Das antigas praças da cidade de Fortaleza a contemporânea Praça de Fátima: entre usos e (re) apropriações nos espaços sínteses de hibridizações

Abstract

The synthesis effort that composes this study rescues the uses and meanings which the square acquired in the history of Fortaleza, becoming reservoir of practices, representations and social actors. The work developed here was the result of bibliographic and field research, including a foray into the history of public squares in Fortaleza during the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first, allowing me to circumscribe details of landscape and behavioral compositions, inserted in these important thoroughfares of city. Essential locus for the achievement of conviviality and public relations, the squares are part of individual and collective memory of the city. While dynamic spaces, (re) connections in the time and space assuming different uses. Among reformulations and urban interventions of the past, such thoroughfares incorporated different equipment and staked new styles of "civilization" among the residents of the city. At the present time, reappropriated by the capital and by new resistance movements, squares take shape today as spaces of consumption and commodification, while also incorporating the sense of agoras and modern spaces for the affirmation of diversity. Serving as the center stage for dramas and conflicts of the city, they currently reveal a blurring of boundaries between formal and informal, legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate. In order to demonstrate this fusion of meanings in contemporary square, I walk through the ethnographic Fatima Square in Fortaleza, as an emblematic territory which reveals "hybridizations uses " between "sacred" and "profane" and therefore acquires the mark "synthesis space" and is suitable for multiple stakeholders, including workers in the informal market, "faithful", "homeless", "service" and "drug users".