Fluxos em transformação: as disputas pelos caminhos dos ônibus nas redes de circulação de Natal/RN (décadas de 1950 e 1960)

Abstract

Natal/RN has intensified and prioritized the use of cars, buses and trucks since the midtwentieth century. While the city had grown with rail networks (whether trains or trams) in the first half of the century, that conformed certain power relations over it, in the middle of the century, buses became the main mode of public transport for movement of people in the city. This research questions: How the organization of this city influenced the expansion of bus networks between 1950 and 1960 decades? Considering that the buses has expanded to already economically and politically consolidated spaces in other cities and that the city flows are the result of the social and economic order that composes it, it is hypothesized that the buses in Natal consolidated the concentration of flows in previously established centralities. Moreover, the implementation of a more flexible modal has allowed new social articulations for the transformation of urban networks. In the context of the development of technical networks, changes and conflicts for space and political articulations from the insertion of buses as public transport in Natal, the objective in this research is to understand the impact of the city's socio-spatial structure in the implementation and development of new transport systems. For this, newspaper and legislative were used documents to identify and analyze the articulations of urban actors and agents on the conformation of the circulation networks, to identify the political arguments and discourses that influenced these performances, the spatial aspect and the materialization of these conflicts in the technical network. As a result, economical central areas has prioritized for urban agents. The bus flow concentrated in the commercial areas.