The preservation policies would be, however, quickly captured by different forces and redirected in function of real estate interests and cities promotional strategies. The concern with identity, the preservation of past, tends to become more important when urban space transformations, provoked by capitalist economic dynamics, advance speedily. The reinvestment programs in degraded areas demand references that support their reappropriation, relocating the uses and populations installed there.
The idea of the city as community, the recuperation of a supposed local life, of places endowed with qualities, became central in the redevelopment strategies. The architecture then is mobilized for, through eclecticism, historical quotation and ornament, to construct this fiction of collective places. An architecture of the spectacle to stage public places, a theatricalization of public life, in fact evacuated from these spaces dominated by political power and corporate interests.
The logic that directed the creation of cultural centers at Avenida Paulista area, in the 80’s, is entirely distinct from the central area revitalization dynamics. Downtown, the implantation of this type of equipment obeys the constructions history and the traditional urban pattern: it aims at restoring the public space. These new equipment, in contrast, conditioned by corporate marketing, installed in general with public resources, through tax deduction, tends to compete with the city traditional cultural spaces. With their protected atriums, contrasting with the abandonment and violence that haunt the city streets and squares, they configure a tendency to private appropriation of public space.
references
D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell,
1990.
D. Graham, Corporate Arcadias, em: Rock My Religion, Cambridge, MIT, 1993.
