Museums, Railway Memories, and Cultural Landscapes

Abstract

In the state of Sao Paulo, despite its more than five thousand kilometers of railroads and hundreds of stations, warehouses, and residential complexes destined for railway workers, only 12 items are listed by the Instituto de Preservacao do Patrimonio Historico e Artistico Nacional (IPHAN) (Institute of National Historical and Artistic Heritage). In the list of the Council for the Defense of the Historical, Archaeological, Artistic and Tourist Heritage of the State of Sao Paulo (CONDEPHAAT), there are 32 railway buildings listed. The scarce number of railroad properties under the protection of the State’s preservation agencies shows the selective criteria adopted by the official policies of historical heritage preservation. There are no official statistics, but it is known that many cities claim the historical value of their respective railroad heritage, taking into account the cultural relevance, usually associated with the origin of their own urban formations. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the Brazilian and Sao Paulo railroad system has been in the headlines of newspapers and TV stations spreading images of abandoned and depleted stations, rolling stock depreciated by the weather and disuse, passenger cars, locomotives, and wagons rotting in urban yards. Theft of rails and poles became a routine agenda until the plundering was completed. The demand for the preservation and musealization of this type of heritage, stimulated by the bonds of affection in the imagination of a large part of the population that cultivates the railway memory, intensified in another way. The objective of this text is to point out guidelines for the musealization of open-air railway heritage, taking into account the methodological principles of museology and the distinct potentialities of cultural appropriation of these tangible and intangible assets by the populations of its surroundings with a view to the recognition of their cultural value and the regeneration of urban texture and social tessitura.