Socio-spatial segregation, urban growth morphology and socioeconomic fragmentation in medium-sized Brazilian cities

Abstract

Socio-spatial segregation is a process that has been constituted urban space, particularly in contexts of socioeconomic inequalities in which the restriction of contact deepens the condition of unequal urbanization. In this work we analyze quantitative empirical evidence associated with theoretical-critical reflections on the contemporary urbanization process, adopting the concepts of fragmentation and segregation to analyze 125 medium-sized Brazilian urban concentrations, between 1985 and 2020, in which in 60% of cases the expansion took place at a faster rate than population growth. We detail a study in Pelotas/RS ­and Blumenau/SC, to which we applied local spatial indices of segregation (dissimilarity and isolation) examining correlations with the morphology of the expansion areas (infill, edge and leapfrog). For both cities, we observed that the different morphological patterns of expansion occur with a certain stability in the global dissimilarity indices, whose areas of urban expansion combine and juxtapose local situations of socioeconomic isolation for the extreme groups of high and low income. The results suggest that urban expansion has been structured by fragmentation and segregation, contributing to hiding socio-spatial conflicts in peripheral urbanization through the separation and restriction of contacts between different social groups.

Keywords:
Socio-spatial segregation; Urban expansion; Medium-size cities