A rede de agentes imobiliários e o déficit habitacional na configuração territorial urbana de Santa Cruz do Sul.

Abstract

The present study aimed to understand the urban territorial configuration in Santa Cruz do Sul, specifically its expansion of the urban perimeter and urban area, produced by the network of real estate agents and justified by the municipality housing deficit. The research and analysis are based on the assumption that the production of urban space is realized by a set of social agents since the value of urban land are considered a social product. However, as the land is a commodity converted in many forms of exchange, it became valuable and intensively speculated. The real estate sector and the industry of construction had acted directly on the intensive new and diverse real estate production in the city, in a process of urban expansion that seems to solve the housing deficit. Therefore, from this fast, contradictory and disorderly urban grow, it was aimed to understand which had been the relationship and contradictions between the urban territorial expansion promoted by the network of real estate agents and the dynamic of the housing deficit and vacates homes in Santa Cruz do Sul. The middle city of Santa Cruz do Sul is localized in the central-eastern mesoregion of Rio Grande do Sul. It is the most populous city and the main industrial, trade and service centre in the Rio Pardo’ valley region. As the main centre of attraction of capital and people on the regional scale, the city is spatially fragmented and socially segregated in the municipal territory scale. Then, the understanding of the urban territorial configuration in Santa Cruz do Sul, as well as the constitution and operation of the network of real estate agent and its relationship with the housing deficit, emerge as a need to further understanding the articulations and conflicts between the different social agents that produce the urban space in the municipal territory. Regarding the methods, the dialectical materialist approach and its categories constituted the theoretical path of the study that expressed the conception of the whole territory. Finally, we observed several relationships and contradictions in the urban space of Santa Cruz do Sul, from the complex network of agents with interests, beliefs and actions that made and makes their urban territorial expansion more segregated North/South in the spatially and socially point of view.