Verticalidades e horizontalidades nos usos do território de Santa Maria-RS.

Abstract

This thesis aims at understanding the development of Santa Maria-RS, and it was approached in conformity to the perspective of its sociospacial formation and interpreted from the uses of its territory. We started from the concept of Milton Santos that, in the context of contemporary globalization, every place is, at the same time, object of a global reason and a local reason, living dialectically. As instrumental resources of analysis we also relied on his concepts of verticalities and horizontalities. In global order, verticalities are the expression of exogenous forces, vectors of rationality come from outside, from above and away, which, through technical and organizational networks, arise and/or settle down in the territory, causing disaggregation, divergence and disorder, but, also new possibilities and dynamics. As a counterpoint, in local order, horizontalities are the expression of endogenous forces, vectors of rationality engendered from within and near, in the framework of banal and contiguous space, creating aggregation and convergence, but, not free of conflicts, disputes and cooptation. Our main objective was to understand the territory of Santa Maria, taken as process and product of the dialectical coexistence of these forces, projected spatially throughout its history. More specifically, we proposed to evidence the verticalities and horizontalities engendered in the main uses of the territory and, through them, interpret their present, mainly in the corporative use of its commercial function. To this end, we constructed a system of concepts that make it possible for us to delineate a conceptual frame which was able to guide us from the geographical space (an abstract totality) to the territory of Santa Maria (a concrete singularity). The reconstitution of its historical process authorized us to associate the sociospace formation of the territory to three cognomens attributed to Santa Maria by its social imaginary: military town, railway town and university town. These functions, by being accumulated in the territory, created the conditions for the emergence and consolidation of its commercial function, giving it the new cognomen the regional capital. The valorization of such uses has also allowed us to use it as criterion of periodization and the identification of four different geographical situations. The verticalities and horizontalities engendered on each of them were evidenced, specially, in the spatial practices, in job offer and in the finances of the territory. Empirically, we demonstrated that, in the current geographical situation, the command of all these fields come from outside forces of the territory, among which we highlight the military, railway, university and commercial uses. In 2010, for example, the total of the budgets of BASM, from the Army and the UFSM, was equivalent to 31% of PIB in Santa Maria. The total number of public and private income transfers is another indicator of singularity that has, historically, marked its development and that has accentuated in the current geographical situation: almost 50% of the income of the residents in Santa Maria is constituted by the sum of such transfers. Although these singularities, by themselves, represent a positive factor, they, contradictorily, hide a high degree of dependence on external sources of employment and income, which exposes the territory to the uncertainties that such privilege will have continuity in the future.