Peripheral creativity: temporary cultural uses as alternatives to inefficient policies?

ABSTRACT

The article focuses on temporary and improvised cultural spaces in marginalized neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They are presented here as alternatives to current urban and cultural policies, often based on international ‘best practices’ models with exclusionary and segregating consequences. It begins with a brief overview into North American and Western European cultural planning policies. It then analyses the instability of cultural policies in Brazil, highlighting that, after a period of State recognition of bottom-up actions, administrators have turned to a contradictory planning scheme that mixes outdated and recent international trends, leading lower-income inhabitants to self-build their own cultural spaces. Unlike many products of today’s global strand of ‘tactic urbanism’, Rio’s temporary spaces are politically charged territories of resistance. An example is ‘Cine Taquara’ – an improvised cinema and debate forum that illustrates how, in an unequal city, such initiatives can do more towards social inclusion than ready-made models.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporary urbanism
• cultural planning
• creative policies
• Latin America

Acknowlegment

The authors would like to thank the organizers and attendees of Cine Taquara.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this study was financed by the ‘Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES-Brazil)’ (Finance Code 001) and by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany); Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung [Forschungsstipendium für Postdoktoranden]; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico [Scientific Initiation Scholarship]; Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior [Código de Financiamento 001].

Notes on contributors

Claudia Seldin

Claudia Seldin is an architect and urban planner, currently working as a guest researcher at the Centre for Metropolitan Studies (CMS) at the Tecnische Univertität Berlin (Germany) with a fellowship from Capes and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Urbanism from the Graduate Program in Urbanism (PROURB) of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Brazil, with two collaboration periods at the Fakultät Architektur und Urbanistik of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Germany). She was a former assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at UFRJ. She is the recipient of the 2016 Capes Dissertation Prize for best Ph.D. dissertation in Architecture and Urbanism (given by the Brazilian Ministry of Education) and of the VIII Milton Santos Prize for best article in a journal (given by the Brazilian National Association of Graduate Research in Urban and Regional Planning in 2017). She is also the author of Urban Images and Resistances: From Capitals of Culture to Creative Cities (2017) and the co-editor of Cultures and Resistances in the City (2018).

Caio César de Azevedo Barros

Caio César de Azevedo Barros is a social scientist with a Master’s Degree in Anthropology from the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology of the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Museu Nacional/UFRJ), where he is also a PhD candidate. He holds a technical scholarship from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technical Development (CNPq) at the Graduate Program in Urbanism of the same university, serving as a member of the research lab ‘Culture, History and Urbanism’. He was an editor of the Brazilian social sciences journal Habitus from 2013 to 2016.

Pedro Vitor Costa Ribeiro

Pedro Vitor da Costa Ribeiro is an undergraduate student at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (FAU/UFRJ). He holds a scientific initiation scholarship from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technical Development (CNPq) at the Graduate Program in Urbanism of the same university, serving as a member of the research lab ‘Culture, History and Urbanism’. He was a volunteer of the Latin American NGO Teto in 2015, which focus on housing projects in underprivileged neighbourhoods. He is currently a member of the cultural collective responsible for the Cine Taquara initiative in the western region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Thomas Ilg Gavinho

Thomas Ilg Gavinho is an undergraduate student at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (FAU/UFRJ). He holds a scientific initiation scholarship from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technical Development (CNPq) at the Graduate Program in Urbanism of the same university, serving as a member of the research lab ‘Culture, History and Urbanism’. Since 2013 he has been a co-editor of the Brazilian cultural magazine Usina, focused on art, literature and cinema.