Urban and public spaces

Urban and public spaces

 (in: FURTADO, Gonçalo, “O espaço público na condição urbana contemporânea” (2000/2001). In: AAVV, Arq./a, Lisboa, Setembro 2009, p.72-73).

In thinking about ‘the public space in the contemporary urban condition’, the current consolidation of three phenomena closely linked to the urban experience of the metropolis should be highlighted: spectacle[i], control[ii] and consumption.[iii] Such various phenomena - whose genesis arises within the formation of 19th century urban culture - have been developed during the last decades in association with a desire for leisure and entertainment, the spectacularization of society and visual culture, fashion and advertising, mass culture and the globalization, mobility and information technology. The contemporary metropolis appears to us, thus, as a structure that is spatial and social in which these phenomena take place; a situation that has a profound impact on the level of spatiality and urban experience. In the metropolis, “non-spaces” – to use the French antrophologist Marc Augé’s[iv] concept -, unified and without historical reference,  are outstandingly consumed by the a-ethnic individual under precise and controlled behaviours within the notion of late capitalism.[v] The metropolitan condition becomes the engine of spetacle, consumption and control. Public space, as we understand it, has often become, the ultimate “other”, the tangibly excluded.

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[i] DEBORD, Guy, A Sociedade do Espectáculo. Lisboa: Edições Mobilis in Mobile, 1991.

[ii] DELEUZE, Gilles, Post script on the societies of control. In: AAVV, October, V.59, 1992, p.3-7.

[iii] BAUDRILLARD, Jean, A Sociedade de Consumo. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1995.

[iv] AUGÉ, Marc, Non-places. New York: Verso, 1995.

[v] MANDEL, Ernest, O Capitalismo tardio. São Paulo: Nova Cultural, 1985.