O uso do território na cidade de União dos Palmares – AL: o circuito inferior nas suas áreas central e periférica

Abstract

This present search seek to understand the urban dynamics in the city of União dos Palmares - State of Alagoas, in the current period of Globalization, from the activities of lower circuit of the urban economy, especially the use about territory, synonymous with geographical space, by the agents of the small businesses that animate the popular economy of the city. Therefore, based on the theory of the two urban economy circuits in the underdeveloped countries, proposed by Milton Santos (2008c), an important theoretical and methodological way to understand urbanization, we selected the main plots of the built environment that the population uses to work. The city chosen here as a geographical situation (SILVEIRA, 1999) it has its genesis linked to the regional urbanization context, driven by the expulsion of workers from their lands, as well as by the floods that affected the Mundaú river basin in the last hundred years. With the implementation of several services over the last decades, including the public sector, the city has emerged like an important urban center in the mountainous region of Quilombos, but it was mainly from the 1970s that the expansion of large peripheral districts through invasions, donations by public authorities, by sales and by the housing reconstruction programs for the homeless. In this context is conformed in União dos Palmares city, a poor population, which seeks to survive in various ways in the central and peripheral areas. In order to understand the manifestation of urban poverty, we investigated the behavior of the lower central and residential circuit in the largest neighborhoods of the city: Center, Roberto Correia de Araújo, Nova Esperança housing and Newton Pereira Gonçalves housing. Thus, understanding these economic activities reveals how urban poverty manifests itself in places and demonstrates, especially, the political-institutional need that should be active from people to the economy, not the other way around.