Utopias sea in the South Atlantic (1900-1950)

• Grant number: 13/12240-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date until: October 19, 2013
• End date until: August 18, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - Modern and Contemporary History
• Principal Investigator: Maria Stella Martins Bresciani
• Grantee: Joana Carolina Schossler
• Supervisor: Jean-François PinchonJean-François Pinchon
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France
• Associated to the scholarship: 11/10252-1 - Utopias sea in the South Atlantic (1900-1950), BP.DR

Abstract

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the rise of seaside resorts on the Atlantic coast of Uruguay and Rio Grande do Sul favored "seashore vacation areas", which were prescribed for therapeutic medicine at the time. However, this practice acquired other meanings during the first decades of the twentieth century, when the industrialization and urbanization of some Latin American capitals created the new "life in cities". Concomitantly, the planning of seaside resorts meant the projection of a social space free of urban problems, thus representing an utopia on a small scale and for a short vacation. In addition to the historical, cultural and geographic features that approach the formation and development processes of seaside resorts in Uruguay and Rio Grande do Sul, is the current assertion that the urban projects in the Uruguayan coastline served as a model to resort design on the Atlantic coast of meridional Brazil. Through the comparison of stories of some beach resorts it is understandable how these "seashore utopias", idealized in urban plans until urbanization, keep proximity to what was happening in large urban areas of Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Porto Alegre. In this project I propose to analyze territories on the margins of urban centers in the first half of the twentieth century, the seaside as a projection of an utopian space relative to the metropolitan space, with the protagonists being European immigrants, eccentric businessmen, intellectuals, doctors of medicine, engineers, urban planners and architects. (AU)