Os meandros do habitar na metrópole: expansão urbana e controle territorial na produção do litoral de Fortaleza

Abstract

The present research seeks, from the regressive-progressive method, to grasp the urban production of the waterfront of Fortaleza, investigating, mainly, the conceptions, materializations and consequences of the strategies of territorial control applied by the local state-business apparatus. For a long period of time, Fortaleza just kept partial connections to its beach areas, which remained relatively away from urban-social practices and also from expansion of the formal urban network, allowing the city’s transformation of the space coast into one of the biggest artisanal maritime fishermen refuges of the State. The devalued land near to the sea also constitutes as territories of resistance and insertion in the urban culture to migrants coming from sertões, given the actions that sought to contain the access of this population contingent to the established urban zone, as well as to the rentier practice of urban landowners and difficulties about employment and income. However, during the second half of the 20th century, the coastal area becomes one of the most disputed and valued in the city, provoking public authority to begin to implement diversified interventions of incorporation and urban renewal. Nowadays, the segment that embraces Praia de Iracema, Meireles and Mucuripe neighbourhoods is characterized by the force of the interweaving between real estate and tourist dynamics, characterized by the high price of urban land, concentration of multifamily condominiums and high-standard hotels and also the best access conditions to urban infrastructure services and networks. At the same time, Fortaleza maintains an important peculiarity regarding the occupation of its waterfront, since it is characterized by the significant distribution of low-income housing settlements that still present diverses patterns and degrees of irregularity and urban precariousness. In the current context of entrepreneurship in urban governance, the emergence of strategic planning and the movement towards to "revitalization" of central urban areas and waterfronts, there is also a new strengthening of selective interventions in key areas of the city, transforming these settlements that remained as territorial reserve in primordial borders of real estate and tourist expansion of Fortaleza. New interventions are designed and implemented to foster the competitive insertion of the city into the global economy, generating new conflicts and forms of resistance. The long and permanent confrontation between the strategies of territorial control and the creative practice of popular resistance is the founding and inseparable mark of the urban production of the coast of Fortaleza.