The project presented by Schie 2.0 and Urban Fabric, Dutch architecture offices, intends to argue the question of public space in contemporary metropolis. The starting point is the old Piratininga movie theater, at av. Rangel Pestana (the East Zone already had one of the biggest movie theaters concentrations in the city), today converted into parking lot. The proposal consists of transforming part of the cinema into a garden (eventually carrying through projections) and extending this metamorphosis to the surrounding area: to install (painting the pavement) soccer fields and skate slots in the adjacent streets, including a suspended swimming pool on the avenue. The conduction of activities in these metamorphosed spaces would be under community responsibility: a street children care organization of the area.

One of the most important features of the urban thought that today blossoms in Holland is pragmatism. The capacity to recognize and to operate with the existing city, activating situations and equipment already installed. Instead of working with ideal models, developing criticism from a presupposition of what it could have been, it tries to deal with the real city.

2.0 Shie and Urban Fabric start from the situation created by the road corridor and the low quality commerce that proliferated around. The viaduct, one of the local deterioration factors, is integrated to the urban space as support for an alimentation piazza. New functions are given the underused equipment, as the platform for Christmas decoration. Commercial activities are foreseen in abandoned places, leisure is programmed in areas of little use during weekends. The principle is to activate these spaces, to intensify its occupation. The terrain vague is not seen as emptiness, but as a field to be intensified. The intervention aims at to create city, center of commerce, culture, leisure and social life.

The most recent cycle of urban restructuring, with large development projects implanted by international capital, integrating commercial, residential and leisure programs in megastructures, suppressed all expectation on restoring the old public spaces. The initiatives made in this direction, in the last decades, had proved to be only an instrument to revaluate real estate investments, excluding the local population. This project, in its apparent precariousness, dealing with the effective uses and conditions, denounces official revitalizing strategies and, at the same time, suggests local strategies of contraposition to the corporative appropriation of public space.