O Descompasso do “modelo” na urbe amazônida: o caso de Porto Velho, Rondônia

Abstract

The establishment of the company town Madeira Mamoré Railway Company represents the genesis of the city of Porto Velho. Since then, the city´s urban expansion has been characterized by the hegemony of the functionalist logic of production, aimed to the exploitation of natural resources and capital accumulation. In contrast to the pre-existing way of life, which was based on a harmonious relationship of diverse communities and the natural environment, focusing on the coexistence of both parts. Therefore, this research aims to analyze the consequences of the city model adopted at the origin of Porto Velho, based on the pragmatic and functional patterns of the company town MMR, and how it affected the population’s quality of life and the coexistences on the natural environment. Hence, we sought to understand the city standards of the industrial society in the 20th century through the analysis of the Urbanism anthology elaborated by Choay (1965), and to demonstrate that the expansion of capital over the Global South occurred as a re-presentation of the colonialism based on the need for domination and domestication of a different local reality. Authors such as Fanon (1952), Acosta (2009) and Cusicanqui (2015) were used to highlight the need for a holistic and cosmopolitan view of the reality of the cities in the Global South, especially in the Amazon area. Targeting a true development, aligned with the de-colonial concepts. The order-disorder, progress-delay and rupture-continuity dichotomies were used to analyze the city of Porto Velho in its genesis and contemporaneity, considering the "space production agents", "infrastructure provision", " road network", "socio-spatial organization", "housing" and "natural elements" categories. As a result, the inefficiency of the exogenous solutions that led the process of creation and expansion of the city was proven. This welcomes and reconcile the Amazonian diversity with the human needs, based on an alliance between ancestral knowledge and new technologies, constituting, finally, innovative alternatives.