Urbanização imobiliária residencial: uma leitura da configuração espacial da região metropolitana de Natal/Brasil

Abstract

In the last decades the Natal Metropolitan Area (NMR), as well as in much of Brazil, experienced a population and spatial growth in its cities through/experiencing an urban sprawl pattern of expansion. The trend to intensive growth in peri-urban areas led to new forms of production of space. The real estate search for available land for housing production, are consolidating old processes and generating new patterns in the metropolitan land fabric. This leads us to question: how is the result of the residential real estate dynamic in the (re) configuration of the NMR? What forms and territorial phenomena are evident in this spatial process of the metro area? How much the Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) housing politic is responsible for the spatial changes of NMR? This research aims to understand the logic and the urban sprawl process analyzing/through the recent production of social housing, contributing with an explanatory model of spatial configuration of the NMR. The metro area was analyzed on two scales: the urban, including Natal, Parnamirim and São Gonçalo do Amarante cities, framed in this research as Functional Metropolitan Area; intercities, taking into consideration all the municipalities of NMR. In both scales there were cronologically observed the general conditions of the NMR metro expansion throught the state and the real estate interventions, that resulted into the fragmentation of the urban fabric and socio-spatial inequalities what we called here as “Urbanização Imobiliária Residencial”.