Desenvolvimento urbano-regional e cidades sustentáveis no contexto das regiões metropolitanas nordestinas

Abstract

In metropolitan cities, social and environmental problems are intensified and the pressure of capitalist development on limited planetary resources makes urgent the need to rethink urban development and the economy. Among several proposals, sustainable cities (SC) have been highlighting in recent years as a model of urban development. With wide international adherence, the United Nations (UN) model of SC, based on the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11-Sustainable Cities and Communities has become the most popular SC proposal, based on the contradictory discourse of sustainable development. In Brazil, in parallel, the context of marked socio-environmental inequalities and vulnerabilities of the Northeastern Metropolitan Regions (RMs) and the commitments made by the government to the SDGs underpin the research question: “Northeastern metropolitan regions are able to internalize the principles of Sustainable Cities in their dynamics as strategic alternatives to their socio-environmental and urban-regional issues?”. The objective is to investigate the conditions of metropolitan dynamics for internalization of the UN Sustainable Cities model to favor urban and regional development and improve some aspects of social and environmental issues. To this end, this research developed the Regional and Urban Development Index for Sustainable Cities (RUDISC), which uses socioenvironmental and economic indicators to express aspects of urban sustainability, urban resilience and climate change adaptation, as principles for sustainable cities. The methodology, of a quantitative nature, establishes a comparative case study between the MRs of Fortaleza, Natal, Recife and Salvador as a cutout of the Northeast Region of Brazil. Based on the RUDISC results, we test the hypothesis that metropolitan regions are unable to internalize the principles of sustainable cities as strategic alternatives to the socio-environmental problems of current urbanregional development. The discussion of results revolves around the challenges of CS in the reality ascertained by RUDISC and the literature review on public policies, urban and socio-environmental planning and management of northeastern metropolitan cities, reflecting on environmental rationality as an alternative to current urban-regional development.