Violência e medo do crime: tipologias territoriais no bairro de Cidade Nova, Natal - RN

Abstract

We will initially focus on the idea that the city is a body that is affected and that promotes affections, being in the city is to experience the encounter of bodies that are moving at different speeds and rhythms. These encounters are expressed through the landscape morphology, denoting the multiplicity of shapes, contours, sounds, colors, volumes, experiences, and feelings. The city has undergone a significant transformation in its territorial texture. In recent times it has ceased to be a place of shelter and security to represent the portrait of exclusion and reclusion, for humans. Affected by countless problems, the city, in post-modernity, highlights the phenomenon of violence and fear of crime, and the strategies for obtaining safe spaces as emblems of these changes. The study undertaken here discusses the city in this context, presenting as an empirical reference Natal, capital of Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil) and the Cidade Nova neighborhood, located in the West Zone. The research in the neighborhood showed that violence and fear of crime began to restructure the territorial morphology, creating and reorganizing the spatial logic of the place and modifying the experiences of the neighborhood. In this way the residents are the unique agents to deliberate about the space in which they live, because they have experiences with such spaces, they are living parts of these places, keeping with them the stories that, when told, help to understand the morphology of the neighborhood. From this perspective, the analysis of the spatial perception of individuals is a strategy that contributes to understanding and deciphering the territorial texture of Cidade Nova from the analysis of territorial typologies in the neighborhood.