What we call neighborhood?: the case of Apipucos and Poço da Panela, Recife

Abstract

For a long time, the district scale appears in the urban landscape from Recife. Since the first mills in Capibaribe’s valley, passing through the parishes and villages, suburbs, today Politic-Administrative Regions and components districts. Theses outlines still seem to be the same. Mills that became districts. Districts which are Recife’s true ‘genius loci’. Apipucos and Casa Forte ‘mills’; Poço da Panela ‘parish’; Apipucos, Casa Forte and Poço da Panela ‘suburbs’; all ‘districts’ today. It is in this scale where there is larger convergence between the geometric space and the social space, where the sense of urban place is stronger. It is a space-social module, formely parochial, associated to a physical support which concludes it. Furthermore, it always presents three simultaneous and integrated characteristics: a shape and a size, a politic-administrative limit which represents it in the presence of Estate, and a historic-cultural charge of the society that it belongs. Thus are Apipucos and Poço da Panela. Relating these characteristics to the districts studied in a historical-temporal axis is the proposal of this essay.