Abstract
At a time when all public access spaces in the city were closed, including cafes, the Public Market of Braga remained an open space, albeit with strict entrance control rules. The authors thus advance with the hypothesis that the PM was fundamental to guarantee the routine mobility of Braga's citizens, especially the most disadvantaged and, with that, to ensure their sense of hope and confidence in the future. Likewise, the PM is a place of resistance also from the perspective of sellers, on the one hand, maintaining its economic survival, albeit with visible difficulties, and on the other hand, ensuring the maintenance of a vital communication space. To reflect on the specific ways in which this phenomenon has occurred since January 2021 is the main objective of this chapter.
TopIntroduction
Participation in the public sphere, in what is common, according to Arendt (1958/2001, pp. 64-65), is a condition, a guarantee of the reality of the world and of our own reality. Furthermore, in everyday contexts, it is in the public sphere that subjects find, through their social interaction (which implies, in one way or another, the experience of mobility), ways of dealing with their awareness of finitude, of the world, of loneliness, in a word, the “fear of death”: “that it's not the usual fear, let's say, for dying, but a kind of tiny, subterranean and permanent terror that takes over life…as if death, as the opposite of life, as absolute lethargy, definitive rigidity, paralysis and abyss, came to occupy the terrain of our daily times. It is against the tendency to be captured by such a feeling of fear that we must fight — precisely, keeping ourselves active and concerned about others and the social life of which we are a part” (Gil, 2020, p. 97).The vital routine itineraries, such as the practice of 'going shopping', the sites where such practices occur are spaces of social communication, more or less intense, and of economic and symbolic exchange of experiences and emotions. It is also, and especially in the pandemic context, in these spaces (and not just on the street) that the city is constituted as a “city in motion” (Nel.lo, 2015), as an instance of the exercise of “citizen responsibility” in times of deep social crisis. “In crisis, space matters”, says Nel.lo (2015), and collective heritage and goods can also include social practices or, in the author's words, the exercise of “citizenship in motion”. Stavrides (2021) also discusses the potential of new ways of looking at common spaces, spaces that are inscribed in a city understood as a “common world in formation” and not as a reality or consummated spatial order. In this sense, it can be considered that crisis’ contexts impose the urgency of reinventing new and common spaces. In the preface to the work by Stavrides (2021), Common space. The city as a collective work, Joana Braga clarifies that for the author “cities… are systems of spatial relations in continuous mutation, invested and mobilized also by the daily practices of its inhabitants” (Braga, 2021, p. 7). Do we now have reasons to believe in the definitive “decay of the public man”, as Sennett (1974/2017) would argue? Or can we consider the role of transformations, for example at the level of urban design, in redefining new ways of building a “happy city”, as stated by Montgomery (2015)?
Key Terms in this Chapter
Routine: The monotonous fulfillment of the predictable, the regularity of the practices that make up everyday active life.
Insecurity: A feeling of lack of confidence in the surrounding urban environment, of uncertainty regarding the present-future generated by the perception of risk that threatens the regularity of the daily life.
Place: A meaningful site. Space is transformed into “place” when humans invest meaning on it and then become attached to it. Place is constructed and reconstructed over time by different groups of people. It is thus a socially produced space.
Marketplaces: Situated phenomena; assigned to precise sites—in space and time—and social frameworks.
Everyday Resistance: The more or less veiled strategies that individuals or groups develop in their daily lives, in order to minimize the oppressive effects resulting from the social and political dominant structures to which they are subject.
Mobility: The set of itineraries, displacements. and drifts that individuals experience in the context of everyday urban life, both in physical and virtual space.
Social Communication: The process of putting in common, in a specific social setting.
Urban Public Markets: Long-standing urban institutions owned and managed by public authorities, located in a geographically distinct city location, which encompass specific social relationships and frameworks through which economic transactions take place and generators of social and cultural activity. Urban settlements which are a part of the public urban space.