Pulsações utópicas e distópicas nos imaginários urbanos: a cidade de Frutal (MG) nas trilhas dissonantes da história

Abstract

This thesis aims at understanding the meanings and values woven in the social imaginaries of Frutal (MG), taken from the perspective of urban utopias/dystopias, from the recent enunciation by local and state leaders of the new time in the history of the city, supposedly built through the project called City of Waters. The study has started from the premise that not only Frutal, but cities, in different forms and scales, can be taken in the dimension of utopia, not in the strict sense of modeled space, but as a place of promise of a politicized conviviality – ideal that has gone back to the classical Greeks and to the spirit of the polis. Nevertheless, in modernity, increasingly reified social relations make urban life extremely complex by inserting dystopian dispositions of the capitalist market into the utopias. In the contemporary urban experience, the conception of the right to the city, that is, the bet in the urbe as a space of collective (re)construction in dissonant tones, comes across luminous projects, supposedly visionary, that reduce the cities to the fabric of the goods and the citizens to mere consumers of dreams haunted by the countless urban dramas. As an expression of this tense and ambiguous process, Frutal, located in Triângulo Mineiro, has been the stage of a remarkable modernization project since the 1990s, with the establishment of institutions of higher education and the installation in 2009 of the UNESCO–Hidroex – an international center for water research, which linked the city to the debates on ecological appeal related to the water crisis. From 2010 onwards, the announcement of the construction of the City of Waters has been accompanied by the promise that Frutal would undergo significant urban restructuring, which would give it worldwide visibility, by becoming a reference in the environmental studies and in the formation of leaders for water management. The idealization, monumental at inception, projected the historical particularity of the city as a singularity, which aroused the interest in conferring if the enunciated transformation – a new time – would be possible, before the previous history of Frutal about what studies point to in respect of the cities in contemporary Brazil. Ultimately, it was intended to problematize to what extent luminous projects do succumb or not the spirit of the polis in the space of the cities. By means of a bibliographical research, the investigation interpellated, initially, moments in the history of western cities in which utopian/dystopic impulses mobilized urban imaginaries, to finally consider characters and facts which have leveraged grandiose and singularizing representations in Frutal, in varied temporalities, aiming at rescuing and reconfiguring their social imaginary. Through the analysis of various documentary sources (works of memorialists, newspapers, magazines, photographs among others), speeches and sensibilities which support the luminous projects were scrutinized. It was also attempted to offer space for speaking and listening to some anonymous actors of the invisible city, thought as agents who daily (re)build the historical plots in all the cities. At the end of this investigative course, it is defended that, even in a small city from the interior, the streets and squares, the edges and the trails remain, as spaces to denounce and subvert forged consensus around idealized urbanistic projects, when the subjects weave relations and attribute dissonant meanings to the urban living, making the authentic and political use of cities sparkle, even if in glimpses.