- Changing Public Spaces and Re-Designing the City: Effects of Major Events in Rio and in Lisbon   217 kb by    Magalhães, Fernanda & Serdoura, Francisco & Nacif, Helia | fmbrasilrj@hotmail.com    Short Outline The pulsar of cities corresponds to a strong change. The extra burden has to find a place to fit on the city and enough infrastructure.The paper looks at two cases. Abstract The pulsar of cities is not only their breathing; it corresponds to a strong change of their content on special occasions. In any case it can be of an “elliptic” nature, periodically coming, or “parabolic” nature, happening only once in a life time. To evaluate the pulsar effects in cities one have to measure the intensity of changes (pulsar flows), their nature and their duration. Starting form a city, or space, with X inhabitants (average), the number will change to X + AX or to X – AX on pulsar situations. These extremes will last At minutes, hours or days. These effects can be measured on absolute values either on percentages of X or of time. The extra burden has to find a place to fit on the city and enough social infrastructures to operate. A negative burden means a void on city-life and also needs some measures to avoid unsafety, lack of economy of scale and urban life distortions. The paper departure from the analysis of case studies in two cities, Lisbon and in Rio, in two different continents Europe and South America, to discuss the impacts and major changes (pulsar flows) caused in the city by major events such as the Carnival or the Football championship. The following questions are dealt: How do these two cities cope with the increase on the abnormal infrastructure demands during the events? What sort of temporary and permanent impacts can be identified in the cities? How people perceive the physical and functional changes introduced in the city by those major events just after they have happened? What sorts of measures local authorities take action to minimize impacts on every day life over the time of the events? What sort of use is given to infrastructure built to support the event after it? Are any type of devices or solutions used to take advantage of infrastructure left redundant? Frequently these major events are also used by cities as a form to implement improvements and major infrastructure on their urban space and as a form to produce and design new developments. In the two specific cases the paper will look at what sort of impacts and changes in the public spaces and on the urban fabric the events have caused, and the type of urban development associated to them? And last what sort of new demands have been generated on the public as a consequence of those changes introduced by the events? Keywords public spaces, planning arrengements and infrastructure Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2002: The Pulsar Effect   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper