Nas encruzilhadas do território: as iconografias e a circulação como vetores para a reafirmação dos centros regionais Mossoró-RN e Sobral-CE

Abstract

Present day Geography cannot fullfil itself without analyzing the past, just like the examination about the devir. In the same way, the sciences, especially present day Geography cannot close itself or abstain to make conexions with knowledges and notions that are not exclusive to its scope. In this perspective this research, which is titled: At the crossroads of the territory: iconographies and circulation as vectors for the reaffirmation of the regional centers MossoróRN and Sobral-CE, bases itself in concepts and notions both geographic and non geographic that communicate to each other and to other areas of knowledge. They are iconographies, circulation, crossroads or carrefours (Jean Gottmann); psychosphere and technosphere (Milton Santos); geographical situation (Maria Laura Silveira); spacial diferentiation (José Lobato Corrêa e Kelly Bessa). The category: used territory is the conductive wire that passes through the concepts and notions. This category appears, in this body of research, complemented by the notion of authenticated territory, suggested by us. All these concepts, notions, categories and ideas are working for the analysis about the previously mentioned cities, in their relations with the condition of cities that throughout the histories and geographies, always stood out in the regional scope. This way, we look to understand, by the interaction theory-empirism, what is the relation that exists between the crossroads, the appreciation of the local iconography and the processes of circulation, while a vector for a spacial diferentiation, for the construction of an authentic territory and for the condition of regional center, historically assumed by the cities of Mossoró and Sobral, in the urban context of the region in which they’re inserted. Methodologically we joined an analytic bias that strives in critical analysis, praxis in works that present themselves as geographical or humanistic. We also consider some important aspects of reality, which are: the sociospatial structures in the inter-relation between the parts and the whole; The processes like past, present or future materialities or ongoing prospectives; the forms, like portraits of reality, placed in each of the spacial arrangements, and the functions as the tasks or activities that make the relational link that covers the uses of territory, urbanization, the spacial diferentiation and the conditions of regional centers assumed by the cities mentioned. A condition of crossroad allied to the valorization of a place (city), starting by the construction of a representative iconography and an insertion in the context of the globalization networks, stablishes, at once, a mixture of “security” and “protection”; “opening” and “possibilities”. In this context, we entered the histories and geographies of Mossoró and Sobral, hoping to unveil this amalgam and reveal this hybridity. Our thesis, therefore, is that the elevation of the place (cities) allied to a consistent relation with the external, constitutes itself in a solid strategy that ensures regional spotlight and insertions both in national or international scales. Facing the presented reality by the cities, which we took as empyrical basis in our research, we enter also in the analysis regarding the contradictions that appear, starting, from all this context.