Regiões metropolitanas de Alagoas: entre os motivos da institucionalização e a dinâmica da integração

Abstract

The aim of this survey is to investigate the reasons that led the state of Alagoas to establish several metropolitan regions, therefore, being the institutionalization of metropolitan regions the subject. The 1988 constitution made it optional for federation states to establish their metropolitan regions, urban agglomerations or microregions from their own legislation and, in a less expressive temporal lapse, there was an increasing demand of the number of these regional units without any major concerns by the legislators with theoretical relevance in spite of the theme. Incurs that in the state of Alagoas, between the years of 1998 and 2014, 9 metropolitan regions were established, contemplating 88 counties of the existing 102, collocating it in the third position among the Brazilian states that most concentrate metropolitan regions. Therefore, the Metropolis Statute was approved, with the purpose of regulating the institutionalization in the country, thus becoming a reference in the metropolitan question. This study realization is justified by the need to investigate whether the municipalities that are part of the regional units established have the metropolitan quality that can integrate socially and spatially into a metropolitan region. The methodology used adopts a qualitative, bibliographic and descriptive research, lists the concepts, formulations and propositions of the main authors who study the urban space, the metropolization and the metropolitan regions. The results indicate that the metropolitan regions of Alagoas are in agreement with the proposed planning by the Statute of the Metropolis, as well as the purpose for which they were created, since they are managed by abstract models that can not provide the required development mechanism in the region. Meanwhile, these institutional arrangements do not articulate solidarity instruments among the federated entities, generating disjointed and deconstituted spaces of the characteristics that confer them as metropolitan units. It is established that most of the metropolitan regions of Alagoas were instituted by the political-institutional character, prevailing the "common sense" of the legislative proposers who saw as an easier way to obtain financial resources alongside the Federal Government with a focus to minimize the structural problems of the region, an averse situation of imposed reality. Against the spatial organization of Alagoas, it is verified that most of the counties in the state do not have the economic dynamism that can justify the creation of such arrangements, except for Maceió, due to the influence that the capital exerts throughout the state. However, it is realized that the metropolitan regions of Alagoas pass only through a territorial cut with the purpose of formalizing an circumscription entity with a regional planning. Lastly, the results of this survey can contribute to new studies being carried out generating knowledge and increasing the number of publications on the subject still little publicized in the Alagoas’s literature.