A mobilidade urbana frente à pandemia da Covid-19 em Aracaju: o direito à cidade e à saúde

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic drastically impacted urban dynamics, especially during the period between 2020 and 2022. The closure of shops, services and other attractions, which influence individual and collective motivations for moving people, within and between cities cities, opened up one of the great and old problems present in Brazilian society, the socioeconomic inequalities that permeate everyday relationships, such as those at work, which can be translated, visually, into the image of different vulnerable social groups, clustered in stations and within modes of public transport, aiming to access the formal city and obtain the necessary economic income to survive in the concrete jungles. In short, Brazilian municipalities presented a paradigm in the behavior of Covid-19 on territories, consisting of two stages: the first with the initial number of cases registered in the most consolidated regions; while in the second stage, there is a decline in the number of new cases in this region, while there is an uncontrolled growth of cases of the disease in peripheral regions, accompanied by a sharp increase in deaths from the disease. Thus, the objective of this work is to understand the influence of inequalities, reflected in public transport, for the dissemination and lethal effects of Covid-19, in the peripheral areas of Aracaju. The methodology adopted to achieve this objective was to carry out a set of data collection, among them: the urban mobility present in the Master Plan for Urban Mobility of Aracaju (PMDU) of 2015; socioeconomic information present in the 2010 IBGE Demographic Census; of the daily and accumulated records of cases and deaths due to Covid-19, made available by the Municipal Secretary of Health of Aracaju and the Secretary of State for Health of Sergipe. The data collection together with the analysis of studies already carried out during the pandemic period in question and that connected the themes of urban mobility, Covid-19 and the various faces of inequality, allowed the formation of an argument, to question the possibility of the unequal effects, present in the raw data of the disease by neighborhoods of the capital of Aracaju, being related to the inequalities reflected in the daily urban dynamics of the peripheral residents, especially public transport, which involves much more than the path A to B, but the provision of equipment and its accessibility, the places of origin and destination, the distances, the conditions under which these trips are made. Therefore, this dissertation begins by discussing the right to the city, in order to understand the possible negative impacts of urban immobility on the most vulnerable population. Secondly, it addresses the socioeconomic issues of the neighborhoods of Aracaju and the processes that acted and continue to act for the territorial disposition of urban attractions. And finally, the analysis of the data collected, referring to urban mobility and Covid-19, showed a possible relationship between the spread of cases of the disease, with the displacement of people through public transport, as well as the unequal effects of lethality, related to the provision of health equipment and socioeconomic conditions in the neighborhoods and zones of Aracaju.