Challenges for sustainable urbanization in the intra-metropolitan space of Campinas and Santos: populational mobility, socioenvironmental vulnerability and the evidence (local, regional and global)

Abstract

The association between urbanization and environmental degradation is commonplace in the demographic and sociological literature, especially in the debates on the relations among urban population growth, scarcity of resources, pollution and quality of life. Recent changes in population distribution patterns in Brazil"s principle urban agglomerations lead to dispersed and fragmented patterns of urbanization - a consequence of structural changes in society and of new forms of spatial mobility - forcing new challenges for the comprehension of social processes and the distribution of the population in metropolitan contexts. Using the background of social and environmental vulnerability, the research will look for the relations between urbanization and environmental changes in its local, regional and global scales, through a comparative perspective from the cases of two metropolitan areas of São Paulo State (Campinas and Santos). Using the data of a research in progress at the Population Studies Center (NEPO/UNICAMP) in these two cited regions, it will be possible to explore these relations evidencing some causes and consequences of the environmental changes in metropolitan contexts. (AU)