Urban equipment and public places are not empty physical objects, but rather culturally charged devices bearing narratives that compose the symbolic dimension of the city. Each street, building, public square, and so on, participates in our everyday lives, for example, by helping us locating and recognising ourselves within the city while at the same time being shaped physically and symbolically by our actions. In this sense, they not only participate in the city's collective life but also in our mnemonic experience.
Like public places, memory is not self-contained and independent of social practices but rather in a constant dispute that takes place in different fronts – including urban toponymy – and relies on different tactics that are themselves influenced by contemporary sensibilities.
This paper has as its main objective the analysis of ongoing disputes around Niemeyer's bridge name in Brasília. It sustains that these disputes are significantly rich in meanings that conduce to a better comprehension of memory's construction in the Brazilian post-dictatorship (e.g. the present days' perspectives for democracy and the reminiscences of state terrorism; the role of public participation in the construction of memory and the potentiality of public places to support this construction).
Drawing from a theoretical framework that puts place and memory into relationship this paper expects to demonstrate how the meanings of the past and the projects for the future are simultaneously being disputed in the present by different social actors through this form of temporary occupation of the city's urban toponymy.
