Ephemeral architecture and urban insurgency. Strategies for the appropriation of street trading in the interstitial spaces of the BRT TransOeste, Rio de Janeiro.

Abstract

Rio de Janeiro has gone through many important constructions of urban restructuration throughout the last decade. The city’s condition as headquarter to the World Cup of 2014 and the Olympic Games of 2016 meant an important transformation process to most parts of the city. In this context, one of the most important insfrasestructrual interventions that was executed was the implementation of the BRTs (Bus Rapid Transit) system. In the majority of stations it is possible to identify an informal dynamic of non-programmed uses and ephemeral apropriations, using objects as supports that occupy the “interstices” left by the system. This insurgence claims new possibilities of reading the urban spaces, once they can reveal the potentialities of those, offering answers to the demans of products and services in the contexto of urban daily mobility. The concept of “intersticiality” is proposed in order to nominate the “in-between”, or the gaps in the BRT system, which limits are fuzzy. What sets out this interstitial dimension are those who inhabit and use the gaps, through ephemeral apropriation of the mobility infraestructure and its surroundings. By means of a bibliographic discussion, field work, photographic survey and categorization of the observed conducts and ephemeral supports that were detected, this work observed the ephemeral appropriations of the intertitial spaces in the BRT system as a phenomenon that should be considered part of the urban systems.