Music and imaginary in the production of a city: The complex vitality of the carioca Lapa.

Abstract

The instrumental usage of music to the promotion of the city’s image can be acknowledged in the dominant imaginary of the city of Rio de Janeiro, in which Lapa appears as a place of bohemian. Event though some victories of local leadership result in isolated governmental actions to transform Lapa in a kind of showcase of music genres which are connected to the city’s identity, one cannot deny the happening of a multiple and horizontal cultural occupancy. Lapa’s supervalue as a night point does not lack to express resistancies, not completely conscious ones, to the pragmatic domination of the territory through symbolic appropriations and renewed usages that helps in the identification of collaborative production in the city. Such process of renewal, strongly linked to music, confronts the planning oriented by exogenous models, that materialize themselves in the building of urban-icons-equipments such as the Cidade do Samba (The City of Samba) and the Cidade da Música (The City of Music) that underlines the vertical action and the lack of dialogue to the promotion of the scenario city.