Banca de DEFESA: THAYSA FERNANDES TEIXEIRA

FROM RAILWAYS TO NORTHEAST ROAD PLAN: planning, cartography and Rio Grande do Norte territory’s road structuring (1881-1944).

Road plans, technical networks, historical cartography

The Northeast Road Plan of 1931 was a program to establish a network of roads, drawn up and implemented by IFOCS in the Northeast region, as part of the Inspectorate's efforts to combat droughts, starting in the early 1930s. This plan has enormous relevance for Rio Grande do Norte, as it is possible to see the completion of several roads belonging to this program that form part of the state's current road network. The Northeast Road Plan is the result of a continuous effort to produce Road Plans, which began during the Second Reign, more precisely in the second half of the 19th century, when the first railroads were set up in the country. Its significance is amplified by its aim of integrating the region's road network into the national road system, as other proposals for National Plans had tried to do but were unsuccessful due to the obvious mismatch between the technical and political actions involved in producing these Plans. So, the research question is: How did these technical and political efforts converge to build the Northeast Road Plan, despite the mismatch between these two fields? We are working on the hypothesis that the Plan was a paradigm shift, because at that moment there was a convergence of these aspects despite the mismatch that had previously existed, especially in relation to the Northeast region. The main objective is to analyze the context in which the 1931 Northeast Road Plan was drawn up, relating it to the proposals of the national plans and the conjunctures that promoted them through historical cartography. The main sources used in the research are: primary, the cartographic sketches of the National Road Plans; maps and geographical charts developed in the same period as the plans; images belonging to the collection of the History of the City and Urbanism Study Group (HCURB); official messages and reports from the government, ministers and the Inspectorate of Works Against Drought; as well as periodicals of the time such as the Engineering Club Magazines, the Brazilian Geography Magazine and the Brazil-Ferro-Carril Magazine; secondary, the bibliographical review of authors with production related to this research. In the end, the aim of this work is to contribute to the enrichment of the historiography of the state of Rio Grande do Norte and to generate subsidies for new research.