Tourist-real estate complexes and planning on the metropolitan coast of Fortaleza

Abstract

Since the 1970s, large cities in the Northeast have undergone intense transformations, mainly in their coastal spaces. The main variables for these changes are linked to planning, private initiative and new forms of consumption in coastal areas. It is understood that beach areas have gained representativeness and appreciation in all regions of the planet. These areas seek to attract tourists and vacationers to coastal resorts and to boost their uses and functions. As on the global scale, the Northeast region has been inserted in a new logic of production and consumption of urban space, mainly that of equipment with a strong attractive power. We seek to understand, firstly, the consequences of these transformations in the uses and functions of the metropolitan coastal space of Fortaleza in the state of Ceará, and how new forms of leisure, especially in tourist-real estate complexes, corroborate the production of these spaces. For this analysis, we used data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (BIGS) in order to understand how coastal locations have been occupied, and how the government corroborate the issue. Secondly, we carried out a cartographic production to visualize the expansion of the coastal urban areas in the years of 2000, 2008 and 2016 in the metropolitan spaces with greater dynamics today. We further conducted a data survey on one of the largest real estate sales and rental sites in order to compare the appreciation between apartments and houses in the year 2020. As a product, we can understand how the private sector (through real estate developers) and the public authorities corroborate the appreciation of metropolitan beach areas.