Social invisibility and production of subordinated space in Belém (PA)

Abstract

The historical difficulties of integrating environmental logic and urban planning have upheld practicesof social and environmental exclusion in the urban expansion of Belém, to the extent that new spatial and social arrangements have ‘naturalized’ environmental changes that affect low-income social groups from the floodplains (caboclos and riparian). By re-examining the expansion of Belém we discover in the production of the city a progressive disarticulation of man, his ways of life and biophysical bases, where the suppression of vegetation, constructive densification and the location of rivers contaminated by sewage outlets have rendered traditional practices unfeasible and contributed to changes in the urban
microclimate. Empirical data indicate that in the metropolitan periphery there are coexisting social groups, ranging from those who depend on nature (urban farmers and extractivists) to the characteristic inhabitants of the periphery in a capitalist city, a blind spot for urban policies, which tend to homogenize space and
pays no heed to the potential of solutions that this diversity may offer to the challenges of social exclusion and environmental risk. Cartographies of the occurrence of water and vegetation, morphological analyses and field research seek to reveal the positive potentials of the resistance of old practices for Belém and for Brazilian cities in general, although especially for Amazonian cities, which still regard the metropolis as a reference of ‘civilization’.