Sobre formas, usos e leis: decifrando relações entre forma urbana, parâmetros urbanísticos e condições morfológicas de urbanidade em Natal/RN

Abstract

Relationships linking urban form and conditions for the development of urbanity are investigated in this thesis, which addresses neighborhoods of Natal/RN/Brazil as case studies, taking into account that the parameters of land use and land subdivision, established by the Master Plans, are factors that can act on how the urban form is structured. To verify these conditions for the development of urbanity, this work is based on two premises: the first is that architecture and its spatial configuration - understood as an independent variable - affects social life (HILLIER; HANSON, 1984); the second is that the urban landscape as a unit results from successive historic and geographical processes that imprint traces on the physical and spatial structure of a city (CONZEN, 1960). Considering the historical processes that Natal has gone through in the last 50 years, we aim to identify the socio-spatial marks that shaped seven urban Morphological Regions (as defined according to criteria proposed by Conzen) and associate them with the typological patterns pointed out by the literature as potential developers of urbanity conditions. Patterns of land use, occupation and subdivision enhance the definition of the city's spatial form and, consequently, can become instruments for promoting or discouraging some of the socio-spatial qualities most dear to human coexistence in the city. Results suggest that the legal parameters of land use, occupation and subdivision tend to be obeyed in more accessible areas that concentrate higher income groups. However, in these areas, some typological patterns that the literature points out as less prone to the formation of urbanity also predominate. Conversely, morphological conditions viewed in the literature as more favorable to urbanity are often present in areas protected by special laws, whose parameters are constituted by less rigid constraints of land occupation. In Morphologic Regions where the implementation of legal parameters has not been consolidated, socio-spatial transgressions also end up by allowing for conditions of urbanity.