Praça das Nações and Cimba Ecological Park in Araguaína/TO: public spaces in the legal Amazon

Abstract

This article discusses the order of urban discourse of two spaces in the city of Araguaina/TO: Praça das Nações and CIMBA Ecological Park.  These spaces were defined as public. In order to investigate the way, they were discursively produced a local news portal was used. The guiding question for a such a purpose was to identify how the order of urban discourse produced effects on the revitalization of those spaces. Theoretically, the study is founded on French Discourse Analysis, particularly on Orlandi’s reflections (1999) about the order of urban discourse.  By using the category of “organization”, a relevant dialogue with scholars from the fields of Geography, Architecture and Urbanism became possible. The analysis showed a contradiction since the “organization” seeks to inscribe what, supposedly, disturbs the urban order in the discourse of expulsion. Thus, the implementation of revitalization of Praça das Nações was meant to (re)signify the precarious infrastructure and expel the homeless population present there. To what concerns CIMBA Ecological Park, the process of revitalizing was to provide the “urban voids” with new meanings by preventing irregular disposal of garbage. In both, social practices appear as a subterfuge for the urbanization project.