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Historic center; Ribeira, Natal/RN; decadence; Image.
The idea that the neighborhood of Ribeira, Natal/RN, has gone into decay is so common that it appears with a certain “naturalness” and often no attempt is made to problematize its meaning or know what its historicity is. In this sense, this research aims to identify the emergence of the image of decay associated with Ribeira in the second half of the 20th century from memorial texts and newspapers. The objective is to understand how the construction of its meanings occurred, which became central to the construction of a certain type of entanglement in the urban trajectory of the neighborhood in historical time. One of the hypotheses is that the image of decadence corresponds to the stigmatization of this space resulting from the change of subjects and the uses they made of this neighborhood. It is also proposed to reflect on the image of decadence in the construction of a given memory of the Ribeira neighborhood as a determinant of images, concepts and discourses, present and active today, on how to understand the cartography of the city of Natal, which associates some of their neighborhoods to an outdated past.