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My dissertation examines the putative success of Curitiba, the Brazilian capital of Paraná, and seeks to understand how it came to be touted as the model city of Brazil. The standard explication for Curitiba’s success credits the power of a single city agency, the Urban Planning and Research Institute of Curitiba (IPPUC), and the vision of its first president, Jaime Lerner. According to this narrative, in 1971 IPPUC formalized a broad urbanistic vision for the city’s growth and initiated projects aimed at improving traffic congestion, expanding green space, and increasing city and social services. I argue that the narrative of the institute’s contributions provide an incomplete genealogy of Curitiba’s success. It fails to examine the historical context of the city’s status and does not consider the significance of publicity campaigns in sustaining this image. Also, IPPUC’s story is not only tendentious but derivative. My historical research shows how IPPUC has rearticulated longstanding tropes that celebrate the region’s unique characteristics -such as Curitiba’s edenic cityscape and its European social composition- and has recycled deterministic arguments related to race, ethnicity, and geography. My dissertation demonstrates that exceptionalist discourses have circulated for more than a century. I trace these claims from the 1880s to the 1940s and investigate how and why they changed over time. I show that politicians first initiated efforts to promote the region at the turn of the twentieth century to attract European colonists. Over the next fifty years, politicians, elites, and intellectuals forwarded new claims that positioned Curitiba and Paraná as ideal locations for economic and social development. Planning specialists from around the world have closely studied Curitiba’s urban development, but in their analyses they have largely failed to consider the intellectual and social constructs that undergird this story of progress. My dissertation focuses on century-old celebratory claims about Curitiba and reveals the epistemological roots of the current explications of the city’s success. / text

This scientific research considers a political celebrity, Senator Romario Faria, the digital public space, making an analysis of publications and interactions contained in his official profile on Facebook. Through content analysis of posts with greater interaction each week, plus thirty first comments in a period of twelve months, it seeks to understand the way in which it is possible to have a debate, informing and questioning the subject of social practices. To this end, there is the activation of the theories of digital public space, the Esteves studies (2011), Habermas (2003) and Weber (2007), using the resolution operators proposed by Marques (2011), and the celebrity studies Rojek (2008), Street (2012), Turner (2004), France (2014) and Campanella (2012). At the end of this stage, it was observed that the celebrity assumptions directly affect the interactions between subjects and reciprocity Romario in the digital social network involved in certain specialization and rationalization of communication by individuals who wove comments, contributing to gradually the realization of a digital public space are made. / Esta pesquisa científica considera uma celebridade política, o senador Romário Faria, no espaço público digital, fazendo uma análise das publicações e das interações contidas em seu perfil oficial no Facebook. Por meio da análise de conteúdo das postagens com maior interação a cada semana, somada aos trinta primeiros comentários, em um período de doze meses, busca-se entender a maneira pela qual é possível ocorrer um debate, informando e questionando os sujeitos das práticas sociais. Para tanto, há o acionamento das teorias de espaço público digital, dos estudos de Esteves (2011), Habermas (2003) e Weber (2007), utilizando os operadores de deliberação propostos por Marques (2011), e os estudos de celebridades de Rojek (2008), de Street (2012), de Turner (2004), de França (2014) e de Campanella (2012). Ao final desta etapa, observou-se que os pressupostos de celebridade incidem diretamente nas interações entre os sujeitos e a reciprocidade de Romário na rede social digital implicou em certa especialização e racionalização da comunicação por parte dos sujeitos que teciam comentários, contribuindo para que aos poucos a efetivação de um espaço público digital se concretize.