Parque do Flamengo revisitado: uma investigação geográfica através do pensamento de Henri Lefebvre

Abstract

The thesis presented here investigates, from a geographical perspective, the Parque do Flamengo (1961-1965), a monumental space spread between the Central Zone and the South Zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro. For the central objective proposed here – to answer the most basic and most vital question: what is essentially this space, Parque do Flamengo? – we invoke the concept of urban space and the regressive-progressive dialectical method authored by the french philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Procedure based on Karl Marx that establishes that for the critical understanding of a space we must go back to the moment of production of its main elements (dating). Another step is to identify the continuities and discontinuities that produce and reproduce (in) this space over time. Following this logic, we are led to two groups of “coordinates”. The first consists of two public loci that in many aspects – concrete and symbolic, architectural and landscape – predate Flamengo Park:o Passeio Público, built in colonial times (1783), and the republican Avenida Beira-mar (1906). The second set of “cardinal points” leads us to two annihilations and a grounding. The demolitions of Morro do Castelo (started in 1904) and Morro de Santo Antônio (during the 1950s and 1960s). Controversial urban actions that demanded high economic, historical and sociocultural costs. With the remains of these landforms, part of the Baía da Guanabara will be filled up, giving rise to the Aterro do Flamengo, ground on which the Parque do Flamengo and other landmarks will be built. One of them is MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, which also has genetic links with our object. It is therefore, based on dating and regressions and progressions prescribed by the Lefebvrian method, that we face the complexities and spatial contradictions that affect Flamengo Park. Among these, its flagrant structural degradation and the privatization of certain areas. Processes that jeopardize its status as a public and listed space.