The management of housing policy and the production of urban space: an analysis of spatial practices and the formation of new central areas in the city of Marília - SP

• Grant number: 12/07076-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2012
• End date: November 30, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Arthur Magon Whitacker
• Grantee: Heloísa Mariz Ferreira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia (FCT). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Presidente Prudente. Presidente Prudente , SP, Brazil

Abstract

With this project we aim to analyze the action of public authorities in the production of urban space of Marilia-SP and the relationships established between the deployment of popular allotments and housing and the creation of new central areas, notably sub-centers. The role of local government in the production of affordable housing has undergone significant changes when, in the late 1980s, municipalities were given greater authority to a process of political and administrative decentralization in progress. As a consequence of that change, housing policies and popular allotments and housing present today, older elements with more recent ones. In a way, there is greater dependence or influence from local negotiations in the effectiveness of policies that culminate in spaces of housing for the poorest segments. We highlight among the most important negotiations in our study, those that culminate in the associations between public authorities and property developers, with increasing power over the production of urban space of intermediate cities, and, from the previously mentioned decentralization had a greater chance of acting in the allocation of areas for deployment of the so-called housing complexes or popular allotments. In the city of Marilia, those concerns could be met when, as in the 1970s, the popular allotments and housing began to be deployed in separated from the urban area that already existed. For the population of those areas, this often meant less mobility through the rest of the urban space, a result partly due to the lower accessibility to and from those areas, which favors, as research hypothesis, the deployment of shops and service establishments to fulfill a new demand of the population of those areas. Implementation of such establishments may have led or may lead to the formation of sub-centers, or simply areas with concentration of what is called commercial neighborhood. (AU)