Sescs and the new configurations of urban spatiality

• Grant number: 13/01939-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: May 01, 2013
• End date: January 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Architecture and Town Planning - Fundamentals of Architecture and Urbanism
• Principal Investigator: Manoel Antonio Lopes Rodrigues Alves
• Grantee: Natalia Fernanda Roldão
• Host Institution: Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo de São Carlos (IAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The contemporary city, which remains a product of social, cultural, political, and economic transformations, demands the investigation of aspects related to the new urban spatialities and sociabilities. This city, which generates new relationships between the public and private domain, enables possible questionings regarding the visible and invisible separations that fragment the urban space and alter, empty in a certain sense, the notion of public space. The transformations of the notion of public space demand, in this way, the analysis of equipment of collective domain, as much as the investigation of the city itself while a public asset - considering that it is a reflex of an economy that in search of profit transforms the urban space in a "commodity". This work proposes, therefore, the analysis and questioning of the SESCs under the reference of the container concept. Containers, according to Solá - Morales refers to " these places, not always public, neither private, in which is produced the exchange, the disposal, the distribution of the qualities that define the multiple consumptions of our highly ritualized societies. "In this context, this research comprehends the relationship between the most recent equipment and the urban space, as well as the way that they manifest and configure this space, evaluating the relevance of its qualification as "containers". Beyond that, as a sequence to previous research, it proposes to reevaluate and complement the criteria and parameters of the spatial analysis matrix that was applied, as well as to complement others in development. (AU)