Fading traces of soico-environmental change in the old town centres of Seridó, Brazil

Abstract

This paper presents a morphological study of four hinterland towns in Seridó, part of the vast semi-arid region in north-eastern Brazil generally designated as sertão. It aims to stress the importance of safeguarding the remaining ensemble of 19th and early 20th century buildings, by arguing that they function not only as landmarks of the towns’ transformation processes, but also as living evidences of changing socio-environmental relationships. Findings stem from a study of territorial occupation and architectural transformation, which is part of a developing dissertation, and from data that comprise an inventory of twenty-two older town centres whose objective was: to record the remaining architectural vestiges that demarcate those towns’ successive urban stages; to raise awareness about their rapidly disappearing architectural heritage by displaying the inventory in the web; and to form a database to support studies about the built environment in Seridó. Most of those towns originated as cattle farm settlements in the 1700s, became supporting commercial nuclei for cattle and cotton wool trades in the late 1800s and centres for tertiary activity from the mid 20th century, following the economic collapse of those trades. Albeit affiliated to the country’s then predominating stylistic tendencies, the simple physical structures of older buildings appear remarkably well-adapted to specific social needs and to the region’s tough nature. These evolved into larger, more solid houses that presented increasingly climatic adequacy until the last quarter of the 19th century, thus demonstrating a steady growth in resources availability and folk builder’s competence to respond to specific socio-environmental requirements. Although the houses produced after that time resemble more and more those of the coastal settlements, some morphological aspects of the traditional buildings lingered on until the 1970s, when a combination of factors – among which urban functional change assumes key role – has been acting to erase those traces from the built ensemble.