Do papel ao concreto armado: projetos de cidade e a medicalização da morte – São João do Rio do Peixe - PB (1947-1970).

Abstract

This research work aims to analyze the process of modernization of the city of São João do Rio do Peixe-PB, between the years 1947 to 1970, based on the use of urban photographs taken by a memoirist who proposed to tell the history of the city based on urban photos, where the names of the “heroes of the people” crystallized. I also make use of Minutes (1947-1960) and Code of Postures (1951-1963) which are in the Municipal Chamber Casa Raimundo Gomes Pereira. Thus, when analyzing the set of laws, decrees, and norms in the interference process of modernization in the city, in the bodies and practices of the city's inhabitants, especially with regard to death, I focus on the work of legislators who acted in the city, where their forms of urban management, was delimited by means of technique and medicalhygienist knowledge, which sought to build a city of reinforced concrete, with new uses of space, with new ways of “living well” and “dying well”. The municipal policy of urban investments developed in the city and recorded in photographs, Minutes and Code of Postures, produced a city that wanted to be modern and its future was in the hands of its intervenors- of the legislators who established the policy of “well serving”, “building well” and “doing well”. Thus, the detailed analysis of this research is based on studies about the city as a multiple space, which permeates the technical, medical and hygienist apprehension, but a city that was also modernizing from the inhabitant, and mainly from the dead, who redesigned the first urbanization works in São João do Rio do Peixe.