Creating Leisure Places: Political Struggles for the Ressignification of the Paulista Avenue

Abstract

In October 2015, Paulista Avenue, in São Paulo, became a pedestrian zone, closed to cars on Sundays. This political action sparked debates between the ones in favor and the ones against this measure, as well as a clash between Local Government and Public Ministry. São Paulo is the most populous city in Brazil, in the Americas, and in the Southern Hemisphere. It is a urban place and it is most of an iconic avenue, also seen as the mirror of the metropolis. This paper aims to comprehend how Paulista Avenue is being (re)signifyed in face of the transformations that it is going through. Due to the current political struggles, we chose Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory as a guiding approach for our political analysis process. We hope to uncover the meanings brought to discourse by the different political subjects involved in this subject. The research corpus was built in order to answer our main question, regarding the (re)signifying process that Paulista Avenue is going through, which consists basically of secondary sources drawn from different sources: news, notes, manifests, blogs, social network, etc. From the analysis, we identified that although the struggles between the Local Government and the Public Ministry, the articulated practices of the people were important to the (re)signification of the Paulista. Moreover, both subject positions, in favour and against, try to signify the Paulista Avenue towards a democratic use. In conclusion, we point out that struggles for the (re)signification of  Paulista Avenue represent a new way of thinking the city democratically, making it possible to use it for different purposes (like leisure, physical activity, among others), maintaining a peaceful coexistence.