The Other Public Space: Questioned Legitimacy and Highlighted Inequalities Underneath an Overpass

Recently, local governments have been interested in revitalizing urban spaces impacted by overpasses, considered degraded and violent. However, the daily lives of the surrounding people remain largely misunderstood. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter analyses the dynamics of five different social actors in the public space beneath the Paulo de Frontin overpass, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I explore the negotiations and struggles of residents, volunteer workers, street vendors, peddlers and homeless people under the overpass. Inspired by Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, I draw on semi-structured interviews and direct observation to explore the public space below this overpass as “other”. Overpasses can be understood as a symbol of urban spaces designed and appropriated on the basis of authoritarianism and exclusion. The degradation and violence are the result of historical inequalities which brought the people studied to live and work beneath the overpass. The space underneath the overpass revealed inequalities within inequalities, as marginalized actors are also unequal among themselves. The investigation of public spaces that are considered “dead” or “interstitial” and their definition as “other public spaces” delegitimises the official narratives on progress and development that mark overpasses’ revitalization projects. I argue that the use of “revitalization” may cause obscurity and a misunderstanding of former and existing social dynamics in those spaces, that it may nourish the perpetuation or even the increase in social inequalities in the urban global south.