Araraquara Railway Heritage: the mobility of industries and identities.

Abstract

The aim of this article is to enhance the Estrada de Ferro Araraquarense value as an industrial heritage of the mobility through the systematization of the Araraquara (Brazil) industrial heritage by an inventory. The most recent Directive Plan of Araraquara (2014) added to its agenda the dissemination of the urban heritage knowledge in order to make the population to understand a part of its identity, thus, the inventory proposal that will be presented aims to attain this goal. The role of the railway in the city of Araraquara is inseparable of its history, morphology, economic and social development. In the cities of Estrada de Ferro Araraquarense (E.F.A.), the stations were located outside of the existing urban grids, which resulted in a second centrality by the attraction of different kind of services and infrastructures. In this way, the railway of Araraquara, the first city of E.F.A., was important to the consolidation of the territory, industries and cities of the western region of São Paulo State. Currently, Araraquara has its railway infrastructure in the process of deactivation, a big part of it is already abandoned, only the train station passed through a conservation process and became a museum, but even this building does not seem to be part of the daily life. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to present the inventory as a tool to highlight the importance of the preservation of a railway heritage in the urban and regional scales to instigate initiatives able to reintegrate this industrial heritage in the urban grid.