A cidade e as suas praças: formação dos espaços de sociabilidades públicas e seus usos sociais em Natal (1893-1929)

Abstract

This work aims to analyze and understand the process of construction of squares in the city of Natal as spaces for public sociability, between the years 1893 and 1929. During this period, the ruling classes of Rio Grande do Norte, especially political groups linked to families Albuquerque Maranhão and Bezerra de Medeiros, sought to legitimize a discourse of modernization of the city to elevate it to the status and position of economic centrality, required by a capital. To this end, they mobilized international loans, state credits and resources from the Municipal Administration for the construction, beautification and landscaping of the squares André de Albuquerque, Augusto Severo, Pedro Velho, João Maria and Sete de Setembro, idealized by local intellectuals and chroniclers as havens of leisure and of learning refined behavioral codes, emanating from francophile cultural models. In different proportions, material and symbolic transformations in these social environments led to changes in the social uses attributed to them by different subjects. Thus, we intend to reconstruct the role that the set of five squares in Natal played in the period of the First Republic through toponymy, the elaboration of a modernizing image of the city and its inhabitants, civic rituals, commercial dynamics and administrative management of the city. The study starts from the perspective of space in two main senses, namely, in the public and sociological dimension. The first concerns the analysis of space as an object of state interventions in its architectural and material forms, which includes squares, surrounding buildings, their furniture, the standardization of sidewalks, storage measures and the installation of urban equipment. The second, in turn, consists of investigating the potential of agents in this concrete space to raise various social relations that transcend the private sphere and were controlled, ideally, by legislative regulations, municipal and customary resolutions. From this perspective, we take as the guiding axis of the research the questioning about the inscription of the desires to establish a republican order in the social structure, mainly within the scope of the local political network and sociability guided by cosmopolitan models of social conduct and civic education. Thus, we examined as historical testimonies newspapers from the situationist Republican Party and the opposition, annual messages from governors, reports from municipal intendants, resolutions and notices from the municipal government, photographs and almanacs.