The city of Maringá, PR. The initial plan and the "urban requalifications"

Abstract

The city of Maringá, located in the Northwest of Paraná State, Brazil, was part of an extensive area colonized by the Companhia de Terras Norte do Paraná replaced by the Companhia Melhoramentos Norte do Paraná. Starting from a modern project elaborated in midlles of 1940´s, Maringá emerged quickly amid the forest. We analyzed the initial plan, the projects for the reformulation of the central area and the tendencies of the public actions in the urban area that turn for real estate promotion and disrespect the popular participation. In its regional scale, Maringá follows the same orientation of cities that are used by the rhetoric operations and by urban marketing of the strategic plans that forget the social dimension. The obsession for the modernity takes to the systematic construction of new spaces that substitute the memory and the urban history in projects that reconduct to the aestheticization and the spectacularization of the urban landscape of Maringá.