Praia de Iracema

This article analyzes the relationships between discourses of degradation and public policy for urban requalification in Praia de Iracema, a space of major historical, symbolic, and cultural importance in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil. We start from the hypothesis that discourses of requalification, recurrent in the city’s government agendas since the 1990s, are built in dialogue with narratives of degradation widely disseminated by the local press, public players, and various social voices. The concept of urban requalification is revisited in the context of contemporary public policy and, based on the dialogical perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin and José Luiz Fiorin, it is demonstrated that requalification works as a discursive response to the representation of ‘farewell’ and mobilizes idealized images of Praia de Iracema’s past, so that such interventions are not restricted to the physical dimension of space, but weave a web of meanings that interconnects memory, politics, and representations of urban space.