Characteristics of historicity and centrality of urban space: the case of the Central Market of Pelotas-RS

Abstract

The focus of this presentation is the historicity built by the citizens in the central spaces of the city of Pelotas. The empirical reference of centrality is the Public Market, which received an urban intervention between 2009 and 2012, which resulted in a change in the urban landscape due to the multifunctionality of the use of space and the dynamics of consumption of the regulars. The study captures the actions of townspeople, whose practices produce forms of coexistence in the urban space that allow conflicts, consensus, social exclusion (gentrification) to come onto the scene. To this end, it makes use of secondary bibliographic sources on the history of the Central Market of Pelotas, in order to understand the meaning of the Public Market as an inheritance from generation to generation, which integrates the historical architectural complex of Pelotas, recognized by the Institute of Historical and Artistic Patrimony National (IPHAN, 2006; 2012), The conception of the history of the place covers the categories “isotopy”, place of the same, same place; “Heterotopia”, the other place and the place of the other; and, “u-topia”, the non-place, the place of elsewhere, in the critical perspective of Henri Lefebvre, in his works Right to the City ([1968], 2001) and the Urban Revolution ([1970], 2008).