Estrategias de participação no espaço publico contemporaneo - uma viagem pela criatividade e subversão na regeneração urbana.

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on alternative and subversive contemporary practices in search for urban regeneration made from the appropriation of public space and through the dynamics of participation and citizenship. It is questioned the current architectural practice and the role of the architect in contemporaneity in relation to the phenomena of globalization and gentrification that increasingly take over the city, ignoring or devaluing their identity and peculiarities and their collective memory. It becomes important to look back and understand and review the legacy of the artistic avant-gardes of the twentieth century and of the artistic interventions (subversive or not) made in the public space, as a starting point for a review and exaltation of the intrinsic characteristics of the architecture as a artistic discipline. However, the bottom-up strategies of social movements and participation - as social phenomena to take into account - are also a recall to the fundamental role of Architecture in social (urban) transformation. In parallel to these issues it is also analyzed how some contemporary cases of urban interventions and actions made in the public space by the initiative of some collectives of architects in the European context are examples to be taken into account. This once again raises the issue of reviewing the ethical and social values that should be reevaluated in an era of generalized crisis. Berlin is the case study chosen to explain the issues addressed throughout this essay, bringing to the discourse, a register of concrete examples of emerging bottom-up (as well as of artistic content) urban phenomena and practices, in the sights of urban regeneration. Crisis triggers criticism and enhances creativity and adaptation in response to widespread difficulties. Criticism can be radical, and it can break conventions and create the intended change in search of a fairer and more conscious world of the phenomena that surround us.