Contested public space: scenarios for street vendors in Juiz de Fora

Abstract

This paper addresses the topic of street vendors in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais. The investigation arises due to recent attempts to ban the activity, transfer it to a popular shopping mall and implement new regulations. This is exploratory research with a qualitative approach. It aims to envision future scenarios for street vendors in the central region of the municipality in a democratic way. The methodology adopted to construct the scenarios included a bibliographical survey on interventions that took place in other Brazilian cities; and in the next stage, interviews were carried out with street vendors and representatives of bodies involved in the discussions. In the end, six main scenarios for the spatialization of street vendors were proposed, which can be made more flexible due to the temporal dimension, adopted individually or combined with each other.