The appropriation of public spaces through dance in the city of Concepción and the challenges for urban design

Abstract

Dance, as well as the rest of the performing arts, has extended its practice and exhibition outside conventional and formal spaces to alternative contexts due to reasons that lie fundamentally in the need to explore new spaces and formats approaching, at the same time, new audiences. In Concepción, dance has slowly been taken to urban contexts. It has thusled to the appropriation of space and infrastructure generating an impact on different spaces. This has meant a change of paradigms, of connotation and way of being perceived by the inhabitants of the city. The present research seeks, in the first place, to analyze the relationship of dance with the city as a stage from the physical appropriation of urban spaces of a public nature and to observe how, through this appropriation, users transform urban spaces into significant places. The study identified the main factors in the design of public spaces and infrastructure which encourage the phenomenon of dance in their surroundings for which they were not directly designed. To this end, three buildings with significant spaces in the city of Concepción associated with the non-formal practice of dance in their immediate contexts and which are recognized as urban settings by dancers and passers-by are identified and chosen. The Tribunal of Justice of Concepción, the School of Chemistry of the University of Concepción and tthe Regional Government of the Biobío Region. For this we worked with a descriptive research methodology, with a mixed approach, to obtain morphological characteristics of the spaces that allowed us to understand how these processes of appropriation of urban space related to dance.