Between the river and the sea: Rocas neighborhood and its relationship with other spaces in the city of Natal (1900-1950).
City; Urban; Suburb; Natal; Rocas neighborhood
This thesis aims to investigate the urbanization process of the city of Natal, as well as its suburbanization process, in the first half of the 20th century, having as a privileged object the analyzes of the neighborhood of Rocas. From the reading and criticism of sources such as newspapers, government reports, laws, decrees, photographs, as well as the historiographic production itself on the theme of the urban history of the city of Natal in the period under review, it is possible to see how some spaces in the city were favored during this process of urbanization/modernization and how the neighborhood of Rocas, in addition to being physically accommodated on the banks of the river and the sea, were also on the margins of that process and, in a certain sense, on the margins of history. The projects, the urban plans, the design of the streets, the legislation regulating the spaces and their inspection, which did not have sanitary ideals at the forefront of their actions, had a segregating and excluding character, as they were related to the desires of the direct classes of guarantee the beautification and modernization of the city, technology, rationality, mastery of nature and progress. Until the 1930s, the image of Rocas was associated with a place of social marginalization, danger, unhealthy conditions, disorder, poverty and crime. From the 1940s onwards, lasting mainly under the management of Sylvio Pedroza, it was formed as you could see, it gradually changed, being related to the space of tradition, culture and popular festivities. In view of this, we seek to shed light on this part of the city, which was on the margins of the urbanization process of Natal during a good part of the period under examination, in order to understand what would have motivated the production of those speeches and how, in a certain way, , influenced the development process of Rocas, which was only officially recognized as a city district in 1947, through law nº 251, which divided the city of Natal into eleven districts, nine of which belong to the urban area, of which which Rocas were part of, and must belong to, the suburban region, the neighborhoods of Quintas and Carrasco.