"O Rio Jaguaribe é uma Artéria Aberta": infraestruturas hídricas e urbanização no Ceará (1921-2002)

Abstract

In 1928, amid the socioeconomic crisis caused by the drought in Ceará, the writer and politician Demócrito Rocha published the poem “The Jaguaribe River Is an Open Artery,” in which he compares the river to an “artery” of the Ceará “organism,” suggesting that the Orós Dam would be a surgical intervention capable of stemming the “bleeding” of water resources caused by periodic droughts, thereby driving the state’s economic development. Based on this representation, this study aims to analyze, from a historical and critical perspective, the socio-spatial relationships between water infrastructure projects and urbanization in the Jaguaribe River Basin (BHRJ), in Ceará, between 1921 and 2002, using the municipality of Orós as a case study. The theoretical assumptions of this study are based on the production of space as the result of the dialectical interaction between humans and the natural environment through social practices, and on urbanization as the spatial concatenation of the movements of reproduction and distribution of population and productive dynamics within the territory. At the BHRJ’ scale, the research was based on a literature review, the collection of primary and secondary data (on water and road infrastructure, human settlements linked to these projects, state agents, and population and productive dynamics), and spatial analysis using geoprocessing techniques on a GIS platform, enabling the mapping of territorial transformations associated with major water projects. At the municipal scale, a qualitative approach was adopted, analyzing historical documents related to the construction of the Orós Dam and the urbanization of the municipality of the same name, seeking to establish correlations between these processes, as well as period maps, reworked through redrawing as a tool for historical research. The results indicate how technical interventions in the BHRJ – marked by different paradigms of water resource management throughout the 20th century – are related to transformations not only in the natural environment but also in the region’s demographic, economic, and political-institutional dynamics. In the case of Orós, the central role of the dam as a structuring element of the territory stands out, as its construction redefined the relationship between the city, the physical environment, and the State. By combining spatial analysis and urban history, the study contributes to the historiography of urbanization in Ceará, highlighting how water infrastructure acted as instruments of land-use planning and vectors of socio-spatial transformation in the Ceará semi-arid region.