The effects of the National Program of Medium Cities and the public housing policies on the intra-urban configuration of the North Zone of São José do Rio Preto/SP

Abstract

São José do Rio Preto, the main city of its metropolitan region, has gone, in the recent years, through an intense urban development. However, it still maintains a reality with a strong socio-spatial segregation between north and south sectors of the city, which is reinforced along its whole historical trajectory. This paper, therefore, seeks to analyse the impacts of the restructuring of the land use management carried by the municipality, of the social housing policies implemented and of the experience it has undergone with the Medium Cities National Program, on the consolidation of a segregationist urbanization pattern in the city. The methodology employed consists of a periodization of an analysis focused on the period between the decades of 1950 and 1990, when the North Zone is born, embedded in a peripheral Fordist economic model. Supported by primary and secondary municipal data and by a literature dedicated to the study of medium cities, the Brazilian urbanization and intra-urban socio-spatial production, the paper was able to identify strategies adopted by the State and the Capital, who played a structuring role in the city’s current urban organization. Instead of enabling the access to the city for the poorer populations, the resulting structure took away the possibilities of their thorough insertion in the city.

Keywords:
Medium Cities; Urban Policy; Peripheral Fordism; Land Rent; Socio-Spacial Segregation