Understanding the map of irregular and informal settlements in the south of Brazil

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ABSTRACT

The subject of the illegality and informality of the urban settlements is intrinsically related with the urbanization process in Brazil, so that the Country is globally known by the "favelas" of the great cities. However, the phenomenon tends to sprawl for almost all the Brazilian cities starting from a certain size and development level. Pelotas (300,000 inhabitants) is a medium city of the south of Brazil, near to the border with Uruguay. We may consider it as a typical Brazilian and Latin-American city, sharing all the contradictions that characterize these urban areas. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the phenomenon of the irregular human settlements in the city, a structural component of its urban development, which could be classified as spacelly modernizator and socially conservative and unequal.

The paper consists on three parts: firstly we deal with the historic evolution of the urban morphology of the city, focusing the plans of urban improvement that transformed its central area in a modern and provided space of infrastructures. The valorization of the central spaces expelled the low income population to the periphery, where the landholders and real estate promoters accomplished the division of plots of land. The solution of the housing problem in the city took place through the self-building of houses, that few times respected the urbanistics regulations in its execution. Afterwards, we explain the evolution of the irregulary settlements, a structural phenomen in the city, since the first quarter of the 20th century. Initially, the irregular establishments were located in lands less valued by the real estate market (low and humid lands) close to the factories and not very distant of the central area. Meanwhile, since the 1970s, the phenomenon sprawls it the whole urban area, mainly in the periphery.

Finally we approached the measures used by the local government to cope the irregular establishments. Since 1980s the city hall recognizes the need to approach the issue like a social process, avoiding removals and the repression of the informal establishments. Among the measures to coping the irregularity of the urban settlements in the city stand out those that seek the regularization of the ownership of the land with the institution of "special urbanistic regim areas", in which the inhabitants have been regularizing them properties. Another important measure is the program of delivery of urbanized lots to the low income population, an important performance, but that was used as support to politics of populist character. Thus, many areas in the city were occupied by grass roots moviments and poor people with the expect of to get the regularization of the lands. Nowadays, the map of the urban irregularity in Pelotas accounts more than one hundred areas with legal problems (ownership and property of the land, areas of environmental risk, public lands) in which live about the third part of the city inhabitants. The analysis of this map, conjuged with another variables, allows to understand the own model of urban development of the city and to suggest measures to coping and moderate this social problem.

ESF/N-AERUS: International workshop - Leuven and Brussels, Belgium, 23-26 May 2001

N-AERUS: Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South
http://www.naerus.net