Lugares de memória em disputa : uma análise a partir das praças e parques em Rio do Sul - SC / Brasil.

Abstract

This research intends to analyze the territory of the places of memory, as well as the formation of collective memory that passes through societies over its history, highlighting urban spaces. By looking into public and urban spaces like squares and parks, we intend to verify that more than benefit life´s quality, this places, when materialized, represent places of constant disputes for memory or forgetfulness. In that way, this work objectifies the realization and relation of the importance of squares and parks as public spaces by looking at the way that they are involved in a dispute for places of memory through history. Looking forward to answer or exemplify this situation, we focus our attention in Brazilian´s urban history, showing the conceptual and practical changes that parks and squares had suffer over the mainly in the centuries XX e XXI. With a historical perspective, we also look to the Rio do Sul (South River) county, in the Alto Vale do Itajaí (Itajaí´s High Valley) region in the Santa Catarina (Saint Catherine) state. This is an important development center in the region in a prominent place in the state´s economy, being a reference in the regional development. Rio do Sul had constitutes important public spaces over history and that´s what guides our empirical perspective and serve as basis to our objectives. This issue is also in the complementary objectives that intend to analyze the historical processes of parks and squares and its architecture and functions of the public urban spaces to the population. By looking at which are the aspects of collective memory that are important to the citizens about the spaces that we analyzed is another important question to this research. This necessity is justify by the necessity to look to public spaces as regional development places that contribute to the formation of cities in a field full of symbols and meanings. As research techniques, we used a bibliographic review, documental research and interviews realized with people directly involved in the construction processes of the public spaces of the Praça do Trabalhador (Worker´s Square) and the Harry Hobus´s Park. To analyze the data we used techniques of content analysis, looking from the inside of the speech so then we can understand its historical and universal specificities. In this way, we analyzed the different processes of construction and representation of parks and squares in the collective memory by its discourses, images, reports and interviews. As a conclusion, we present that parks and squares are important spaces in the city´s development, but are also important places of dispute for the memory, its formation and reformulation that includes the memory, but also the forgetfulness.