Políticas urbanas e afirmação do direito à cidade: um estudo sobre as contribuições do Complexo Cultural Estação das Artes Belchior para a Comunidade Moura Brasil em Fortaleza, Ceará

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to understand how the community of the Moura Brasil neighborhood, its visitors and workers, evaluate the installation of the Station of Arts Cultural Complex (CCEA). The facility houses a series of public policies focused on culture and occupies an area that, for over a century, housed the old João Felipe railway station, a historical heritage site of the capital of Ceará, Fortaleza, which was revitalized to house the cultural complex. It is characterized as a qualitative and exploratory study. In addition to bibliographic and documentary analyses, it used interviews with visitors, formal and informal workers of the complex, and representatives of the residents of the Moura Brasil neighborhood. Field observations were also carried out, which were used to enrich the discussions. The data obtained from the interviews with visitors and workers were tabulated and subsequently described, and some, to facilitate understanding, had their results presented in the form of graphs, which were also described. To analyze the content of the interviews with representatives of the residents of Moura Brasil, the key expressions used were: “requalification” and “democratization of space”. Based on these expressions, statements were identified in the interviewees' responses that presented, in a positive or negative way, the ideas contained in the key expressions. To better understand the results, the concepts of right to the city and gentrification were studied. It was identified that the complex is currently aimed at a predominantly academic, middle-class audience, coming from more distant regions of the city. High prices of the food offered inside and a program mainly aimed at young academic audiences, with exceptions, may drive other audiences away from the space. It was concluded that the population evaluates the installation of the complex for the surrounding area as positive, however, they demand that changes need to be made so that the facility becomes more attractive to different audiences, especially for the community itself, which lacks leisure spaces.