Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: TELMO AMARAL RIBEIRO

EDUCATION AND TERRITORIAL CITIZENSHIP PROJECT OF A GEOGRAPHY OF THE PILOT PLAN OF BRASILIA FOR HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION IN THE FEDERAL DISTRICT

Brasilia; World Heritage; Heritage Education; Urban Geography; High school.

The greatest of all the conceptual exercises left by Milton Santos is the one that states that society produces geographic space, which in turn reflects on society (Santos 1996). In this conceptual and theoretical formulation, he argues that the geographic space, or the territory, understood here as the lived, used or appropriated space, would not be just the stage, or container of a set of social relations. The territory would be a social actor in itself, a fundamental dimension of society, like the cultural, economic and political dimensions. It would have the capacity to generate positive and negative impacts on society, at all scales. Thus, according to him, the potentialities, possibilities and problems of a given society would have its own territorial structure at stake. This would happen in two main ways: through what he calls the “tyranny of distances”, which imposes high financial and psychological costs of displacement on the most needy, and through the action of what Santos calls technical systems, that is, the density and accessibility of transport and communications systems, and the degree of fluidity or roughness they impose on society and the economy. This occurs at all scales of the territory, but it is at the level of the metropolitan scale that this happens in a more apprehensible way, as metropolises are privileged territories of inequality and scientific-informational technical means by definition. This reversal of the territory over society assumes extremely particular and specific characteristics in the Pilot Plan of Brasilia, the modernist conception of a park city with low density and excessive sectorization, the preconization of individual road transport, its peculiar urban form and its profoundly unequal relationship with the other R.A.s in the DF are sources of very specific psychological social processes for its 225,000 inhabitants, and this needs to be explained to society.