Expansão e transformações urbanas no município de São Gonçalo/RJ: a produção social do espaço nos bairros de Porto Novo e Gradim

Abstract

The present work has as general objective to understand the production of space in the Porto Novo and Gradim neighborhoods in São Gonçalo/RJ, and the processes of urban expansion, residential segregation and socio-environmental impacts suffered in these places in the second half of the 20th century, increasing in the 1980s until the beginning of the 21st century, marking the transition from rural to urban in this space that underwent profound socio-spatial transformations from this period. These neighborhoods are located east of Guanabara Bay, in the 4th district of the municipality of São Gonçalo, belonging to the Metropolitan Region of the State of Rio de Janeiro. It is a process of urban occupation where there was a residential expansion with the construction of popular properties, with grounding and silting up the Marimbondo River and mangroves, causing other socio-environmental impacts that to this day affect the local population, such as flooding, mosquito breeding, accumulation of garbage, among others. This expansion produced a process of residential segregation parallel to the growth of these neighborhoods that was marked by important facts, such as the invasion of land that belonged to the Brazil and were under the guard of the Brazilian Navy and later the National Department of Roads and Railways (DNER), in the Porto Novo neighborhood, and the removal of needy families from the so-called "Favela do Gato" community in Gradim. In this removal process, 1,055 (one thousand and fifty-five) land areas were inappropriate for the construction of the stretch of highway BR-101, Niterói-Manilha, in the 1980s. This work has its methodological basis in phenomenology with a qualitative approach of the data carried out in primary oral sources, through interviews with residents over 60 years of age, in newspapers, with information from IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), in official documents available in the Municipality of São Gonçalo and also through academic papers such as dissertations or theses already carried out on the city of São Gonçalo, or with contents related to the proposed research.