Cartografia dos tempos urbanos: representações, cultura e poder na cidade do Natal (década de 1960)

Abstract

This work’s objective is to analyze the city of Natal during the decade of 1960, period of a dynamic process of urban growth with the development of new spaces around the original occupation nucleuses. We intend to discuss the construction around the urban space provided by this time of great transformations that the city was going through, taking the newspapers, the legislation and the projects of urban intervention as base for discussion. The analysis suggests that such constructions may be apprehended from boundaries provided by the experience of time, in the articulations between projects of the past, present and future. In this sense, it is discussed how the past of a city is elaborated as a means to mediate the relationship with the present and with a new experience of urban space. The images of an “old”, but “modern” Natal, in face of the Natal that is being set are in dispute. The experiences of the present impose a series of actions as to conform these images, experiences that are taken into effect by the specific needs of the daily lives. This is how the city practices are included as a way to legitimize the new spaces that are being shaped in Natal, even though they’re denied as the image of a city to be put into effect. And a horizon of expectation is also elaborated amidst this outline, images of desire and future projections. Relying on this utopia of progress, in the redemption by the employment of techniques, the City Plans made for Natal in this period are inserted in this perspective, based on specific knowledge (the city planner, the engineer, the economist). We point out the multiple characters that the urban space acquires, whether in the field of materialness or of representations. A space permeated by relations of power where the constructions of practices and the image of the society are being disputed.