This work examines memory narratives, poetical writings and urbanistic discourses about the Parque do Flamengo, built in Rio de Janeiro during the 1950s and 1960s, in order to understand the role of imagination and language in its construction as a cultural artefact in the city s history. The implementation of this urban plan was started in the 1950s and was reworked in the 1960s, during the Government of Carlos Lacerda by Grupo de Trabalho, a multidisciplinary team coordinated by Lota Macedo Soares and headed by the architect Affonso Eduardo Reidy and the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. This modernist carioca garden – an architectural and landscape work threefold unfolded as a constructed environment, its images, and the accompanying critical discourses – gains importance in this thesis as a cultural artefact that brought together conflicting interpretations of history expressed in the city; entailed mythical and historical motives from garden and landscape to modern landscaping methods; and was the very fabric of memories and projections of an imagined city. Among others historical records of this collective work, the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop recreates the local landscapes in new images Imagining the city is a poetic, political and ethical act of its inhabitants, ever an exchange between subjective and social dimensions. It is the modern way of inhabiting the city: building it as a metaphorical city that links the fleeting, fragmentary and conflicting experience of urban life to possible alternatives of the way things could be.