Cultural identity and urban development: deceptive projects?

Abstract

This research - whose partial results are presented in this paper - develops ideas about the construction and consolidation of the Niemeyer Route, tourist attraction in Niteroi, a city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This is evaluated as a major project of urban development (GPDU) seeing its socio-cultural implications in the city. In general, the research seeks to follow cultural manifestations to understand the touristic attractivity and to evaluate what is its ability (or not) to strengthen local development. One of the main challenges of cultural policies, especially in Brazil, is to strengthen the economic dimension of culture, without harming their symbolic and citizens dimensions. Aiming cultural tourism, our proposal is to identify the strengthening of the economic dynamics sustained by symbolic cultural values and to understand how such urban interventions activate (or not) the practices of sociability. The research methodology consists of the work of field, participant observation, interviews, and news in newspapers. Consolidation projects in this city so strongly marked by the designs of the architect Oscar Niemeyer are recurrent in tourist and urban planning of the municipality of Niterói, which - we believe - is consolidating new identity values on modern urban icons.