BETWEEN OPPORTUNITIES AND RESISTANCE: DEBATES FOR A HISTORICAL HERITAGE POLICY IN MOSSORÓ-RN.
Management; Safeguard Instruments; Master Plan; Northeast; Brazil.
A brief walk in the consolidated streets of Mossoró-RN shows buildings of historic value losing ground to contemporary constructions. This scene leads to the issue of historical heritage assets and their management, which demand knowledge and debate about the propositions and interferences of the public power. Reflecting a problem not entirely restricted to the municipality, the management of the city’s heritage assets is contradictory. Sometimes it’s based on the clash between progress and conservation, sometimes rests on the inefficiency of tools for its application. Thus, this research questions: how has the treatment given to the historical-cultural good influenced the protection of the built legacy of past times in city of Mossoró? It is assumed that the laws on urban planning incorporated guidelines on heritage belatedly and restricted to a fraction (part of downtown, which may have opened up to pressure from the real estate market resulting in the emptying of historical and cultural capital. Carrying out this study in Mossoró is also relevant given the regional representation of the city and the lack of knowledge on the subject in analysis. Guided by this debate, this research has the general objective of understanding the role of safeguard instruments in the management of the area of historical and cultural interest and, thus, indicate points for the revision of the master plan of Mossoró-RN. It is based on the theorical definition regarding the structuring of the safeguard policy referring to the contributions of Choay (2001), Braga (2003), Pontual (2012) e Sant’anna (2017). Then, it focuses on the Patrimonial Letters, relevant to the understanding of the guidelines of institutional actions, and on the legislation created and/or underway in the municipality studied to subsidize the understanding of the structure of the municipal safeguard policy. To this end, bibliographical and documental research will be carried out, especially regard legislation, reports and works on this area, in addition to semi-structured interviews and physical surveys through inventory. In order to present the results of the research, this dissertation is preliminarily structured in five chapters. The first deals with the concepts and processes of heritage preservation; the second reflects on the reality of historical heritage in Mossoró; the third covers the instrumentalization of safeguarding cultural assets in Mossoró; the fourth brings the interface between the instrumentalization and the reality of cultural assets and the fifth explains reflections about historical heritage to be considered in the revision of the municipal Master Plan.