Rádio Debate · Universitária FM 107.9

Fortaleza 300 anos: de vila a metrópole

·50 min·3 clips

Sociologist Milton Santos describes two Fortalezas: the visible luminous city and the invisible opaque city — and Professor Borzaquiello argues the periphery is speaking now through samba, funk, and candomblé.

1. Rádio Debate (107.9, Universitária FM) marks Fortaleza's approaching 300th anniversary on April 7th, 2026 — Journalists' Day — with a geography-centred discussion of the city's past and present. 2. Host Carolina Areal speaks with Professor Clélia Lustosa, coordinator of the Fortaleza node of the Observatório das Metrópoles network and coordinator of Trilhas Urbanas; Professor Alexandre Queiroz Pereira, member of the LAPUR urban planning laboratory; and Professor José Borzaquiello da Silva, emeritus professor and founder of the Trilhas Urbanas project. 3. The episode's central question is what Fortaleza gained and lost as it transformed from a colonial village into a semi-arid metropolis, and how urban trails through the historic centre help citizens build belonging to a city many do not know. 4. The Trilhas Urbanas project, now in its 30th year, proposes six themed walking routes through the historic centre for the 300th anniversary event on April 10-11, 2026: among them, Clélia's 'Life and Death Spaces,' Alexandre's 'Territorial Geometry of Power,' and Borzaquiello's 'Space of Leisure and Business.' 5. Clélia explains her route by tracing the medical-hygienist discourse that once branded the sea as a source of disease, explaining why old downtown buildings were built with their backs to the ocean — passing through São Luís church, Igreja do Rosário (built by enslaved people), Santa Casa hospital, and two cemeteries. 6. Professor Borzaquiello traces how Fortaleza's monocentric structure — marked by radial avenues extending from the centre toward Calcaia, Parangaba, Messejana, and Mucuripe — fragmented after the 1970s following Henri Lefebvre's theory of urban shattering into sub-centres. 7. He identifies the shopping mall and gated condominium as the two forces that 'disfigured' the centre: the mall captured retail, leisure, and residential functions once belonging to downtown; the condominium withdrew affluent residents to peripheral enclaves. 8. He notes the centre has 18 public squares — more than any other Fortaleza neighbourhood — excellent sanitation, and underoccupied prestige buildings including the largely empty Edifício Sul América and Edifício Lobrage, yet lacks a public policy to convert these to housing. 9. Professor Clélia names the contradiction: Fortaleza has 19 billionaires and simultaneously holds the third-highest proportion of families living in poverty in Brazil, with local investors dominating unlike Bahia (80% Sudene-backed foreign investment) and Pernambuco (30%). 10. She grounds the inequality in one student's commute: a postgraduate student in her programme spends 5 hours cycling to Manari, bussing to Maranguape, and then onward to reach UFC, traveling 10 hours daily. 11. Professor Borzaquiello invokes geographer Milton Santos's concept of the luminous city versus the opaque city, arguing that Fortaleza's 300th anniversary celebrations only illuminate the coastal strip while the majority opaque city — Janguruçu, the most populous neighbourhood — remains invisible. 12. He draws on sociologist Tijuru Dandrea's concept of peripheral autonomy to argue that Brazil's Black consciousness movement, feminism, LGBT rights, anti-femicide activism, and religious freedom movements all emerged from the periphery, not from Beira Mar. 13. He states that the periphery 'has a body' — it samba, does funk and candomblé — and that the press's failure to give it voice does not make it amorphous or voiceless. 14. He contrasts how violence in luminous spaces produces named victims with addresses against how 12 people killed in a massacre in Cajazeiras had 'no body, no profile' in public discourse, making invisibility the core challenge for geography and human sciences. 15. Clélia traces Fortaleza's economic history: the US Civil War opened the cotton export market for Ceará, funding the Belle Epoque downtown; successive commodity booms in carnauba, lobster, and shrimp followed, each leaving infrastructural deposits in the city. 16. She shows Fortaleza's current metropolitan reach: its international airport, port, and the Transnordestina railway project connecting it to Sobral and the port of Itaqui in Maranhão polarise an area extending to Maranhão, Piauí, and Mossoró — far beyond colonial times when everything flowed to Recife. 17. Professor Borzaquiello argues that celebrating Fortaleza's 300 years requires celebrating it as an 'improbable' achievement — a semi-arid metropolis built without gold, sugar cane, or precious stones — while using the occasion to name what is still missing. 18. He invokes Bertolt Brecht's question 'who built Thebes?' to redirect the anniversary from the beaches and the elite to the bus drivers, asphalt workers, shipping agents, and street vendors who built and sustain the city daily. 19. Professor Alexandre closes by noting that the Department of Geography's students, many of whom come from the city's periphery and precarious municipalities, are themselves a mechanism of transformation — their re-signification of their own lives is a form of urban hope. 20. People interested in urban geography, Brazilian urban inequality, the history of Fortaleza, and how academic fieldwork connects to social movements will find this episode substantive and politically engaged.

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