1960’s has came to
the cost of disregarding the ‘social critique’ – the refusal of egoism and indignation at suffering, channeled to a demand for wealth distribution and social mobility “associated with the history of the working-class movement, and stressing exploitation” (xiii).
argues, the creative spaces “amount to a plea for grassroots agency with a communitarian conscience amongst a privileged class of creatives, lubricated by modest public-sector support for culturally appropriate forms of gentrification and consumption” (“Struggling” 760), which therefore has “enabling, sustaining and normalizing a culturally tinged form of neoliberal urbanism” (464). According to him, the creative city paradigm turns culture and recreation into a marketing instrument for commoditizing cities, neighborhoods, and retails – in other words, for greasing the wheels of a model of reinvestment designed for the sake of the upper classes, inasmuch as it “is easily bolted on to business-as-usual urban-development policies, while providing additional ideological cover for market-driven or state-assisted programs of gentrification” (“Creativity Fix” 7).
It is on the realm of this contradiction between the Mirante’s narrative and the “amalgam of corporate and state powers and practices” (Smith, “New Globalism” 437)” underlying it, between the consumers’ aspirations and the exclusionary nature of their reification, that the exhibition unveils its value as a disguise – or, in Peck’s terms, as an ideological cover. By calling attention to the contrast between the belvedere’s past of
ruination and the present of regeneration, and by endowing the space with a cultural identity and a unique sense of place, thereby inflating the perceived necessity of revitalization and allure of Mirante, the artworks at the same time justify, fuel, and camouflage the
appropriation of a public space by capital, bridging the gap between the redevelopment agents’ discourse and practices, between the consumer’s expectations and the reality. In this regard, Greenberg notes that “one of the most important effects of branding is to naturalise, and reify, the image of its commodified object, and so to obscure the social and historical processes that produce it” (qtd. in Mould 30).
Accordingly, I contend that the wheat paste posters analyzed along this chapter
incarnate a double-edge aesthetic device that commodifies and hegemonizes the belvedere by enacting de-commodification and anti-establishment practices. In other words, the artworks
engage in and conceal “what Marxist geographers called ‘the politics of space’ – a phrase that refers not only to the struggles taking place inside spaces but, more importantly, to the
struggles that produce and maintain those spaces” (Deutsche, “Question” n.p.).
Nevertheless, the camouflage rendered by the exhibition is much more nuanced – it substantiates not only a story of ‘culture-led revitalization’ that runs along the deployment of art as a smokescreen for spatial commodification, but also a story of ‘re-appropriation of public space’ wherein privatizing ironically comes to mean democratizing. Diving into the multiple facets of this refined disguise operation requires one to probe into the particularities of São Paulo’s urban policy conjuncture, centering on how the interplay between art and space – namely, the exhibition and the Mirante – relates to the city’s localized creative strategies. That is the topic of the next chapter.
Chapter 2 – The Narrative of Re-appropriation of Public Space: Equating Privatization with Spatial Democratization
2.1. Introduction
The effectiveness of the Mirante’s narrative as an ideological cover for the privatization of urban space is bound up not only with a ready-made story of ‘culture-led revitalization’ that camouflages the commodification of the city with cultural upgrading, but also with a tailor-made story of ‘re-appropriation of a public space’ that tinges the corporate takeover of the belvedere with a gloss of democratization. The Mirante’s website insists that the venue is “open to the public for free”, “open and for all”, “a place that celebrates a new time to rescue the city and occupy the public spaces” [emphasis added] – claims that the narrative sustains by rhetorically connecting the belvedere’s revitalization with São Paulo’s urban conjuncture, particularly in regard to the micro-politics of space around the Mirante.
In this chapter, I will look into how the Mirante’s narrative articulates this parallel story of ‘regaining the belvedere’ by associating the building’s revitalization with spatial practices in consonance with what Lefebvre defines as ‘the right to the city’ – a concept that will be further discussed; and in what ways the exhibition provides additional evidence, so to speak, to substantiate such story. In order to do that, I will center on three axes of analysis: 1) How the narrative capitalizes on a discursively constructed correlation between the public-private partnership behind the Mirante and state-led initiatives for recovering the sense of the city as public; 2) The emphasis on the Mirante’s publicness and to which extent the artworks, by evoking the democratic values of social inclusiveness and diversity, play a part in
corroborating such allegation; and 3) The centrality of the notion of ‘occupation’, mobilized both in the narrative and the exhibition, in associating the Mirante with bottom-up movements
to reclaim urban spaces. By so doing, I aim at scrutinizing the manners by which the interplay between the narrative and the exhibition redounds to repacking the appropriation of public space by capital as the re-appropriation of an urban space by the city’s dwellers.
2.2. Reinventing the City: Blurring the Boundaries Between Private and Public Spaces
The Mirante’s narrative dispels the suspicion inspired by and glosses over the negative overtones attached to public-private partnerships by situating the belvedere’s revitalization – the contrast between the building’s past and present – within municipal initiatives centered on, or at least perceived as centered on, encouraging the São Paulo’s dwellers to explore and enjoy the city’s public spaces. The Facebook page created to promote the Mirante’s opening event points out that “the opening of the new cultural space of the city takes place on a
Sunday when the Paulista Avenue will be closed for cars and open to people”. It is a reference to the then-newly created project Paulista Aberta (Open Paulista, in English) – developed in the realm of the also then-newly implemented Right to the City Coordination9 –, which established the avenue as an automobile-free zone during the Sundays and public holidays, with the avowed aim of giving way to cyclists and pedestrians, as well as of fostering artistic, cultural, and sport manifestations. The specific Sunday of the Mirante’s opening – the August 23rd – was a sort of ‘test drive’ before the Municipality officially setting up the program Ruas
Abertas (Open Streets, in English), which extended the motor traffic restriction to other
streets of the city. The occasion was also marked by the launch of the continuation of the Paulista Avenue bike lane, whose first part had been inaugurated two months earlier.
9 The Coordination objectives, stated in the Municipality’s website, include: fostering and valuing the
recovery of the sense of the city as an arena for meetings, socialization, and conviviality, where plurality and diversity are ensured; and enabling the re-signification of public space as a space for enacting conflicts, expressing differences, and strengthening a sense of belonging (Coordenação n.p.).
It is noteworthy that this overlapping of dates was not a coincidence: initially planed to happen on the August 16th, the Mirante’s inauguration was postponed to the following week, so that it could concur with a São Paulo’s landmark: the day that Paulista Avenue, a symbol of the city, was turned into an emblem of the ‘publicness’ of the public spaces. In this regard, the Facebook event page refers to the opening as part of a festive moment
encompassing São Paulo as a whole: “It will be 12 hours of cultural activities to celebrate our city”10. The effort to capitalize on the association with Paulista Aberta is particularly evinced in a post published in the Mirante’s fan page, which says, “The Paulista is ours” (see fig. 15). A caption provides further information, highlighting that “now we can occupy the city’s most avenue with music, arts, bikes, and people” [emphasis added]. Illustrated with the image of a group of musicians busking on the avenue, in front of skyscrapers and surrounded by a crowd of passerby, the post reinforces the Mirante’s engagement not only with the reclaiming of São Paulo’s public spaces, but also with non-institutionalized art and nonmainstream culture, as well as with the ideals of participation, authenticity, and autonomy – values vastly explored in the exhibition’s artworks analyzed along the first chapter.
Fig. 15 – “The Paulista is ours.” The caption reads, “The Paulista Ave. will be opened to passerby every Sunday. Now we can occupy the city’s most famous avenue with music, arts, bikes, and people. For more victories like this one to the city!”
I would say that insisting on the connections with Paulista Aberta is strategic to the Mirante’s narrative for two main reasons. First, because the belvedere is located behind the Paulista Avenue – to be precise, behind MASP, which is situated in the avenue –, so that the Mirante somehow becomes an extension of the recreational space created by the ‘car-free’ measure. Second, because the Paulista Avenue is a sort of Central Business District – an artery full of corporate high-rises buildings, surrounded by upper-class residences, and therefore highly exclusionary, controlled, and privatized. It follows that, by turning the financial heart of São Paulo into a public leisure space, Paulista Aberta epitomizes the Municipality’s commitment to promoting the democratic occupation of public spaces and fostering a more inclusive city11 – a pledge that has been translated into the construction of
‘parklets’; the pavement of hundreds of kilometers of bike lanes; the development of bus corridors to favor public transportation; and the commissioning of graffiti (e.g., in a avenue near to the Paulista, a project that resulted in the largest Latin America’s open air street art mural)12. And, by positioning the Mirante as part of this process of opening’ the city and embracing all its dwellers, so to speak, the narrative equates the belvedere’s revitalization with the very reinvention of São Paulo. In other words, with a game-change that has been greatly understood in terms of a shift in the way the urban space has been conceptualized, planned, produced, and lived over the last decades – namely, as a space abandoned by the
11 It is beyond the scope of this thesis to discuss whether such commitment has redounded to inclusive
and democratic spatial practices. My objective is not to probe into the Municipality’s administration faithfulness to its promises or into the effectiveness of its actions, but to explore the ways by which the Mirante’s narrative piggybacks on the state’s discourse and measures, building on their rhetoric effect – mostly with regard to the public perception of these initiatives – to create a democratic reputation.
12 One can say that some of these initiatives chime with the creative city guidelines to make spaces
more alluring and, therefore, do not necessarily render spaces more inclusive and democratic. In this sense, I insist on the fact that I am not endorsing São Paulo’s Municipality urban policy, which may be questioned from the perspective of the critique to neoliberal urbanism. What I am saying is that the Mirante’s narrative builds on the public perception of these initiatives, insofar as creative spatial practices suit to its consumers’ tastes and lifestyle, as shown in the last chapter.
state and reigned by the market, wherein “the whole has lost its primacy as organizing principle, the public is under attack, privatization rules, inequality is a value, and violence, fear, and crime offer the language in terms of which social life is interpreted” (Caldeira 57).
In this sense, it is worth noting that such municipal urban policy comes to realize the requirements of the Brazilian City Statute federal law. Passed in 2001, this law established a new legal framework for urban planning and policy-making based upon the presumption that the urban land consists in a sort of ‘collective property’ and therefore must fulfill a ‘social function’ in terms of accessibility and equity. According to Caldeira, the statute incorporates “the language and concepts developed by urban social movements and various local
administrations since the 1970s” and thus revolves around the promotion of social equality in the realm of urban space (70). She also remarks that the legislation entails two paradoxical instruments “to enforce its directives regard management: one requires popular participation in the formulation and implementation of policies; the other considers that urbanization is to be obtained by cooperation between government and private organization” (71).
Hence, through intertwining the belvedere’s transformation with the very process of transforming São Paulo’s public spaces – and, by extension, with the democratic ideals and the legal-urban order this process conjures up –, the Mirante’s narrative somehow situates the public-private partnership behind the building’s revitalization within a broad urban policy based upon furthering the public dimension of the city and upon triggering a new manner of conceiving, experiencing, and inhabiting its public spaces. This blurring effect is particularly plain in another Facebook post, also published in the Mirante’s fan page, which brings the image of what seems to be an open air movie session – on the foreground, one can see the building’s main external stairs covered by people and, on the background, a skyline of edifices. The picture is overlaid with the ‘request’, “Transform the city into your city”, and the caption, “Depends on us” (see fig. 16).
Fig. 16 – “Transform the city into your city.” The caption reads, “Depends on us.”
From this follows that the narrative bridges the gap between a neoliberal spatial practice – i.e., the privatization of a public space – and spatial practices built upon, whether rhetorically or effectively, the democratic principles of participation and inclusion13. For, as Peck et al. remind us, neoliberalism is highly adjustable in that it interacts with and taps into “pre-existing uses of space, institutional configurations, and constellations of sociopolitical power” (54) – in other words, in that it adapts to the conditions and specificities of
neighborhoods, cities, and nations. They go on to assert that “neoliberal programs of capitalist restructuring are never imposed in a pure form, for they are always introduced within politico-institutional contexts that have been molded significantly by inherited regulatory
arrangements, institutionalized practices, and political compromises” (54). I would say that
13 In explaining the goals of the Coordination for Promoting the Right to the City, the deputy
coordinator says, “we know that society is demanding new forms of participation. The right to the city is important in assuring human rights, and must be realised with more social participation, ensuring a democratic administration of the city. We want a city in which public space is central in social
interaction among all citizens: a city made for people” (Perry n.p.). One of the Coordination’s projects is the Plan for Occupying the Public Space through Citizenship, which “aims to promote the re-signification of public space, articulating government actions and initiatives by civil society as a means of promoting the human rights and strengthening the exercise of citizenship, as well as of supporting innovative and non-traditional forms of participation and social dialogue” (Plano n.p.) (Translated from Portuguese).
such hybridization of neoliberal urbanism and public policies entails what Harvey defines as ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ – a model of urban governance that amalgamate the many levels of state powers, “a wide array of organizational forms in civil society (chambers of
commerce, unions, churches, educational and research institutions, community groups, NGOs, etc.)”, and the private sector “to form coalitions to promote or manage urban/regional development of some sort or other” (“Art of Rent” 101).
I would risk saying that, by means of such a symbolic operation – the equation of market-driven strategy focused on lubricating the corporate capital with an urban policy aimed at promoting the collective social good –, the Mirante comes to represent a sort of synecdoche of São Paulo as a reinvented city, as if there was no separation between its privatized space and the São Paulo’s already ‘restored’ public spaces, as if there were no incompatibilities between the private and public interests.
Next section, I will probe into how the narrative fuels this meaning-making effect by emphasizing the Mirante’s (alleged) intrinsic ‘publicness’ and democratic nature, and how the exhibition contributes to this through aestheticizing poverty.
2.3. Forging Publicness from Privatization: Staging Universality and Inclusiveness
In addition to tap into the Municipality’s official discourse and to capitalize on its praised and ‘lawful’ spatial practices, the Mirante’s narrative glosses over the negative overtones attached to processes of privatization by identifying the belvedere’s renewal with the actualization and enhancement of the building’s public purpose – in other words, with the fulfillment of the promises comprised in the very conception of ‘public space’. For, as
Deutsche observes, “‘public space’ is commonly assumed to be a space which is, precisely, non-exclusionary – which is fully inclusive or at least potentially fully inclusive, all
embracing, and universally accessible” (“Question” n.p.). The notions of ‘openness’ and ‘publicness’, ostensibly conjured up in the Mirante’s narrative, play a key role in this vein, inasmuch as they carry a democratic connotation that entails the ideas of inclusiveness, accessibility, sharing, partaking, and universality, and accountability (“Question” n.p.). This connotation is especially evoked in the website’s poetic description of the Mirante’s al fresco cinema: “The screen is an opened space. The armchairs are staircase”; “mixes styles and thematic programing that involves music and arts for kids, parents, young people, moderns, and whomever is walking by the street” [emphasis added]. Such characterization implies that the cultural activity at stake is available for whomever want to enjoy it, and that the belvedere belongs to all São Paulo’s dwellers. The venue’s accessibility is reinforced in the website section Co-working, which says: “During the day, the Mirante is opened as a gathering place for work, meetings, conferences. A co-working without fee or frills, a space for whom need a
space at day: table, Internet, coffee, and that is all” [emphasis added]. In this sense, the
Mirante is represented as a democratic space “capable of harmoniously supporting a blend of incomes, cultures, age groups, and lifestyles” (Rose qtd. in Lees et al. 199).
Although grounded in reality – the Mirante is actually open and does not charge an entry fee – the notion of accessibility comes to conceal that, whereas the place is technically ‘public’ and can be enjoyed by anyone, most of the services it offers cater to and are
affordable for middle and upper class consumers, that is, a public that “is used to paying for a quality experience” (Zukin, “Naked City” 143). Moreover, the Mirante is open from 10 a.m. to 22 p.m., from Tuesday to Sunday, so that it stays closed – and therefore locked and inaccessible – during the night and on Mondays. To this restraint one may add the
securitization and the sanitization of the space: the surveillance enacted by privately hired guards stretches the closing of the belvedere’s boarders beyond the physical barriers erected by gates and locks, imposing a quasi-public authority that makes it clear who is welcome and who is not, and, thus, ensuring a social cleansing. When inquired about the ostensible
presence of security guards at the Mirante – which would make people feel uneasy staying there without purchasing anything –, the entrepreneur Facundo Guerra, who heads the
Mirante’s project, replied: “We may be overreacting and keeping too many security guards on watch during the weekends, but it is only because of the fear of hosting too many people; and the more people, the greater the probability of problems, especially in a public space, which, by definition, is a space of conflicts of all sorts” (Boatismo n.p.).
Furthermore, the emphasis on the publicness and openness of the Mirante redounds not only to disguising the commoditized nature of the revitalized belvedere to the eyes of its would-be costumers, but also to satisfying, at least rhetorically, the guidelines of the public-private partnership behind it. For the belvedere was supposed to hold a project of urban revitalization focused on recovering, cleaning, and preserving the building and its surrounding area by means of socio-cultural or socio-educational activities with the primary aim of
improving the democratic use of the space. The municipality’s invitation for bids explicitly mentions that the commercial exploration of the land was meant to be a secondary purpose of the development. Therefore, in restating that the Mirante is essentially an open public space that welcome everyone and in emphasizing its physical accessibility, the narrative gains new contours: it is not only about the revitalization of a decayed urban space through culture, but also about the rescuing of a hitherto ‘lost’ public space and the returning of it to São Paulo dwellers, so they could thereby re-appropriate it and give it a proper use.
One can say, then, that the Mirante positions itself as an agent of spatial
democratization rather than of privatization, of communalization rather than of dispossession. As Deutsche notes, the very notion of public space is an element of a rhetoric of democracy that plays a key part in legitimating undemocratic urban planning policies, among which she includes the creation of exclusionary urban spaces, economic privatization, and curtailment of the social outcasts rights (“Question” n.p.). In this regard, I contend that the exhibition
