Occupation of public spaces is still a challenge for producers from the city

(Article written for the newspaper Jornal da Esquina from Uniceub college in 2015.)

New movements of occupation of public spaces to improve quality of life in big cities gain strength around the world, but bureaucratic and financial difficulties delay their advance in Brasilia.

At one point in Western history, during the Industrial Era, people left the countryside in search of opportunities in the urban area, causing the cities to grow more and more and get overcrowded. Which resulted in a change in the architecture to adapt to this new reality. From then on, the modern world created new situations and demanded, from time to time, that the planning in big cities create new ideas to improve the quality of life. In 1960, as described by the Danish urbanist and architect Jan Gehl, cars started to gain more popularity, increasing the need for faster ways of building cities. At this point, a change of paradigm happened, and architects started to worry about the view from above, which he calls “Brasilia syndrome.” Planning cities from the outside in, thinking first on a larger scale (buildings) and then on a smaller scale (people). As the years went by, problems with overpopulation in big cities started to become more evident: huge traffic jams, subways, and buses with people being squeezed into each other. The difficulty with transportation and the relationship of the citizens with the urban space became problems that cities like New York and Sao Paulo try to bypass, and that, according to Jan, are a consequence of this way of planning cities.

It’s becoming more evident that these big urban centers are concerned with creating biking paths, encouraging the use of bicycles, protecting cyclists, making the lives of pedestrians easier, and even closing streets in the downtown areas so that cars can’t go by. Along with this tendency, some movements appeared, looking to occupy and transform public spaces that are not well used in the city, bringing life to them. In Brasilia, parties like Mimosa and PicNik seek to improve urban life by bringing different people together in open spaces. The plane-city, full of broad and green spaces, has enough places to house these events, including the Parque da Cidade (Park of the City). But difficulties like financial support, bureaucracy from the public entities, lobby, and problems with infrastructure, still delay this change in the city’s way of life, one that gains strength in the rest of the world.

Sandro Farias, the creator of the event Mimosa, comments that the party began as an idea of gathering friends on a Saturday afternoon to hear good music and have the drink that has the same name as the party. Today the event has become well known in the capital and has even migrated to other cities. One of the parties happened last year at the “castelinho” (little castle) at Parque da Cidade. Sandro says that the then administration of the place was trying to bring cool events to the park and made the invitation to organize a Mimosa there, even offering structure support like a tent, a generator, and chemical toilets. When selecting a place within the park, Sandro says he considered the castelinho because he saw that it needed a policy of revitalization. “Many found It weird when I said I was going to promote a Mimosa at the castelinho. The place was seen as a prostitution spot, full of dirt, a drug spot, etc. I asked the park’s administration to clean the place and give it a paint job. The rest of the work was ours. We decorated the place, occupied it in a way that distributed the exhibitors of delicacies and art, signaled, and hired a local service of sound and lighting that transformed the space, and it was really special” reports Sandro.

The event happened in August last year, received 2,5 thousand people, and was considered a success. Guilherme Henrique Santos, a 24-year-old guy from Brasilia, a student of occupational therapy, says that, although he always saw the castelinho as a place of potential, he also had in mind the negative way it was used by people and that Mimosa helped change that: “I always thought it was a really nice place, I always imagined myself having a party there, so it was almost like a personal accomplishment. (…) When I was a kid, I would walk around there and see condoms.”

Difficulties

“Brasilia is a place full of potential, but it still is full of poorly explored spaces”, says Sandro, who believes that events like these are important for the self-esteem of the city, which is starting to rediscover its vocation. “Even the Parque da Cidade is still not fully explored, although there has been a boom of projects of occupation there. But there are still a few spaces that are outside of focus. I’m not going reveal them here because one of them is the next place I intend to throw a Mimosa at, it’s still a secret and I can’t tell.” Among the difficulties in making events like these happen more frequently, Sandro talks about the excessive bureaucracy and the preference they give certain producers because of lobbying made with public administrators, “Since we don’t do this kind of politics, we end up without incentives to structure a public event at an open space, which is very expensive.”

The bureaucracy questions and the high cost were also listed as difficulties by Miguel Galvao, organizer of PicNik, an event from Brasilia that started in April 2012 and also seeks to find new ways of using public spaces. The event started with the idea of creating a meeting platform that valued the real experience instead of the virtual one and that encouraged sobriety. The first edition happened through an invitation from the city’s administration to occupy the “calçadão da Asa Norte” (boardwalk of Asa Norte), which had been recently inaugurated at the time and was not well known by the population. It was already being used as a spot for drugs and prostitution. In three years, PicNik has already thrown many editions of the event, not only at the boardwalk but also at the Cultural Center of Banco do Brasil (CCBB), and at the Parque da Cidade. Miguel says that the worries of the person throwing the event are leaving the place better than they found it, and making the population create a positive connection with the space. He also says that the awareness of the people is also a challenge, so these events are more encouraged. Problems with trash, noise, depredation, in short, the bad use that people make of the environment and that reflects the relationship of the population with the city needs to be better.

PicNik had already two of its editions at the Parque da Cidade, and about the viability of doing these events there, Miguel says: “The Parque da Cidade is the lung of the city. Even with almost no resources, it concentrates an enormous variety of events and actions in its day to day. Now is the moment to implement alternative ways to make improvements to the space and support for its conservation: public-private partnerships with brands of small to medium size could be very productive. Instead of creating difficulties, the public power should concentrate its efforts in the sense of creating mechanisms to make this possible.”

Administration

The sentence “even with almost no resources” can draw attention, and the person who can explain that is the Manager of Commercialization of Parque da Cidade, Moniele Cunha de Oliveira, 25 years old. The park doesn’t have public money destined for it and it works mainly with donations from the population or private companies. When an event happens in any area of the park that raises money, the amount goes first to the Administration of the Brasilia, then to the Treasury Secretariat, then to the Tourism Secretariat, and only after that it gets to the park’s administration, which used to belong to the Administration of Brasilia and this year became an Undersecretariat of Tourism.

Besides the financial difficulty, there is also a problem with the discontinuity of planning between the different administrations. Moniele says that every four years all the staff changes, and the old archives aren’t stored at their office but at the Administration of Brasilia. This means that every four years everything starts from scratch, and the projects that worked well do not continue. According to Moniele, the current administration has projects to better the circulation within the park, spread people more over the space it offers, and lower the big concentration at the parking lots ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen. But with little financial resources and a deadline of four years to accomplish these projects, the scenario is not very optimistic.

Solutions

Even with different events being so successful around Brasilia, not just Mimosa and PicNik, but also Chefs nos Eixos (Chefs at the eixos), Balada Em Tempos de Crise (Party in times of crisis), and others, gaining fame among the people of Brasilia, the architecture student, Julia Sollero, of 24 years old, says it’s also necessary to think of other solutions. “What we have today are these big events that have been bringing people to the street and that get overcrowded and there is a very clear intention of people that they want to occupy, they want to be on the street, they want to meet other people, but it’s always like this, in big events (…), but this has to be more natural, the dislocation of people around the city has to be more natural”, says Julia. The student is working on a college project called “Manual of Occupation of Brasilia” with the goal of finding the best ways of using the big green areas of the city. She references the urban gardens that started to appear at the residential buildings as an example of a manner to use the spaces in a more daily way. She reports the access of the pedestrian as a difficulty to optimize the use of Parque da Cidade. Julia remembers that the new accesses to the park were created without sidewalks, always prioritizing the passage of cars.