Taking care of what is ours. Unexpected encounters

In cities nowadays, walking is no longer the main method of knowing and thinking about space, just as communication, that in order to be quick, is no longer experienced in a face-to-face relationship between people.

Carlos Fortuna, 2018, p. 137.

 

When I go to work by foot, it sometimes happens that I do it with plenty of time, without the feeling that I’m late, released from any guilt that the rhythm of the city machine makes us feel whenever we stop running against time. A perversion that exists in the city, says Gonçalo Tavares (2025), is to convey the feeling that we are always late, something that makes us feel guilty, either for not having done enough, or for not giving enough.

In those intervals, in which I have the luxury of putting practical concerns on the sidelines, walking to work is transformed, gaining new shapes. It is no longer a transition between inside and outside, between here and there with no “value of its own” (Grós 2008/2021, p. 37). Quite the opposite. It’s as if everything is waiting for me, waiting to be looked at, felt, walked through. I walk with my whole body, apart from those who run past me or talk to their peers, immersed in the daily frenzy into which the constant feeling of “being in debt” pushes us.  I let myself be carried and guided by the sound of the river, while I walk attentive to “the sympathy of living things” (Grós, 2008/2021, p. 60) that respond to my presence.

It’s as if I’m seeing things for the first time. Perhaps this corresponds to what José Gil (1996) defines as looking (Neves, 2010). The philosopher says that seeing and looking are not the same thing. In order to see, we have to look, but we can look without seeing, that is, without intellectualizing, without giving meaning to what we see and, instead, simply enjoy the process, going with the flow: with the flow of water, the wind blowing through the trees and flowers, the impact of my feet hitting the ground or the bicycles that always pass me by with something better to do.

In one of those moments of wandering, enjoying the vast landscape, near the entrance to one of the so-called Parque Desportivo da Rodovia [“Road Sports Park”], in the city of Braga, the brilliant color of a plant triggered my memory. This took me back to the island of São Miguel, in the Azores, and the dazzling corners populated with hundreds of flowers of the same kind of plant that I thought was original and typical of those green and humid landscapes.

 

 

Figure 1. Flowerbeds

 

Taken by surprise, I felt the need to deviate from the path so that there would be no doubts regarding my unexpected discovery. The plants were arranged in flowerbeds on the edge of a kind of pedestrian bridge, in the shape of a circle, which allows you to cross the East River from one side to the other. And I say a kind of bridge because it was designed not only for a functional purpose, that of being a place of passage, but also for conviviality: it includes furniture, benches and tables, which invite us to sit down and socialize, even though some may feel intimidated to do so, since the centrality of the passage removes the sheltering effect that benches can have in cities’ public spaces. To sit, whether to rest or for pleasure, is to show your body to others, which makes the act of sitting in public within the city both banal and delicate; hence the location of this type of seat, as well as its design, affects the different uses we can make of it (Jolé, 2003). The benches we can find there don’t seem to be perceived as welcoming or as encouraging of sociability. On the several occasions I passed by, I never saw them occupied.

 

Figure 2. Pedestrian bridge and furniture

 

But it wasn’t the furniture of the pedestrian bridge that attracted me. It was rather the colorful vegetation in the flowerbeds. At the edge of the flowerbeds was an elderly man with a small hoe tool in his hands, not wearing a uniform or showing any other sign of being a council employee. Amazed by my unusual discovery, I immediately questioned him. And the conversation flew on. From the plant to the dedication with which he takes care of the flower beds every day. Every day, after having lunch at home (sometimes with his two daughters who come to visit), he goes out for a coffee at the kiosk next to the Nanotechnology Center, a meeting place for many retired men. Instead of playing cards and making small talk, a common practice on the terrace of that kiosk, he entertains himself by bringing this liminal zone to life.

It all started with the pandemic and the need to “get out of the house so as not to go crazy”. Even so, “the divorce happened”. He began by making figures in the flowerbeds with the fruit from the trees that line the East River in that area; over time, the figures gave way to words, in high-relief, traced with plant stalks. “Braga, cidade paraíso” [“Braga, paradise city”]; “Braga, encanta” [“Braga charms”]; “Rio Este” [“East River”].

“I have to imagine everything in my head first, and then I start doing it,” he told me proudly. “Well-educated people from the neighborhood come here to talk to me and show their appreciation for what I do.”  “I’d even like to do more, to take care, for example, of the areas surrounding those trees over there; I’ve even spoken to the men from the Town Hall, who are here in the park…”  His taste for cultivating his imagination comes from the practices of his former profession. “I had an advertising agency. Everyone knew who I was in Braga. Even my daughter graduated in pharmacy, but she works in advertising.” Like father, like daughter…

 

 

Figure 3. Braga Encanta [Braga charms]

 

Figure 4. Cidade Paraíso [Paradise City]

 

Figure 5. Complexo Desportivo da Rodovia  [“Road Sports Park”]

 

My meeting with this expressive practice, which is simultaneously a care practice, made me think about the “porosity” (Benjamin, 1928/1992) of urban spaces – a pedestrian bridge that is a walkway and wants to be simultaneously a living room and a flower bed, which is both public and private. I saw the potential of the many uses that we make of collective public resources and the experiences that foster a sense of “commons”, the foundation of urban civic culture (Amin, 2008).

The contemporary discussion about the meaning of commons (e.g. Bollier, 2016, May 17) tells us that it results from a praxis that “communizes things” and is driven by “principles of cooperation and responsibility: with each other, with the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals” (Federici, 2012/2019, pp. 317-318).  What connects and binds us to one another can also be approached in terms of care, as Joan Tronto proposes in the book Caring democracy, published in 2013. This implies rethinking concrete social relationships from a democratic perspective of shared responsibility. In this kind of scenario, the creative individuality of subjects can thrive by expanding the horizons of “commoning” provided that, as the Greek architect Stavrides emphasizes, communization or the process of making the common “never ossifies in the enclosed reality or fantasy of a homogenized common world” (Stravides, 2017, p. 273).

 

Zara Pinto-Coelho (CECS/University of Minho)

Braga, May 26 of 2025

Published in June 26 of 2025

 

 

References

Amin, A. (2008). Collective culture and urban public space. City, 12(1), 5-24.

Benjamin, W. (1992). Rua de sentido único, Crónica berlinense e infância berlinense por volta de 1900 (C. Fischer & I.A. Sousa, Trad.).  Relógio d`Água. (Obra original publicada em 1928)

Bollier, D. (2016, 17 de maio). Commoning as a transformative social paradigm. David Bollier. News and perspectives on the commons. [https://www.bollier.org/blog/commoning-transformative-social-paradigm].

Federic, S. (2019). O ponto zero da revolução: trabalho doméstico, reprodução e luta feminista (Coletivo Sycorax,Trad.). Elefante. (Obra original publicada em 2012)

Fortuna, C.   (2018). Caminhar urbano e vivências imprevistas. Revista Brasileira de Sociologia, 6(3), 136-154.

Gil, J. (1996). A imagem-nua e as pequenas percepções. Estética e metafenomenologia. Relógio d ́Água.

Gonçalo, M. T. (2025, 5 de março). A literatura é uma arte pobre, no melhor dos sentidos.  Jornal Sol.

Grós, F. (2021). Caminhar uma filosofia (C. Euvaldo, Trad.). Ubu Editora. (Obra original publicada em 2008)

Jolé, M. (2003). Quand la ville invite à s´asseoir. Le banc public parisien et la tentation de la dépose. Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine, 94, 107-115.

Neves, J. P (2010). A experiência perceptiva do ecrã. Novas perspectivas interdisciplinares. In Z. Pinto-Coelho, & J. P. Neves (Eds.), Ecrã, paisagem e corpo (pp. 95-103). Grácio Editor.

Stavrides, S. (2016). Common space: The city as commons. Zed Books.

Tronto, J. (2013). Caring democracy. Markets, equality, and justice. New York University Press.