Fortaleza (Ceará-Brazil) urbanization process: a historic

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the process of production of space and urbanization in Ceará, highlighting the role of Fortaleza in different historical cycles. The location factors, urban expansion and hegemony of Fortaleza are closely related to historical cycles of Ceará, involving the various relationships between space and social practices (economic, political and cultural-ideological). In this sense, the adoption of a timeline is an important pre-requisite to understand the continuities and ruptures in the process of urbanization seen in Fortaleza, and the contemporary socio-spatial inequalities. There is not a spatial analysis without a temporal one, because the territory historically summarizes the dialectical relationship between space and society, which can only be fully understood based on the study of their origin and evolution. The historical analysis serves to explain contemporary processes where it is possible to infer about the permanence in the territory of preterit socio-spatial dynamics, as long as urbanization takes place on pre-made spaces due to different socio-spatial practices in time. One of the main aspects of the historical process of urbanization of Ceará refers to communication networks that have developed over time in order to facilitate the economic flows in Ceará. Highlighting the rivers and the ways of cattle during the livestock; railroads and port in the cotton cycle; the national and state highways in the cycle of industrialization and unification of the national market; and currently, the airport and coastal roads, with advent of actions and policies aimed at increasing tourism. Among the contemporary socio-spatial practices, the article emphasizes the role of tourism in Ceará, in the context of globalization. Tourism exacerbates the socio-spatial contradictions, mainly, when entering peripherally in places that carry the accumulation of inequalities of other times. Finally, it presents a concise overview, which summarizes the main features of the urbanization of Fortaleza in different historical moments.