Sundays: politicals layers at the Paulista Avenue
Paulista Open, Open Streets Program, activist collectives, occupation, politics.
This research aims to describe the recent actions on the Paulista Avenue space through three layers: the Open Streets Program, the activist collectives actions and the protests. We seek to investigate what has happened in the avenue’s space; the activities entailed by those agents have been part of the street and crossed the public policies designed for such; and which subjects have been evidenced in this process. Some main notions will permeate the research, helping us to understand the street as a space that is beyond its constructive materiality, but pervaded by social relations: the concept “state of the street” (SCHVARSBERG, 2011), showing us a use of the street that is unstable, with its own dynamics, which configure, all the time, other ways of “making a city” (AGIER, 2011), and stresses the planned and the programmed; the notion of “occupation” that, seeking for visibility through momentary stability, would operate in a “political act” for the “right to be there” (AGIER, 2015), reinforcing the disputes, dissents and misunderstandings inherent at the space of the street; and the notion of “politics” on different scales, that is presented “from the street”, “to the street” and “on the street”, supporting the realization of a political action on a micro scale, banal and ordinary; and on a macro scale, in which the attempt of consensualization would seek the erasure of that ordinary practices; and perhaps on an even more exacerbated scale, in which the effervescence of the protests reaches a political shaking of gigantic proportions.