The pre-existing centre and the main centre in polycentric cities: transformations and permanences in Marília, Presidente Prudente e São Carlos

Polycentrism is related to, above all, the importance of new central areas, complementarity and competition relations and new hierarchical arrangements, and it promotes transformation in the pre-existing centre and in the intra-urban centrality, starting from multi-scale processes, which confer new roles and functions to the medium cities. The resulting spatial structures are more complex than the precedents, which are characterized by a single central area or by strict subordinate relationships to the centre. Indeed, in polycentric structures, the centre no longer exhibits its inherent central role, although it expresses a pre-existing condition, in a dialectical movement of loss of importance and the reaffirmation of its centrality, which justifies calling it a pre-existing centre, its attribute of roughness versus new processes. Considering an axis of successions, they have been marked by transformation in the urban structure and redefinitions in the pre-existing centre, and another of the coexistences, the representative of different articulated central areas. We seek to analyse the centre from a dual perspective of the pre-existing centre and the main centre, taking as hypothesis, the propensity of how the pre-existing centre shows up to be as permanent as the main one. In order to verify this thesis, we have proposed an analytical process of identification of the main centre, as well as the axis of coexistence of different central areas, belonging to a totality and only apprehended in relational analysis, through the approach of the economic logics of companies and consumption of spatial practices. With a set of methodological procedures, involving simple data collection, fieldwork and analysis of surveys, questionnaires and interviews, we have studied the pre-existing centre of Marília, Presidente Prudente and São Carlos, cities in the state of São Paulo, to apprehend their roughness attribute, by identifying the main centre. In Marília, we've conferred the territorial coincidence between the pre-existing centre and the main centre, with the privilege of that area by companies and city dwellers, of which is an indicative of a significant size of concentration and diversity of activities; a high complexity of the capital, with the presence of large stores; and the preference for an area manifested by city residents, for the acquisition of different goods and services. In São Carlos, the structure and the intra-urban centrality are not different from what it was observed in Marília. However, the size of the concentration is lower, as it is the capital complexity. Nevertheless, we have perceived in both cities, the prominence of subordination relations between other central areas to the centre, despite the observed relations between competition and complementarity. Although the centre of Presidente Prudente presents a remarkable concentration and diversity of goods and services offered and high complexity of the capital of the present companies, it coexists with an important shopping mall, which develops complementary relation, and a greater number of hypermarkets, which carry out relations of competition, with greater repercussion on the centrality of the pre-existing centre. (AU)