Brasil: urbanização e fronteiras - USP

BRAZIL: URBANIZATION AND FRONTIERS
Klára Kaiser Mori
Abstract
This dissertation deals with urbanization in Brazil, as a process in which Brazilian
elite society has secured the spatial conditions of its own re-production. Its starting
point is that an interpretation of that process must take into account not only the
general frame of the accumulation process of the capitalist mode of production, but
also the dialectic of hindered accumulation specific to the reproduction of Brazilian
elite –as opposed to bourgeois– society. The moulding of space for the unified
market in Brazil is the result of antagonic forces both towards widening the market
and towards hindering the former movement.
The purpose of this study is to capture that antagonism at work in the concrete process
of urbanization. It reposes on two main and interlinked assumptions. First, that
the institutional infrastructure provided conditions for the Brazilian elite both for
continued hindering of the process of unification of the market and for isolated
movements of widening the same market, always according to the needs of the reproduction
of elite society. Second, that the bulk of ideology produced about the
movements of transformation of space refer to the institutional and political
infrastructure and that in particular, the very raison d’être of such concepts as
municipalism, regionalism or federalism, is the upkeep of fragmentation or even the
restoration of internal barriers within national space.
Thus the focus of the analysis was drawn upon the institutional structure of this
country which reveals, through its very antagonism with the movements of homogenization
of space, the concrete process of urbanization.