Real use versus formal land use in the Amazon of Maranhão: conditions for sustainable development

• Grant number: 20/16489-2
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: August 01, 2021
• End date: July 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Agreement: CONFAP - National Council of State Research Support Foundations
• Principal Investigator: Lindon Fonseca Matias
• Grantee: Lindon Fonseca Matias
• Host Institution: Instituto de Geociências (IG). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Andrea Aparecida Zacharias ; Antonio Augusto Rossotto Ioris ; Antônio Carlos Reis de Freitas ; Carlos Frederico Lago Burnett ; Danúbia Caporusso Bargos ; Dionatan Silva Carvalho ; Fabricio Sousa da Silva ; Gabriel Macedo Monteiro ; Henrique Cândido de Oliveira ; John Christopher Brown ; Leonardo Silva Soares ; Lucas Pinto Seixas ; Thiago de Azevedo Cunha ; Yata Anderson Gonzaga Masullo
• Associated research grant(s): 24/14307-5 - PLURIS 2024 Congress for Urban, Regional, Integrated and Sustainable Planning, AR.EXT; 22/00487-6 - Land use and sustainable development in the Eastern Amazon, AP.R SPRINT
• Associated scholarship(s): 22/06620-0 - Organization and compilation of the cartographic base in digital media of the Amazon region of Maranhão, BP.TT; 22/03985-7 - Mapping the boundary of legal institutional areas in the Amazon of Maranhão, BP.TT; 22/05029-6 - Mapping of land use and occupation in the Maranhão Amazon, BP.TT; + associated scholarships 21/08769-8 - Mapping the boundary of legal institutional areas in the Amazon of Maranhão, BP.TT; 21/08986-9 - Organization and compilation of the cartographic base in digital media of the Amazon region of Maranhão, BP.TT; 21/08992-9 - Mapping of land use and occupation in the Maranhão Amazon, BP.TT - associated scholarships

Abstract

The Amazon of Maranhão is composed of 108 municipalities, has a territorial extension of 81,208 km2 and constitutes one of the most dynamic geographical spaces of the Brazilian Amazon biome, concentrating important characteristics of biodiversity and endemism. The region has a marked process of degradation via deforestation and other forms of environmental impacts. The spatial configuration of the forms of land use, resulting from the various stages in which the social relations of production are found in different locations, as a mark of the uneven and combined historical development of capitalist relations of appropriation of this space, configure diverse expressions in the landscape of the region. In this case, there is a tendency to increase socio-territorial conflicts on a local and regional scale, revealing a striking process of manifesting the various strategies of hegemonic agents producing space in the conduct of public policies or private actions aimed at the appropriation of geographical space according to needs for capital reproduction, which occurs to the detriment of the socio-environmental characteristics of the region. This project has as main objective to analyze the production process of the geographic space in the Amazon of Maranhão, using geotechnologies for big data processing and analysis as technical support and theoretical and conceptual foundations of citizen science, to understand the real and formal forms (legal) of land use, with the aim of contributing to planning and management actions to subsidize public policies aimed at building sustainable development. (AU)