"The Organization of the City Margins: Ruins as a Philosophical Historical Nexus"

The city of Fortaleza, capital of the Brazilian state Ceará, stands out as a city with a high tourist vocation. However, beyond this scenario, the city is evaluated as one of the most unequal, outlining the fragmented urban margins with their different vulnerabilities. In this context, the objective was to understand how the organization of the urban margins of the city of Fortaleza occurred. In theoretical terms, this research is found in the conjunction between studies on the city and the approach to history in administration. The discussion of history is supported by the philosophical concepts of Walter Benjamin (2016) formulated in his famous theses “On the Concept of History”, published in 1940. The methodology was based on historical research with the organization of a collection of archives. The analysis was carried out in the light of historiography through a set of procedures related to the writing of history, according to Michel de Certeau (1988). The historiographical plots suggested the existence of a philosophical nexus of the ruins as a history, which acts / acted in the spatial fragmentation of the city, organizing the urban margins in the western region of Fortaleza. The historical ruins were represented, in this study, by the government policies for the confinement of migrants from the droughts who walked from the interior of the state to the capital, Fortaleza. The effects of government confinement policies put into practice in the name of progress, configured the organization of large marginalized urban spaces that are reproduced until today. Through the reactivation of the memory of a circumstantial past, the gaze of the historical ruins symbolized by the government policies of confinement of migrants opposed the official accounts of history and thus opened a space where new possibilities for the future of the city can be imagined.