Taking Notes from Brazilian World Cup Fans in Toronto: Open Source, Participation, Public Space by neil
There are any number of discursive and rhetorical qualifiers I could affix or undergird to buttress the following remarks. They could include things like: some vernacular and mythic essence of flavela-bound Brazilian public life and the social solidarity of the multitude; historically-informed senses of community; the recent “emergence” of the latin global south; the globalization of football and its diffuse transnational capital flows; the banner of world humanism and the expressive power of sport; football as war and politics by other means…the list continues.
What requires qualification? Well, the Brazilain take-over of College Street west of Dufferin in recent hours following Brazil’s 1-0 victory over Croatia. Around a hub of Brazilian-based bars and cafes, fans effectively shut down the vehicular capacity of the street, transforming it into a celebratory place for revelry; literally, it was a carnivalesque kind of rearticulation. I walked through it: I was tickled, feeling a mild but palpable sense of pleasure at having been coopted by this event during my passage home.
Now, one could be cynical, one could say this was mere convention, expected even, considering all the tropes around passion for the game and the exotic/unruly behaviour of sun-drenched, scantly clad brazilianos. Yet, invest in these renditions as one may, they cannot outstrip or nullify the basic (if temporary) constituent power of a small group of people to act in concert so as to orchestrate the reorganization and reorientation of a space heavily-coded as something else. While College Street has a very street-based feel over that particular stretch, its function as an artery and thruway was delayed, placed on hold while things leaked outside of the bars, off the sidewalks, and into the street. In a city (Toronto) where car-free and pedestrian-friendly spaces are at a minimum or are consigned to parks; where the Kensington Market community has to eek out and pull teeth to establish a Sunday-only car-free zone in the downtown; and where the municipal apparatus has repeatedly opposed the celebration of one measely Car Free Day, it was reassuring to witness the participatory potential of this kind of event.
It may seem mundane and I don’t mean to invoke this as a first step in some new-fangled transformation nor as some kind of magic liberatory politics. Certainly, its spontenaeity is further predisposed, predicted by the ongoings of the World Cup. This is exactly what local communities do, especially in regards to Toronto’s manifold cultures of circulation ongoing at asymmetrical rates and in different directions. This is to say that we all implicitly afford and accommodate this sort of thing, circumscribing it within the logic of how we conceptualize the tangle of the thing, “World Cup”. Yet, I think it’s an interesting kind of performative public syntax, a bit of open-source code if you will, that can be taken up by others in considering the types of uses and practices we want to both impart upon and extract from the urban territory around us. It suggests a movement premised on collectivity that is momentarily harnessed to allow for something to happen, “to come through”, without the consent of whatever bloc of authority – governmental, repressive, discursive, affective or otherwise. If we move it from the extraordinary “inside” of the World Cup to the ordinary “outside” of the everyday, we may learn a thing or two, or least find ourselves tickled in the meantime.
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