Metropolitan mutations: road system structures as place of appropriation, reinvention and use in the contemporary city

Abstract

This paper analyses urban road structures that have undergone transformations of appropriations different from what they were originally designated, with focus in three viaducts. Subversions of use, incorporation of architectural structures to existing contexts, and multiple relationships between circulation and permanence contribute in order that the contemporary metropolis offers a particular aesthetic experience. The possibility of facing the unknown and occupying public spaces rescue the notion of city as a place of exchanges, freedom and unpredictability. Concepts of heterotopia and terrain vague are discussed in the approach to interstitial spaces, of the "non-places", and infrastructures in relation to the metropolitan context. The work analyses three viaducts located in distinctive contexts: the High Line in New York, the Eichbaum Oper in Munich, and the Madureira viaduct in Rio de Janeiro. In difficult times, they are signs of power of simple but precise interventions, and of the relationship between the local popular organization and the implanted projects. In common they share the initial situation of interstitial space and the interventions that transformed them into spaces of collective use, with an intense and particular relationship between the public and urban space.