Mercado Central de Pelotas: a permanência no lugar do consumo

Abstract

This is an interpretive study on the traditional public markets. The study takes for a pilot case Pelotas Central Market (Mercado Central de Pelotas) in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, but sets it against other equally surveyed facilities, like Buenos Aires markets and the old Bagé Central Market. Departing from this simple sketch, the task purported to perform an interpretation of the urban consumption phenomena, particularly those referring to the building, perception, and usage of public spaces. Taking the viewpoint that the traditional public markets were ruined to give room to supermarkets and the subsequent damage to the popular economy and deterioration of the urban space, the work means to justify the working hypothesis that the consumption society does not edificate, but reificates the reality from the manipulation of the environmental stimuli with marketing goals, a process in which architects have played a fundamental role as accomplices or critics. Acting in the name of the second ideological viewpoint, it is proposed that the social memory of public markets be preserved as a representation of the long period in which the State has acted as a promoter of popular economy. Public markets have been facilities prepared not only to supply foodstuffs for cheap pricing but to promote entrepreneurship as well, two conditions the present state of the market lacks, as it is marked by the raise of food prices and the levels of urban unemployment. If said distortion had been intrinsic to the economic exploitation of urban soil, towns would not even had been built in the first place. On the contrary, a brief characterization of the origins of commercial activities reveals to us that towns have actually been established because the exchange of goods allowed for a peaceful balance between demand and offer of goods necessary to life preservation. This ancestor role of exchange activities is still preserved in the public markets where the substitution of gondolas by stands represents a respectful approach to the face-to-face dealings between vendors, producers, and consumers.