Natal between Plans: the urban issues of the city of Natal between the years 1967 to 1985 and their contemporary developments
Urban Planning, Urban History, Master Plans of Natal
This research is inserted in the context of urban transformations in the city of Natal between the 1960s and 1980s, a period that we can call a new urbanization cycle. Thus, the object of study is the urban issues that marked the time and, subsequently, the transformations of the urban form of the city. As parameters of analysis and temporal landmarks, the studies for the Serete Plan in 1967 and the master plans of 1974 and 1984 were used, which are placed here as a synthesis of more general issues. This work, in an effort related to urban history, focuses then on looking at the master plans as the representation of a context of urban conflicts beyond the law itself. Thus, the general objective of the research is to analyze the urban issues during the planning process of Natal between the years 1967 and 1985 and the contemporary unfoldings regarding urban form as an expression of the conflicts of the time. For this, the structure of the work will go from identifying this conflictive pattern, making possible the understanding of the main urban issues raised during planning, to understanding the urban form as an expression of the spatial-territorial dimension provoked by these analyzed conflicts. In relation to the thematic axes it was necessary to embrace as theoretical review issues related to the history of urban planning in Brazil, gradually moving to the regional level and to the specific issues of Natal in relation to progress and the need to instrumentalize planning. Later on, the possibility of deepening urban morphology issues will be studied as a way to analyze the implications and interrelations between the urban form of the city and urban planning issues. We used as methodological procedures, in this sense, initial bibliographical research, deepening in the nominative and filtered searches in the digital Hemeroteca as the main source to find newspapers of the time and, through interviews, we also intend to rescue part of an oral history of the discussions of this planning. The last part of the work should bring a visual emphasis of the city's transformation, in an attempt to relate it to discussions about events and the idea of progress and also to close an approach that proposes to understand the city as a historical-cultural-urban construct of issues and conflicts that are built, rebuilt, renewed and also maintained.