Para além das formas e das funções: preservação e gestão da paisagem do Centro Histórico de Belém (CHB) na perspectiva do espaço como instância e produção social

Abstract

Nowadays, many Brazilian cities suffer from a growing disability of keeping alive and attractive its historic areas caused by land use transformations deriving from the dynamism of contemporary times. Learning a city's historic area, identifying its values and/or spacial cofiguration meanings and its landscape components in the middle of a society movement, is the first step of analysis, in addition to it serving as a base for social and urban plans and projects that look not only to preserve it but to integrate it to a contemporary life style. This present work takes into consideration the “Historic Center of Belem” (HCB), in the Brazilian Amazon, as a social space containning shape and content. The intervention process on this historic center has been changing it through many spacial actions. Those intervention processes, most of the time, are more focused on the management of shape and function than the social management of its historic centers. By not taking in consideration this auto explaining social space, this research utilizes social and spacial categories (structure, process, function and shape) which explain the space social production, in order to learn dialectical relations between physical shape and actions during history. The general objective of this research was to analize the HCB spacial configuration from the preservationist management of its landscape elements, trying to learn the meaning of created shapes and the changes of its uses along the time, from the understanding of both its structures (where they were coming from, the historic context) and the processes that were responsible for their origins. We realized from the interventions on the HCB, that the spacial shape and its use are the most considered elements of bases for this area’s plans and urban projects, leaving behind other components and elements of this space, such as social relations. In this case, the central argument sustained during this research was that the social space categories (structure, process, shape and use) that helped explain the current origin of Belem’s urban landscape, which most of the time, is not taken into consideration as base for new laws, plans and urban projects on the HCB. With that in mind, the preservationist kind of management cannot handle the total spacial history of this historic center, in a way that the value appropriation and/or meaning is materialized by a shape and use management, leaving behind the structures and processes that gave birth to these same shape and functions of the HCB.