CITY CENTER, CENTRALITY, AND MID-SIZE CITIES IN THE STATE OF CEARÁ: THE ROLE OF COMMERCE AND SERVICES IN THE RESTRUCTURING PROCESS OF THE CITY OF JUAZEIRO DO NORTE

• Grant number: 12/04108-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date until: September 01, 2012
• End date until: January 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Maria Encarnação Beltrão Sposito
• Grantee: Cláudio Smalley Soares Pereira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia (FCT). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Presidente Prudente. Presidente Prudente , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In the middle of the transformations provoked by the restructuring and redistribution processes of capital flows and allocation in the 1970s, the mid-size cities emerged as an object of study with a great potential to explain the Brazilian urbanization. In this context, the dominant paradigms have been questioned, and the dichotomies such as center/periphery, public/private, and local/global, that had defined the social life before this, have been redefined and approached on a different level. The urban structure of Brazilian cities has become more complex in the light of new emerging dynamics of the economic crisis that have modeled the urban space. Till the 1970s, most of the Brazilian cities had as their main characteristic only one city center (mono-centric) - an area of the city that offered all the principal urban services and that was the nodal point for flows. After the 1980s, with the materialization of economic processes in urban space, the cities began to grow and allowed the formation of new centers - in other words, these cities developed poly-centric structures in which activities, which before this could only be found in the main city center, could now also be localized in other parts of the city. In the State of Ceará, these new spatial forms, characterized now as spaces of flows that are linked to the global economy, have redefined the role of mid-size cities in the state. Juazeiro do Norte serves as a real case that exemplifies these transformations and where the ongoing spatial restructuring could reveal important aspects for the understanding of the urban phenomenon in Ceará on a intra and inter-urban scale.

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

PEREIRA, Cláudio Smalley Soares. Centro, centralidade e cidade média : o papel do comércio e serviços na reestruturação da cidade de Juazeiro do Norte/CE. 2014. Master's Dissertation - Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia. Presidente Prudente Presidente Prudente.