Desvelar o urbano: o Centro de Vitória-ES e o ensaio de uma experiência fenomenológica

Abstract

Western society has developed under the preponderance of rational and objective thinking since the Modern Age. Combined with the scientific and technological advances that have followed, objectivity has been applied predominantly in different areas of knowledge. In the 20th century, the field of architecture and urbanism has aligned with the Modern Movement in the exploration of techniques and materials in the reconstruction of European cities in the second post-war period. The homogeneous discourse of the modern city presupposed the innovation of building types and the rise of road interventions in the urban space. At the limit, the modern city is based on the universal concept of the city submitted to rationalist zoning, whose use of urban land must be separated by functions. The trivialized replication of modern principles culminated in the extreme situation of fragmented city spaces and passive human bodies. These thoughts were and still are, even if revised, paradigms and practices in the professional field of the architect and urban planner. In Vitória (ES), the modernization process of the city started in the late 19th century and intensified in the 20th century, especially impacted the Center, generating the urban restructuring of the area and the expansion of port activities. Landfills expressed, over the past century, a significant increase in buildable area, boosted the verticalization of properties and the opening of new roads, following the urban model of large European and Latin American cities. In the academic environment, there is a predilection for objective knowledge, which aims to instrumentalize methods and validate results. This work considers it restricted to advocate the researcher's impartiality regarding the studied object and adopt the apprehension of reality through the objectivity-subjectivity dichotomy. It emphasizes subjectivity as a necessary counterpoint to rationalism and uses the phenomenological attitude as a method to revalidate subjectivity in science. Rehearses a phenomenological approach in the Center of Vitória, in an intersubjective experience of the researcher immersed in the daily life of the neighborhood, in order to unveil new issues related to the reading of the urban space. It results in a first-person narrative, describing the researcher's trajectory and the mobilizing question of this study: what can the Center say subjectively, that it has not said before under a technical view?