A cidade da infância (re)visitada: a relação entre presente e passado sobre o futuro da nostalgia em Pelotas (RS).

Abstract

Time is embedded in the city and the city, through its transformation, absences and continuity is also embedded in the memory of its habitants. In the last 30 years or so, those who lived in the city of Pelotas (RS/Brazil) in the 80s and 90s, when confronted with the city they remember and the city they perceive, usually show the feeling of nostalgia in their narratives. Among conversations with friends from Pelotas (RS/Brazil), whose childhoods happened during this time, the nostalgia in their reports seems to go beyond the mere presence of the past. It seems to indicate a feeling of identity and belonging, in greater or lesser extents, to the city of Pelotas (RS/Brazil), and not only in the present, but also in relation to the future. Therefore, this research aims at understanding how nostalgic places are perceived in the city of Pelotas (RS/Brazil) and how the resulting image of this perception relates with the building of the sense of identity and belonging to the city. The strategy to answer these questions is to identify the type of relevance that these places have and the nostalgia they incite. The methodological approach is supported by phenomenology in the Humanistic Geography with emphasis on the elements that organize the image of the city developed by Kevin Lynch. Hence, through interviews with people born from 1977 to 1982, it is possible to notice that the places they remember can be classified through many elements similar to those suggested by Lynch, besides evoking nostalgic feelings of distinct natures. Furthermore, we can notice that subjects who have more spatial marks and affective zones, and greater positive feelings of nostalgia associated to those places, have greater identity of belonging to the city.