Os malucos de estrada e a apropriação do espaço público em João Pessoa/PB

Abstract

Popularly known as hippies, the nomadic craftsmen, who call themselves road crazies, Express a culture that evolves entirely on the streets, are constantly changing from one city to another, and establish themselves as nomads. In every city they go, they settle in public spaces and create the Crazies Rock, a place where they make handicrafts and build their habitat. The purpose of this article is to characterize the Crazies Rock in João Pessoa/PB, located on the beach of Tambaú, a public space appropriated by road crazies. The ethnographic approach and the occupation’s cartography showed that the Crazies Rock is a territory (SOUZA, 2013; HAESBAERT, 2014), or more specifically, a nanoterritory (SOUZA, 2013). Although it has no buildings, the Crazies Rock has codes, trails, and invisible boundaries, which entails changes in meanings and expressions of the space, as well as the construction of the road crazies’ identity and values, also transforming the Crazies Rock into one Place. Besides, observing the natural situations, this microscale of road crazies let us understand not only the symbolical construction of the nomadic artisans’ territory, but also the City and its politics - the macroscale. The City organizes social cleansing actions, as intensive inspections, seizure of goods and threats to remove road crazies out of Tambaú Beach.