PUBLIC SPACES: INTERACTIONS,

APPROPRIATIONS, AND
CONFLICTS

Luciana Teixeira de Andrade and

Luı́s Vicente Baptista

ABSTRACT
The authors begin the chapter with the contemporary discussion on the
crisis of public spaces and use a Simmelian regarding to focus on two
dimensions of this debate. First, the meaning of the thesis that argues the
death of the public areas of large cities. Then, the relevance of the cate-
gory public spaces, using the diversity of types of spaces and types of
interaction that are associated with and try to show why they cannot be
reduced and homogeneously represented. Hence, from research con-
ducted in Brazil and Portugal, the authors illustrate the various dimen-
sions of public spaces with examples of conflicts and appropriations from
its everyday uses.
Keywords: Public space; interactions; urban life; Lisbon;
Belo Horizonte

Public Spaces: Times of Crisis and Change

Research in Urban Sociology, Volume 15, 19 34
Copyright r 2017 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 1047-0042/doi:10.1108/S1047-004220160000015001
19
20 L.T.D. ANDRADE AND L.V. BAPTISTA

INTRODUCTION
This chapter is the result of a reflection on public spaces in contemporary
cities. Reflection that was based on a more general sociological discussion
on the nature of the interactions and changes observed in cities in Brazil
and Portugal.
From a Social Science perspective, public spaces are of interest in that
they set the stage for social interactions of a specific type. This specificity is
due to its public character, that is, open to all and arising from the possibi-
lity of interactions with strangers. Different, therefore, from private spaces,
restricted to family, friends and other acquaintances. These two ingredients
of public spaces openness and interactions with strangers converge
toward a relative unpredictability of interactions and, not rarely, to con-
flict. For these reasons, though public spaces are open to all, social restric-
tions emerge in the process of interaction implying that the different social
groups do not circulate in all and any public space in the same manner.
This finding often leads to the interpretation that the public space is
experiencing times of crisis. The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate
the importance of discussing the public space and analyzing what is most
common in the interactions taking place therein, for its insights toward the
understanding of urban dynamics, since it is in these spaces that the life of
a city gains visibility. Hence, we start from the seminal text of Georg
Simmel (2005): The Metropolis and Mental Life, followed by a presentation
of various works that defend the thesis of the death of public spaces and,
then return to other contemporary analysis that, along the lines of
Simmelian reflection, offer indications on how to interpret the permanency
of the idea of public space today.

ON THE NATURE OF INTERACTIONS IN

PUBLIC SPACES
One of the inaugural texts of urban sociology, The Metropolis and Mental
Life, by Georg Simmel, addresses social interactions in the public spaces of
major cities even though this concept was not used by the author. With the
exception of rare works, it would only be decades later that reflection on
public spaces, as a place of social interaction between different groups,
would gain strength in social thought. This occurred at the time when other
types of spaces, closed and privatized, such as shopping centers and
Public Spaces: Interactions, Appropriations, and Conflicts 21

condominiums, began to compete with streets, squares and parks. The

emergence of these new spaces would influence the debate that came to
be known as the crisis or death of the public space. Three works focus
on this discussion: The Fall of Public Man (1988), by Richard Sennett, City
of Quartz (1990), by Mike Davis, and Fortified Enclaves, by Teresa Caldeira
(1996).1
In spite of not having used the concept of public space, as already noted,
Georg Simmel, in the work quoted above, sought to understand the chal-
lenges of living and interacting in the public space of a large city. An excess
of stimuli, specialization, dependence, massification, preponderance of the
intellect, punctuality, calculability, reserve, blase´ attitudes, loneliness, and
individualism were some of the ways that he found to describe the nature
of the interactions of metropolitan man in the context of a major city.
Some of these characteristics are more applicable to the context of commer-
cial relations, such as specialization, dependence, punctuality, and calcul-
ability. Now the blase´ attitude and reserve refer more directly to the
domain of interactions between strangers, such as those occurring in the
public space, albeit not exclusively.
Both the reserve and blase´ attitude are forms of interaction characterized
by distance in relation to things and people. Neither presumes strong ties,
warm or close interactions. To the contrary, these interactions are perme-
ated by incapacity of reaction to stimuli with appropriate energy, as
described by Georg Simmel on this blase´ attitude and, by the distancing
that occurs in reserved behavior.
As a result of the innumerable stimuli received during his daily routine
in large cities, metropolitan man circulates between people and things
devoid of personal involvement and capacity to make major distinctions.
For him, things (and people) differ little from one another. Reserve, which
leads to not knowing one’s neighbors is, similarly to blase´ behavior, a form
of self-preservation in the metropolis. If he were forced to respond to all
the contacts to which he is submitted on a daily basis, the metropolitan
man would become completely atomized. G. Simmel classifies both forms
of behavior as being of negative social nature, as dissociation, noting, how-
ever, that these are the only possible forms of interaction in the metro-
polis.2 While reserve arises from the impossibility of relating individually
with the uncountable people whose paths are crossed daily, a completely
different situation from that of the small town, where everyone knows
everybody, this is added to the fact that, in large cities, relations are imbued
with distrust in relation to those with whom we merely have fleeting rela-
tions. Hence, in the vision of Georg Simmel, interactions with strangers
22 L.T.D. ANDRADE AND L.V. BAPTISTA

(in the context of this chapter, in public spaces) are not necessarily or, in
principle, promising. In contrast, they are imbued with distancing, indiffer-
ence, mistrust and, regarding closer contact, even mutual aversion and
repulsion. In a non-determinist vision, G. Simmel explores various other
avenues, that is, the possibility of going from indifference and aversion to
affability and from ephemeral relations to lasting ones, to a vision different
from that of a concept of everything being reduced to indifference.
The entire inner organisation of such a type of extended commercial life rests on an
extremely varied structure of sympathies, indifferences and aversions of the briefest
sort. This sphere of indifference is, for this reason, not as great as it seems superficially.
Our minds respond, with some definite feeling, to almost every impression emanating
from another person. The unconsciousness, the transitional nature and the shift of feel-
ings seem to raise them only into indifference. (Simmel, 2005, p. 583)

Against any pessimist or nihilist interpretation, the excerpt below is

elucidative on reserve. “It assures the individual of a type and degree of
personal freedom to which there is no analogy in other circumstances […].”
(Simmel, 2005, p. 583). In other words, both reserve and the blase´ attitude
are, simultaneously, forms of association and disassociation marked by the
possibilities of encounter (of being with another) and conflict (being
against another).

IS THE PUBLIC SPACE DEAD? HOW TO ADDRESS

THE DIFFERENCES IN PUBLIC SPACES?
This part of the chapter shall examine various works which proclaimed the
death of the public space and were very influential on the ensuing
interpretations.
Richard Sennett (1988), in The Fall of Public Man: The Tyrannies of
Intimacy, identifies in some of the most important American and European
cities, New York, London and Paris, what he calls dead public space. These
are constructions in which the public areas are merely places of passage
and not for staying, and where there is none of the social diversity typical
of traditional public spaces, since their use is restricted to those who work
and/or live in the region. The author illustrates this with Lever House
Square on Park Avenue in New York, the Brunswick Centre in
Bloomsbury in London, and the office complex of La Défense in Paris. He
argues that European examples are evidence that this phenomenon is not
merely due to criminality and insecurity, as it could appear if New York
Public Spaces: Interactions, Appropriations, and Conflicts 23

were to be considered. People appear in public not only to interact, but

also to exercise the right of being alone in public, that is, to exercise a con-
temporary version of voyeurism. Hence, public life becomes a question of
observation and, no longer of social concern, of civility.
Mike Davis, in City of Quartz, more precisely in the chapter “Fortress
L.A.,” discusses what he calls the destruction of public space, consequence
of a crusade for security in cities. This action arises from a change of para-
digm of social control; from a liberal vision that counterbalanced repres-
sion with reform, toward the rhetoric of security which sees the interests
of the urban poor and middle classes as irreconcilable. The result is a city
“brutally divided between ‘fortified cells’ of affluent society and ‘places of
terror’ where the police battle the criminalised poor.” In this context, the
genuinely democratic public space gives way to pseudo public spaces direc-
ted at a high-income consumer public: “[…] sumptuous shopping malls,
office centers, cultural acropolis office, and so on successively are replete
with invisible signs that prevent the entry of the ‘Other’ subclass” (Davis,
1993, p. 207)
Mike Davis adds new elements to this obsession for security in detriment
of public life, such as the privatization of spaces formerly public, the use of
sadistic urban design which prevents the permanency of the poor in public
spaces, and the transfer, to private commercial spaces, of the vital life-force
of the center. These phenomena are, for the author, part of a process of
counter-urbanization and counter-insurrection.
In an interpretation close to that of Mike Davis, Teresa Caldeira, in
Fortified Enclaves, identifies, as of the 1980s, the emergence of a new
pattern of segregation in São Paulo. The root cause lies in the growth of
violent crime which gave rise, among various other strategies of protection,
to the construction of walls as one of the most emblematic. These, together
with other security devices, ensure the isolation of the highest income
groups from those considered dangerous. Fortified enclaves, “[…] privatised,
enclosed, and monitored spaces for residence, consumption, leisure and work”
(Caldeira, 2000, p.11), are profoundly modifying urban life, in particular,
engagement in public spaces, since they deny the ideals of heterogeneity,
accessibility and equality that have marked modern public spaces.
The elites, in withdrawing behind enclaves, leave public spaces to the
homeless and poor, in this way, reducing the spaces where people from dif-
ferent social groups can intermingle. Similarly to Mike Davis, Teresa
Caldeira analyzes various other forms of behavior of the elites such as the
privatization of streets, the use of private security, electric fencing around
residences and private transport for all types of movement. Together, they
24 L.T.D. ANDRADE AND L.V. BAPTISTA

are responsible for promoting “[…] intolerance, suspicion and fear” among
the inhabitants of the city (Caldeira, 2000, p. 314).
These interpretations have been criticized by Salcedo Hansen (2002)
regarding the idealization of the modern public space where different peo-
ple interact unconstrained. For the author, a space free and open to all has
simply never existed. Those deemed undesirable by the middle and upper
groups have always been kept at a distance. In this perspective, the public
space is nowadays more open than ever before in relation to minority racial
and sexual groups. Rather than comparing the modern and current public
space, Salcedo Hansen proposes analyzing it as a place of exercise of power
and resistance.
Another aspect of these analyses is the vision of society and the uses of
public spaces focused on a single strata: high-income groups. Although
these authors do identify important processes of change in society and pub-
lic spaces, they succumb to the error of generalization. Moreover, while
high-income groups have the power to define the direction of the changes
that have influenced cities over these last decades, they are not as hegemo-
nic to the extent of imposing a single form of use of the public spaces pre-
sent in different parts of the city. Accompanying the interpretation of
Rodrigo Salcedo Hansen, the authors quoted above neither consider resis-
tance, nor other public spaces and their uses by diverse social groups.
While the new public spaces directed at high-income groups are uninviting
to being and socializing with those of a different nature, they do not
encompass all the public spaces of contemporary cities. Research con-
ducted in Brazil and Portugal shows distinctive uses of public spaces by dif-
ferent social groups, whether counter-uses (Leite, 2004),3 the invention of
new uses and new spaces, or movements in their defence. Therefore, none
of this leads to the conclusion that the public space is dead.
Evidence of life in public spaces is demonstrated in the conflicts, most
visible when these spaces attract different classes or ethnic groups.
Furthermore, as described by the authors quoted above, there are spaces in
which conflict is contained by the predominance and power of a single
group. In these cases, interaction is limited to that among peers, and the
tension is relegated to the frontiers of these spaces. Examples of this type
are the closed condominiums on the one hand, and the squares and other
public spaces occupied by street dwellers or drug users/traffickers, on the
other. In the first case, conflict is evident in the frontier zones that prevent
the entry of uninvited non-dwellers. In the second case, when the street
dwellers make the public space their home, or drug users their site of
Public Spaces: Interactions, Appropriations, and Conflicts 25

consumption and dealing, its shared use by other groups is wrought with
numerous tensions, in view of the difficulty of interaction.
Although these are extreme examples, major social and cultural dis-
tances hinder interaction, often rendering it impossible. This is one of the
reasons that could explain the existence, in some contemporary public
spaces, of joint presence but not interaction. In a square studied in Belo
Horizonte, located on the frontier of a high-income neighborhood and a
slum, the dwellers of both places visit the square, but their interactions,
when existent, are either superficial or of a commercial nature (Andrade,
Jayme, & Almeida, 2009).
In view of findings such as these, Van Eijk and Engbersen (2011) proposed
the concept of light interaction. Light or superficial interaction occurs as a
result of repeated meetings in public spaces, responsible for creating a famil-
iarity opposite to anonymity, as well as a sense of social identity and security.
Van Eijk illustrates this with the repeated meetings that occur such as during
shopping, when picking up children from school or walking with a dog. In
all of these cases, recurrence leads to the categorical but not biographical
knowing of people.4 For the author, this familiarity is particularly important
in spaces where different people meet. These contacts, albeit superficial (espe-
cially since, in the case studied by the author, the dwellers are socially and
culturally very different), make people feel, in the other’s eye, less like stran-
gers. Through these light interactions they acquire information about one
another in order to know whether they can be trusted or not. This type of
interaction takes place most frequently in environments when daily routines
are repeated, that is, in public spaces attended by regular users, such as the
public spaces of residential areas. Different, therefore, from the central public
spaces which, in spite of having a fixed group that uses it regularly, the large
number of people makes the majority appear, to the other, anonymous. This
is even more so considering the sporadic passers-by who further enhance this
feeling of anonymity, discouraging interaction.
These observations show that the interactions that occur in public space
are of a nature different from the interaction peculiar to the private sphere,
marked by intimacy and strong ties. Interactions between people who do
not know one another are, in general, more formal and distant. The danger
of not making this distinction is that interactions in the public space are
devalued, by using as a reference the interactions that occur in the pri-
vate sphere.
The concept of light interactions takes us back to Georg Simmel. The
attitudes of reserve and blase´ behavior can be perceived as forms of light
interactions, especially as a greater amount, and higher involvement in these
26 L.T.D. ANDRADE AND L.V. BAPTISTA

interactions could eventually comprise individual freedom. This could pre-

sume, not only being in public alone (the right to solitude), but also inter-
actions mediated by formal distance, where the individual does not waiver
his individuality. What is at risk in interactions with strangers is the public
dimension of life, thus preserving the most intimate aspect, in other words,
individual freedom.

THE DIVERSITY OF PUBLIC SPACES AND THEIR

USES IN THE CURRENT URBAN CONTEXT
What is understood in G. Simmel with respect to interactions in public
spaces is neither a defence of a romantic vision, nor a catastrophic or pessi-
mistic perspective. For the author, such interactions are, by nature, open to
many possibilities. However, in view of the characteristics of the metropoli-
tan man, immediately realized interactions should not be expected, that is,
without the shield of social distance. Metropolitan man, for his actual sur-
vival and preservation of his interiority, needs this distance from the con-
tacts to which he is exposed on a daily basis.
A principle of freedom that guides his decisions underlies this distance.
Concerning the way that the metropolitan man occupies his time and deci-
des how to use public spaces, the authors consider that it is possible to iden-
tify, in our current era of mobility, a diversity of spaces and forms of
interaction that should not be reduced and represented in a homogenous
manner.
In order to summarize the diversity of contexts of interaction involved
in the idea of public spaces, a classification exercise is proposed which con-
siders, not only the degree of interaction that they stimulate, but also its
durability. This analysis was based on the ideal-types of public spaces iden-
tified by Tonkiss (2005) which seek to examine the feeling of being with
others in public (the square, representing the feeling of collective ownership
and use; the café, representing social engagement; and the street, represent-
ing incidental encounters). In the present case, what we are interested in is
the adjustment given for public use, to urban spaces designed with different
objectives according to their original condition (public/private) and the rea-
son for which they were designed (parks, shopping centers, squares).
Thus, urban spaces programmed for public use are taken as the first type.
Public spaces destined for leisure purposes have an undisputable place in
the planning of contemporary cities. Whether in planned cities, such as
Public Spaces: Interactions, Appropriations, and Conflicts 27

Belo Horizonte and Brası́lia, or in historic cities with layers of edification

and significance that are reminiscent of various periods such as Lisbon,
Porto, or Rio de Janeiro. The squares and parks were designed for diverse
and anonymous uses, destined to all, but, over time, have had multiple
uses, that gradually change along with the populations using them, as has
been sustained in various points above.
Examples of these new appropriations of squares and urban parks have
been detected through research conducted in various cities. Here, we shall
concentrate on the examples of Belo Horizonte and Lisbon where we hav-
ing been carrying out our research. A study on squares of Belo Horizonte
has identified, in different districts of the city, very diverse uses, arising
from the actual contexts of their location. The most relevant distinction
was observed between neighborhood squares and central squares. The first
perform the function of a local leisure space, while central squares combine
different uses, users, and even specializations. Fairs are held in some of the
latter; in others, cultural uses are common with theatrical, musical, dance
performances; others are used for physical activities. At different times of
the day, their use changes: during the mornings, their visitors are predomi-
nantly children and the elderly. At lunchtime, many workers use the
squares for an afternoon nap. In the afternoon, and primarily in the eve-
ning, the strongest presence is that of young people. During the night and
in neighborhoods with scant policing, squares are commonly used for drug
use and trafficking. While some central squares are greatly visited at night
by prostitutes and travesties. Central squares also play a touristic and sym-
bolic role in cities, constantly being used for official events, as well as civi-
lian demonstrations, due to their visibility. These brief considerations show
that spaces and their uses, in this specific case, are not homogenous.
In the case of Lisbon, research has unveiled valuable information on the
dynamics of these urban spaces programmed specifically for leisure pur-
poses, which do not differ substantially from what has been found in Belo
Horizonte. This is evident in the study on Jardim da Estrela, a park in the
heart of the city of Lisbon (Gomes, 2008), designed with a green area con-
necting the zones where the Lisbon bourgeoisie settled at the end of the
nineteenth century (Campo de Ourique, Estrela, Rato) and close to the
symbolic areas of the city (Basilica of Estrela and the current Assembly of
the Republic, which includes the official residence of the Prime Minister).
Designed as a recreational area for the surrounding population and pre-
served as one of the most characteristic public parks of the city, this garden
is currently used by a multiplicity of populations that give it different uses,
according to the time of the day, the day of the week and its individual
28 L.T.D. ANDRADE AND L.V. BAPTISTA

visitors. Maria João Gomes concludes that there is a clear distinction

between those who use the garden as a throughway in urban circulation
and those who appropriate it as a place of more or less lengthy perma-
nency. The author also concludes that, to a large extent, this distinction is
related to its more transitory use given by those who work and use the
zone, thus passing by, and the more permanent use, in contrast, given by
the dwellers of the surroundings and others who seek Jardim da Estrela as
the city’s leisure place.
Also the significance and use given to the street as a place of meeting,
passage or installation has been researched, focusing on the city of Lisbon
(Cordeiro & Vidal, 2008), likewise, revealing the distinctive way that social
groups use it. The authors introduce the subject of the street in urban
research by stating that “[…] the specific realities that are worked on
[…] the spaces, the situations, the agents, the processes open new per-
spectives for the debate around a much-spoken topic but which is, para-
doxically, so little known. This involves revealing the meaning that daily
urban interaction acquires for each citizen, in the places that are inhabited
and passed through, in the roles played, in the representations that are
fabricated. It is the street at the scale of those who live in it that we are
interested in discovering, discussing, and theorizing the street as a place
where interactions are fabricated, where society is produced, the street that
is so often invented far beyond the surrounding urban context, and that so
surprises us (Cordeiro & Vidal, 2008, p. 9).
What these researchers highlight is the need to understand these facets
of the urban world, indeed so poorly understood and whose roots lies in
the urban context of contemporary cities. Our lack of knowledge might,
precisely, be due to interpretations made at a macro-level which, in not
lowering their eyes closely, ignore these extremely intense and unexpected
micro-scales.
It is clear, in both this case and in the preceding example, that the issue
is not the death of public spaces, but rather, the multiplicity of uses and pro-
tagonists who appropriate these territories.
Our second example is new spaces of consumption of public access. With
the emergence of the cathedrals of consumption, referred to by Ritzer
(2010), as an organizing element of life in contemporary societies, these are
gradually occupying an increasingly more central place in the structuring of
current metropolitan flows, where it is clear that not only shopping centers,
but also sports stadiums and thematic parks are places of public access that
compete with traditional forms of meeting and leisure.
Public Spaces: Interactions, Appropriations, and Conflicts 29

In Belo Horizonte, and also for its metropolitan region, two emblematic
spaces of the city have been transformed into cultural corridors: one
already installed and the other under implantation. The first, in a symbolic
square of the city, Praça da Liberdade, the former location of the
Government palace and secretariats of State have been converted into cul-
tural centers and museums. In this case, there was a clear elitization of the
space, through its reform, first with the removal of the handicraft and art
fairs, then, with the prohibition of itinerant trade. Subsequently, the con-
trol of uses and behavior was enforced in the daily routine of its users. The
constant presence of the military police and municipal guards prevents uses
considered undesirable, such as sitting on the grass, lying on benches, and
selling any product, among others. Added to this, is its occupation by the
surrounding dwellers, middle- and high-income groups, who impose,
through their presence, a specific style of visiting the square. This group
primarily uses the square for walking. Diversity is experienced on festive
days. Due to being a central and symbolic square, many cultural and week-
end events take place here. However, this involves a relative diversity
according to the programs based on the taste of the middle classes. In the
specific case of the corridor of Praça da Estação, located in a commercial
part of the city, with intense flows of people from the entire metropolitan
region during the day, and many street dwellers throughout the night, its
implantation, still underway, has faced a tense process of negotiation with
the cultural groups that are installed there and which radically oppose the
policies of gentrification and the control of its uses by the State. This collec-
tive, which promotes various occupations in the square and its surround-
ings, speaks under the banner of the free use of the public space, and, in
relation to the City Hall’s proposed implantation of a cultural corridor,
argues that the cultural corridor already exists.
In the Portuguese case, the example of Parque das Nações (Pereira,
2013) brings to the debate the planning of metropolitan public spaces
where residents, protagonists of the business world and frequent visitors
converge, in particular from the metropolitan area of Lisbon (the case of
weekend cyclists, for example). Of no lesser importance are the national
and international visitors who seek it out as a metropolitan attraction. The
memory of the recent industrial past and former port activity of this zone
of the city, which only shifted to a fully urban condition in 1998, has com-
pletely disappeared. The underlying concept of the construction of the cur-
rent Parque das Nações, safe and sanitized, was a premise of major impact:
stimulating a less stressful daily existence. The idea behind the construction
of Expo’98 and, later, Parque das Nações is that the sociabilities to be
30 L.T.D. ANDRADE AND L.V. BAPTISTA

developed in this context, and likewise the constructed area, should be pro-
grammed so as to ensure the nonexistence of unexpected alterations in daily
dynamics. And hence a public poster of street activities and in the different
leisure spaces built for the effect filled with entertainment, preventing dead
time and a certain spontaneity that would introduce a factor of instability
in this programmed logic.
In this destination of Parque das Nações, as a zone to live in and enjoy,
the programming of public spaces is central. It is in the very spirit of the
venture, as also happens in many other cities with urban and metropolitan
waterfronts, creating a sense of leisure (Degen, 2008), that is, an atmo-
sphere based not only on the offer of services such as cultural, leisure, and
consumer facilities, but also cleanliness, security and, in this case, the con-
nection to past Portuguese glories. With a strong aesthetic accent that seeks
to endow this territory with a distinctive character, a taste for art is stimu-
lated in a strategy of territorial elitization that reproduces time-old inequal-
ities while also creating opportunities of access to consumption previously
beyond the reach of many social groups. The centrality of the shopping
center is not by chance in this planned area of the city, but rather, repre-
sents a gateway to cultural consumption. It should be noted in particular
that the physical layout of the cultural facilities of Parque das Nações
follows along from the shopping center, linking practices of cultural con-
sumption to daily consumer needs.
The third type consists of informal spaces of private origin integrated in
the metropolitan circuit. Resulting from private initiative, these places are
suitable, with greater or lesser intensity, as meeting places of specific
groups. In gaining some particularity, which makes them relevant, they
gradually enter into the metropolitan circuit. Examples, as diverse, and
dear to specific groups of interest, as cafés, cinemas, shops, associative
headquarters, or even house-museums, are frequent in the daily life of cities
as places of visit, permanency and to hold meetings.
These are places that began in a private capacity and which are being
converted into spaces of public access, where some are ultimately trans-
formed into symbols of a generation, of a culture, of a city.
Belo Horizonte, during the 1980s, witnessed the emergence of a move-
ment of defence of Cine Metrópole which operated in the building of the
former theatre of the city. This demonstration, that was unsuccessful in
retaining the cinema, was the starting point of a movement of defence of
the city’s heritage, under a process of accelerated destruction, and protec-
tion of its public spaces (Andrade & Esteves, 2002). During the twenty-first
century, another movement emerged in favor of a private space, but whose
Public Spaces: Interactions, Appropriations, and Conflicts 31

uses are of public nature. This involves the Central Market, an icon of local
culture, since all the state’s products are sold here, quite unlike anything
found in the shopping centers or in other shops of the city. More than this,
however, the Market is known for facilitating interactions between very dif-
ferent people. This is a space that encourages the meeting and interaction
of others. The catalyst of the movement in the social networks was the
installation of electric household appliances shop, which vastly differed
from the Market’s shops and trade and was interpreted, by its defenders, as
an opening for the transformation of the Market into a shopping center
(Andrade, 2008).
The case of the demolished Cinema Monumental, in Largo Duque de
Saldanha, in Lisbon, and the social movement that it inspired during the
1980s among Lisbon’s cultural elite, defending the restoration of the build-
ing in order to ensure its perpetuation and use, is another example of the
defence of public spaces that, even though private, play a very important
public role. More than just a cinema, what was in question was the meeting
point, central in the city at that time, which was lost in the city’s circuit
(Carvalho, 2006).
Common to the work carried out in Belo Horizonte and Lisbon were
the references made by the habitual visitors of these cinemas to a type of
sociability that had been lost with the movement of the cinemas out of the
street and inside shopping centers. Lingering in the street outside the cinema
door, producing a visible meeting point for enthusiasts, a massively edu-
cated and young public emerged in significant numbers in many cities
during the 1960s and 1970s. This conduct, well situated in time, but whose
durability was to prove limited, is an example of how such informal spaces
performed a vital role in the life of the city.
Albeit involving private property, these public spaces are of crucial
importance in the understanding of our cities because they correspond to
the beat of local life, at its various levels, and enable capturing instances of
social movements that are continuously expressed at different periods of
the city, whether political, cultural or other types of movements.

CONCLUSIONS
Returning to the ideas of Tonkiss (2005, p. 72) we could say that “the pri-
mary ideal principle of the public space is based on equality access. The
real life of public spaces suggests that these are not only constituted purely
32 L.T.D. ANDRADE AND L.V. BAPTISTA

in terms of access but also are organized through forms of control and
exclusion.”
And at this point it is necessary to distinguish between the ideal sphere
of discussions on the public space, greatly indebted to the Habermas’ vision
of public sphere and the practical dimension of the living experience of
public spaces, places of common interest for collective use. This distinction,
of operative nature, in no manner contradicts the need to articulate them.
Hence, the debate that was proposed in the initial part of this chapter is
crucial for an elucidative interpretation of the daily realities that were then
presented through various examples of research conducted in Belo
Horizonte and Lisbon. However, this is not to imply the attribution of
higher value to the empirical than to the theoretical. Indeed, the theoreti-
cian risk is as real as the empiricist risk. Hence the central work of sociolo-
gists is that of creating strategies for understanding the real based on the
available theoretical, methodological, and conceptual instruments, in order
to improve our capacity to analyze changing phenomena, specific of the era
of the society of mobility.
To summarize, we could say that the theories proclaiming the death of
the public space are counterbalanced by other theories, tributaries of the
Simmelian legacy, centered on the nature of interactions between strangers.
And from here, we can conclude that, in this era of globalized leisure,
the diversity of experiences than can be identified as happening in public
spaces is so vast that is requires from the researcher, particular care in the
understanding and classification of this phenomenon (Baptista, 2005). This
finding led us to propose a typological exercise which considers that the
public use of urban spaces implies, in addition to a better understanding of
what occurs in classic examples of public spaces of governmental initiative,
also knowledge of new spaces of consumption accessible to the public and
informal spaces of private origin. Part of these spaces, as in the examples
quoted herein, enable interactions of different levels of intensity and dur-
ability, but very peculiar to public spaces, which leads us to prioritize them
in the actual definition of public spaces in detriment of property, whether
public or private.
Having taken the experience of Belo Horizonte as an empirical refer-
ence, articulated with that of Lisbon, this chapter sought to present the
example of research which clearly illustrates the most revealing dynamics
of the transformation of public spaces. It appears to be decisive in the ana-
lysis of public spaces, as the central playing field of the urban transforma-
tion of our societies, that we retain the capacity to regard them in an
encompassing and detailed form, countering the simplifying effect that the
Public Spaces: Interactions, Appropriations, and Conflicts 33

thesis of the end of the public space has produced in the scientific sphere
and in public intervention.

NOTES

1. The two first were translated into Portuguese, see the editions consulted in the
bibliography. However, the book by Teresa Caldeira was originally published in
English and, later translated into Portuguese.
2. “Whereas the subject of this form of existence must come to terms with it for
himself, his self-preservation in the face of the great city requires of him a no less
negative type of social conduct” and “[...] What appears here directly as dissociation
is in reality only one of the elementary forms of socialisation” (Simmel, 2005, p. 582).
3. Leite thus defines counter-uses of public spaces: “[...] the tactics, when asso-
ciated to the spatial dimension of the place, which makes them vernacular, consist
of a counter-use capable, not only of subverting the expected uses of a regulated
space, but also of enabling that the space arising from the ‘strategies’ splits up,
giving rise to different places, based on the spatial demarcation of the difference
and re-definitions produced by these counter-uses” (Leite, 2004, p. 215).
4. According to Goffman (1999), the first consists of placing the other into one
of the various social categories, while in the second, the individual is associated to a
unique and distinctive identity that assumes knowledge of some of the individual’s
characteristics.

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