Between Ruins and Permanence: The Heritage in the Urbanization’s Specificity of Goiás (Brazil)

Abstract

In Goiás, many cities founded in the mining cycle (colonial period) did not have their heritage recognized, restored or maintained by organs and institutions of preservation, leaving few assets in the urban area. In these cities, history reconstructs the process whereby modern values were fixed in the backcountry. The purpose of this paper is to expose the context of analysis of Goiás’s heritage in relation to the colonial urbanization’s specificity in this Brazilian state, thus showing how their condition of negligence is the result of processes that can be contextualized in history. The permanence of heritage, however, is latent and does not express itself only through historical materialities maintained in urban space, but above all, by the symbolic practices that nurture this space. The general objective of the doctoral thesis that bases this article, therefore, is to unveil the forms of resistance of the cultural heritage in the cities established for research in Goiás (Pilar, Crixás and Porangatu), as well as the sense of place (placeness) attributed by memory in the symbolic-affective relation of the populations with their heritage.