MEMORIES OF THE FLOOD OF 1974 AND THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE IN TUBARÃO (SC)

Abstract

The flood of 1974 displaced sixty thousand of the seventy thousand inhabitants of the municipality of Tubarão (SC) and caused the death of dozens of people. The city maintains the memory of the flood through several initiatives, which intensified in the beginning of the twenty-first century. Starting from the perspective that disaster investigations should consider not only their contingency, but also include post-disaster studies, a documentary survey of these memory-keeping initiatives of the flood was conducted. The objective was to understand these actions as policies of memory and to investigate their relationship to the social production of urban space, through an analysis of monuments in the city and the adoption of measures such as the creation of the municipal day of remembrance of the catastrophe. Memory is considered as a collective and selective process about what must be remembered and forgotten, which can be materialized in the urban landscape, representing a link between time and space. The research shows that the construction of monuments and other references to the flood are closely related to the city’s political moments and characters, and concludes that policies of memory are key elements for the construction of history and urban identity and legitimizing new political actions.

Keywords: Flood; Memory; Social production of space; Monuments.