Montes Claros e o Norte de Minas na rede urbana do centro-sul: fábulas e metáforas do desenvolvimento

Abstract

This dissertation, in general lines, is based on a critical analysis of the development concept and begin with the thesis that it has been, in first instance, a strategy of expansion and dominance of the capital and in second instance a phenomenon coming from the social, economical, political and cultural concepts hegemonic in Western-European civilization that has a rational-iluminist basis. We understood therefore, that the expansion of the capital and Western civilization, under the speech of the development, is covered with an apparel that projects the image of the Western scientific rationality and of the market relations as the roads to improve the living situation of the all people. However, what we observe is the development acting as a destruct/restruct agent that flows for the arteries of the urban network circulating the logic and a set of technical objects that carry in itself the speech of the progress. Assumed as more efficient, the technical objects relegate to the forgetfulness the logics, the techniques, the knowledge and the material and immaterial reproduction forms of life in the places that receive the development, what gives to such places the representation of the delay and of the no-civilization or of the underdevelopment. This phenomenon, in the North of Minas Gerais and, especially, in the city of Montes Claros, will be impelled, mainly after the arrival of the railroad (Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil) in 1926. Fact that we believed to have executed a more permanent and regular connection of this area with the urban network of the Center-south allowing the entrance of the logics from the Western-Europe and of the technical objects that, more and more presents in the north of Minas Gerais space, will take to the vision of the development as an obligation. Then the logics and the local knowledge will be represented as symbols of delay and of no-civilization. That will take measures form the regional political leadership to prioritize the search of those objects and of the equipments of progress. Therefore, the spacial layout, in the North of Minas Gerais will be transformed to represent the modern and developed to accommodate the presence, even greater and spatially predominant, of the technical objects and of the urban equipments. This presence, by itself, will say if the city is developed or not.