Intervenção urbanística e violência urbana em Belém: a experiência do Projeto Orla no Bairro do Jurunas

Abstract

This work was carried out in order to understand the issue of violence in the context of the urban intervention program in the neighborhood of Jurunas. Since 2006, the city of Belém has been holding the Orla Project, a constituent element of a broader macro-drilling intervention in the Estrada Nova water catchment area, called the Portal da Amazônia, reaching residents of five neighborhoods. From the thematic presented, our objectives were: To understand how the violence manifests itself in the area circumscribed to the Orla project; Identify the characteristics of this violence; To verify the perception of the residents regarding the effects of the project and the phenomenon of violence in the affected area; Identify how they deal with this phenomenon; and Verify how the Public Security agents act in the areas. In order to achieve our objectives, we use the method of historical-dialectical materialism as a perspective to carry out a critical analysis of the processes resulting from urban intervention and the intensification of violence in the area affected by the project, which can be made possible by the dialectical method; to apprehend the particularities capable of elucidating the phenomenon in its essence and totality. Thus, the qualitative research and its instruments were chosen as a methodological path in order to operationalize the method. The selection of bibliography and its study is cited; the documentary analysis of the Orla Project; the semi structured interview with 42 families living in the villages: Vila Passarinho, Vila Valério, Vila Santos, Vila Gigi and Vila Maria Izabel, affected by the Orla project. The research reveals that for the residents, urban violence is materialized by the actions of crimes, such as robberies, drug trafficking and the common robberies that take place in Orla. It has also been shown that in the last years the residents face the new phenomenon of violence produced by "militia" organizations. It is evident that the problems generated by urban infrastructure actions are perceived as natural and unrelated to the issue of violence experienced in everyday life. In the case in analysis, it is verified that the residents do not articulate the issue of violence, its increase and diversification to the absence of public policies in the neighborhood of Jurunas. Therefore, the issue of urban violence in the neighborhood of Jurunas leads us to predict that in the case of the Orla Project urban violence and the experience of the same by residents of the areas circumscribed to the project has been naturalized, given the dominance of daily life by criminal organizations . In addition, the state is seen as absent in this region from the failure to implement public policies, which also means a form of violence which we call "invisible violence," and this omission leaves those who in fact need state action every time more vulnerable and prone to crime.