A produção do espaço: segregação e diferenciação socioespacial na cidade de Criciúma - SC

Abstract

This study aims at characterizing the production of urban space as well as analyzing socio-spatial segregation and differentiation standards in the city of Criciúma, located in the south of Santa Catarina state. The investigation and the analysis on the production of urban space and the socially segregated and differentiated city follow three views. The first one is the Lefebvrian view, which seeks to understand a city as capitalism s work and product. The second one is the Marxist view, which examines a city departing from the conflicts and the conflicting interests given in it and the division of society into classes. The third one is the Foucaultian view, which emphasizes power relations within space production relations and socially segregated cities. These three views are taken to be in permanent movement and contradiction shown under the most varied forms and geographical scales, articulated on and within the city though. This means that the research will take on the dialectical method. Based on this context and methodological view, the study is organized into four chapters. In the first chapter, capitalist and dissimilar development of Criciúma city is presented and highlighted. Its consolidation throughout space and time, given in an urban and interurban space transformation process by means of permanence and disruption, is considered as the reason for its condition of important medium city for the organization of urban and interurban space on a regional scale. In the second chapter, power relations are taken as methodical possibilities for the production of urban space. These relations are pointed out as premises for dispute and fragmentation of territory, resulting in socio-special segregation. In the third chapter, a scientific approach, allowing for the recalling of socio-special segregation genesis and conceptualization under discussion, is presented. Practices of active producers of a socially and spatially segregated urban space are contextualized. In the fourth chapter, by means of two variables, i.e., education and income, socio-spatial segregation and differentiation standards within the city of Criciúma are considered.Neighborhoods, which are more economically and educationally segregated, are identified and mapped with these variables. The city division in Downtown, Próspera and Pinheirinho neighborhoods is critically analyzed and compared. This research allows for the understanding of who produces the urban space and the city and for whom they are produced. Urban space is marked by conflicts, disputes and interests, aiming at capital or life (re)production and, moreover, interurban space production relations determining the relation and the standards of socio-spatial segregation. The conclusion presented is that agents involved in the process of the production of space produce territorialities on the ground of power relations, relations which produce territory disputes. Agents belonging to this process have the right for the city and the urbanity in a selected and differentiated manner, being the standards of socio-spatial differentiation and segregation produced out of power relations. This standards are linked to incoming, schooling differentiations or the inexistence of these, what results in a socially and territorially fragmented city.