The real estate advance over the city's periphery in the XXI century: the transformation of space production in Itaquera

Abstract

Due to the worldwide process of globalization and productive restructuring initiated in the 1970s, urban space and private land ownership are reinforced as the frontier of capital accumulation, signaling a new accumulation phase in global capitalism (HARVEY, 2014) helped by the increasing interaction between financial and real estate capital, and thereby altering the production of space. In Brazil, great territorial transformations are seen in the metropolis during the XXI century, driven by institutional changes implemented by the Federal Government, which have stimulated the real estate sector in producing housing for the market. At this point, the city of Sao Paulo holds the maximum expression of these circumstances mainly due to its advanced process of metropolisation. Within this context, the research will investigate the recent expansion phenomenon of the real estate production of market housing ("affordable housing") in the precarious periphery of the Sao Paulo metropolis - specifically Itaquera. The goal is to understand its specific forms, the meaning of this boost under other forms of production and the transformations of this peripheral territory. For this effect, we accept as an empirical reflection the changes seen in Itaquera in the last decade, where the real estate market gets an increasing role in the production and reproduction of spaces, by usurping the productivity gains of the socially produced daily space, juxtaposing to historical forms of local space production. Also as a central hypothesis, there is the growing role of the real estate market production as the responsible for a widener fragmentation of spaces plus an exacerbation of its social and urban inequalities, in historically consolidated areas within precarious urban conditions. (AU)