A Metamorfose metropolitana: desigualdade socioespacial e violência urbana em assentamentos precários ao longo de um dos eixos de expansão metropolitana, Belém- PA

Abstract

The great metropolises and cities of the world have been going through an accelerated process of urban complexification, "the result" of processes of capitalist urbanization, urban restructuring, restructuring of cities, globalization of capital, "planetary urbanization" and the neoliberal and financialized global logic. This process-scenario is intertwined with “general patterns and processes that engender the geographical inequalities of capitalist development”, whose “essence” / nature of such dynamics and processes reverberate in socio-spatial inequality and urban violence, which, incidentally, is found in the capitalist urbanization process itself. Thinking about the scale of the city of Belém, this scenario presents itself as a repetition in which spaces, with urbanization of the territory, with the growing expansion of “precarious settlements”, as “expression” of the (uneven) production of the urban space that comes presenting a socio-spatial metamorphosis in the last decade of the metropolization process marked by the consolidation and refunctionalization of the metropolitan space. In view of this configuration, we seek to analyze how processes of socio-spatial inequalities and their correlation with urban violence have been occurring (and / or expanding), in precarious settlements in one of the axes of metropolitan expansion in Belém, Pará, since 2000. The research is guided by Dialectical Historical (Geographic) Materialism, which is based on or considers time, space and social being, the objective reality in its entirety, as well as considering (links between) conflicts and contradictions; finally, it unveils nature and its historical contours, its connections and relations, in a kind of movement that is born and is embodied in a present space-time and actions in recent space-time (integrity of the relationship between the whole and the part). This study was developed through theoretical review, field research, interviews and analysis of secondary data provided by the Municipality of Belém (PMB), Pará State Public Security Secretariat (SEGUP), Deputy Secretariat for Information and Criminal Analysis ( SIAC), Federal University of Pará (UFPA) and Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), Development and Administration Company of the Metropolitan Area of Belém (CODEM), Housing Company of the State of Pará (COHAB). Thus, we found that the crime of homicide is more prevalent in areas where the worst indicators of infrastructure, income and sanitation predominate, which we call indicators of urban quality (Bad and Very Bad). These areas are defined as poor sanitation. In these settlements, the materialization of urban violence is observed (violence as an unequal product of the production of space and violence that manifests itself in its most perverse form in which it results in homicides) as expressions of socio-spatial differentiation and inequality. This is because the settlements would present themselves as spaces that are produced in an unequal way, in which such inequalities can be verified in their forms-contents and uses / appropriations of the city and the Neighborhood.