A PÁTINA DO TEMPO Concepção e Prática na Política Pública do Patrimônio Histórico em São Luís

Abstract

This research which studies the public policy cycle, the design and the implementation of actions related to the Historical and Cultural Heritage was carried out in the colonial city of São Luís do Maranhão (today's historic center), from the last decades of the 20th century until the year 2006. The city São Luís, a manifestation of the dynamic and active forces in engendering the dawn of the capitalist system, yet commercial, later industrial-urban, in a given area of the tropical world, was chosen by the abstraction of its structural, functional and formal historical elements, identified in the motivation of the referred public policy to "revive it", the project to rebuild and maintain it, adjusted to the service terms of trade. "Revived" or redeveloped, with its antiquity to fulfill a new role, as well as offer cultural heritage in a competitive "city market", according to the requirements of the present stage of the forces in the aforesaid capital flow. Care must be taken of the Historical Heritage, conceptual expression theoretically established under the binding force of modern times of and under the multiple manifestations of memory, identity, time, space, representation, aesthetics, value, urbanism, among others: the city is protected at national and local level by Iphan, and internationally by Unesco; such a yearning claimed in the name of humanity; the city, an artifact, a work of art, for use and trade; the city whose body moves a spectacular symbolic diversity by crossing its cultures, vibrant on the facades of the houses of its immense collection, patios, roofs, sidewalks, poems, legends, and traces expressed in the primordial patina of cultural matters artistically elaborated and reworked. In short: how a human settlement built a structure to organize the exchange of goods between worlds in a given temporality. The city itself, in its metamorphoses has become the object of presenting its portfolio to the historic cities in the world today, by the use/enjoyment of its beauty and passions, inserted in the dynamics of the tourism economy