Passo Fundo: the urban structuration of a medium-size city from Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

This dissertation main goal is to analyze the intra-urban structuring process of Passo Fundo, focusing on the socioeconomic dynamics that qualify the city as a medium-size one, owner of functions such as regional center or supportive local for agricultural business. For such an aim, we intend to assume an overlap of analytical scales as a premiss for methodology, which has led the organization of our research to divide itself into two parts. In the first one, based on theoric references that come from the studies of the Medium-Size Cities Researchers Web (Rede de Pesquisadores sobre Cidades Médias - RECIME) and also from Milton Santos ideas, we examined the horizontal relations between the city and its region, mainly the relations that concern to commercial and health services and also university education; in another analytic level, we observed the vertical relations, web structured, which go beyond the regional territory and place Passo Fundo in economic and globalized circuits related to food production (thanks to its already mentioned support to agricultural business). In the second part of this dissertation, taking Flávio Villaça's studies about the formation of Brazilian intra-urban space as a ground, we commented the same theme related to Passo Fundo: the main elements of the city were priorized (the center, its industrial and residential areas - and its separation in social classes) in an investigation that emphasized the location and the way these elements articulate themselves in the city; as well as the actions of social groups, in the aspects of production and consumism of goods in the intra-urban space. Briefly, we observed the socioeconomic dinamics (located in a regional sphere) as definers to the urbanization rhythm in Passo Fundo - which has intensified itself in the second part of the XXth century, due to productive restructuration on agriculture and the consolidation of the city as a regional center. Passo Fundo was structured along regional roads and definied as a city for transition, it starts to grow faster after 1950, and it becomes the main destiny for migrants from the country and satellite cities around. Such a growth on population generates new urban demands and produces a notable needy periphery, parallelly to the concentration of public investments in the central area - which has consolidated itself as a residential place for the higher society, and also as a goal for land and housing speculation. By theses means, a typic segregational model (the center-periphery one) is characterized, and it shows itself as conditioned to market interests which are state-legitimated. Currently, the economic dynamism expressed in the third and second sector manifests itself in the city through the insertion of new vectors in the urban expansion, which show themselves in the implantation of a great allotment willing to mix use (for high and middle classes), as well as luxurious condominiums in the periphery. Although these processes manifest with different intensities and complexities, we highlight them in Passo Fundo as sharing the same nature of the ones observed in medium-size and metropolitan cities, as they are inserted in the same social structure and are product, ultimately, of the capitalist development of the city, owned by the high classes and state-legitimated.