The urban evolution of the city of Belém: a trajectory of ambiguities and socio-environmental conflicts

Abstract

While the understanding about the meaning of urban sustainability evolves in Brazil, market practices related to land use and occupation, as well as urban expansion, have introduced in the city of Belém unsustainable circumstances from the perspective of the Amazonian context. Before the economic and logistic integration of that region into the country, sustainable relationships between people and territory were prevailing. However, at the metropolitan scale, the lack of policies to meet social demands have generated ambiguous situations, in which flood plain ecosystems have been occupied, and after decades have become spaces of resistance for workers and natives, against the new urban expansion processes led by the real estate market, which are guided by fragmentation, sprawl, and transformation of river margins into consumption spaces.