Schirlei Mari Freder (Casa da Cultura Polônia Brasil/House of Culture Poland Brazil) and Paulo Ivan Rodrigues Vega Junior (UNB)

Increasingly, the world we live in “has become smaller”, with cities more closely linked economically, politically and culturally (KARWIŃSKA, 2010), as a consequence, a series of visions and values, that have long tended to move away from each other, at the present - with the facilities of mobility and communication - seem to be approaching. If the interactions between geographical spaces change, the historical processes of transformation of the conception of culture are no different. The interfaces between culture, national policies and cities have been dynamically reformulated, perceived with greater intensity in recent decades. Faced with the resignification of culture, which reflects on its relationship with the city and its citizens, the public policies to which it is linked have also undergone changes over time. In the field of heritage, for example, the relevance of preservation is now commonly associated with contemplation, aesthetic enjoyment and contacts of experience in relation to what has already been pre-selected and constituted as "heritage". With this, heritage began to add intangible elements from different dimensions of development, such as culture, tourism, economy, education, identity, image, employment, social insertion, among others (VARINE, 2012). The Poles, over the generations following the first immigrants, transplanted values, customs and institutions, which culminated in forming a new Polish-Brazilian culture, often with clear local particularities. The history of each group is clearly noticeable in different Brazilian cities, as a result of the efforts of four, five or six generations that contributed with knowledge of different dimensions to define identities of places and cities. The present symposium aims to understand specifically the cultural legacy left to Brazilian cities by the Poles through instruments of urban management and public policies for the protection of material and intangible heritage and/or the action of groups, organizations and Polish-Brazilian cultural societies.