Peripheral urbanization, urban experience and peripheral urban condition

• Grant number: 25/07613-5
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: December 01, 2025
• End date: November 30, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Maria Encarnação Beltrão Sposito
• Grantee: Maria Encarnação Beltrão Sposito
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia (FCT). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Presidente Prudente. Presidente Prudente , SP, Brazil
• City of the host institution: Presidente Prudente
• Associated researchers: Eliseu Savério Sposito ; Igor de França Catalão ; Jean Adrien José Legroux Morant ; José Alexandre Berto de Almada ; Maria Angélica de Oliveira Magrini ; Patrícia Maria de Jesus

Abstract

We start from the observation that the new areas located in the ring of urban expansion, resulting from investments in medium and high-end residential areas (condominiums or not) and large commercial and service areas (malls, business centres, etc.) could not be covered by the concept of the urban periphery, as it has been forged to understand urbanisation in Latin America. The content of this concept is not only established by the distance of this area from the central ones, but also and above all by its relative and relational characteristics to all types of insufficiency, revealing and conditioning in space the diapason of socioeconomic inequalities that have historically marked the socio-spatial formations of this subcontinent. It is therefore important to understand how the ideas of 'peripheral urbanisation' and 'peripheral urban condition' are articulated. The latter will be observed in its objective and subjective, material and immaterial aspects. Methodologically, the concept of 'urban experience' will support the two central procedures chosen to carry out the research - focus groups and semi-structured interviews - since the aim is to guide the recording of the subjects' narratives by combining their life stories, which are constitutive of this experience and the ways in which they live and represent, in their imaginations, the peripheral condition to which they are subjected. The empirical sections will be two metropolitan districts: Cidade Tiradentes (São Paulo) and Pimentas (Guarulhos) because they are characteristic of the 'urban periphery' and 'peripheral urbanisation', at different stages of the metropolization process. And the middle cities are Mossoró (Rio Grande do Norte) and Chapecó (Santa Catarina), belonging to different socio-spatial formations and with very different current socio-economic conditions. (AU)