Contra as Secas: a engenharia e as origens de um planejamento regional no nordeste brasileiro

Droughts surfaced in 1877 as a crucial problem for the birthing Brazilian nation. Engineers, who formed the country's technical and scientific elite, took it upon themselves to study, understand and fight the problem through planned actions of intervention on space. This work, based on proposals and discussions contained in engineering magazines and reports, aims to provide elements for the comprehension of how these systematized actions against droughts, in the Iate nineteenth and early twentieth century, contributed to spatial analysis and the formation of a (then-inexistent) regional and territorial planning discipline in Brazi!. Engineers, by taking up the position of masterminds in the country's modernization, guaranteed for themselves personal economic stability, social prestige and political power. By understanding nature, either as a resource to be exploited or an adversary to national progress, they contributed to the delimitation of the region now known as the Northeast. By seeking to understand the drought phenomenon, they created knowledge about the space they sought to intervene on; by constructing their projects amid political and economical difficulty, they changed the organizational structures of cities and country in the northeast. The proposals for açudes (Iarge water reservoirs) allowed the fixation of population and the resistance against droughts; the roads - railroads and automotive roadways - connected the sertão to the capitais and the coast, speeding up help to the affected populations during droughts and allowing the circulation of goods so as to strengthen the local economies in normal rimes. The adopted practices and techniques, adapted from foreign experience and developed through trial and improvement, were consolidated as an eminently spatial intervention course, even if a theoretical body of regional or territorial planning wasn't formed in Brazil. Regional Planning proper was first applied in the country in the Northeast itself, in the 1950s, based off an economical view of reality in order to achieve development. The engineer's work prior tothat date, however, cannot be dlsconsldered. It was proved that, despite facing financial and political hurdles, engineers had a profound commitment to the problem and intended to act systematically to transform the economical and social relations in the region, in order to be victorious in their struggle against droughts

A Produção do Flagelo : a re-produção do espaço social da seca na cidade de Mossoró (1877-1903-1915)

The great droughts re- produced spaces in the city of Mossoró / RN in the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Its dimension exceeds the climatic effects becoming social locus when advances over the political and economic sectors, social and cultural of the North / Northeast Brazilian societies during that period. This way, analyzing the re-production of social space in episodes of Mossoró‟s droughts is our toil. So try to reveal each segment, route and aspect of production of space in its size and interface between the perceived, conceived and lived, and subjects related to it - refugees, population and authorities - during the droughts of 1877, 1903 and 1915 within Mossoró city. Therefore, issues such as the constitution and representation of the city and social space in the terrifying experience of the drought of 1877, the production of fixed objects and flows of the urban web through of migrant labor, attempts to control, discipline and spatial planning and ways to resistance to these charges in daily sphere are key issues addressed in this work. For this we use diverse sources as minutes of the city council, reports from provincial presidents, media, memory books and others that sustain us in building our narrative and problematic. This way, the spatial production of Mossoró‟s droughts reveals itself in the field of relations and political-economic transformations and sociocultural, inextricably, that shapes and mobilizes your own social space