Políticas de urbanização de favelas: reflexões e desafios em Caucaia/CE

Abstract

Slum upgrading in cities is one of the ways in which urban space is produced as a result of the historical inequalities of Brazilian society, where the struggle for decent housing coexists with the apparent absence of the state. In Caucaia, a municipality in the Metropolitan Region of Fortaleza in Ceará, this process intensified in the 1980s and continues today, resulting in informal occupations by groups excluded from the real estate market and impacted by the lack of housing policies. Added to this is the conurbation caused by the construction of peripheral housing estates during the BNH period, in areas lacking in infrastructure and services, which led to the expansion of real estate speculation between Fortaleza and Caucaia, forming extremely precarious peripheral sectors. As a rule, most of the investment in slum upgrading has taken place in the capital cities, but conurbations are also an object of research in order to better understand the challenges of formulating housing policies. In this way, this study aims to investigate the role of public authorities in tackling slum upgrading in Caucaia. This analysis is made up of a systematization of different surveys of precarious settlements in the municipality, favoring the subsequent contextualization and critical reflection of public policies and programs formulated in the field of slum upgrading, using a qualitative and exploratory methodological approach. As a result, the research made it possible to understand some specific dynamics in the municipality of Caucaia in depth, highlighting the existence of programs that had not previously been addressed in the literature. It was also possible to observe that the municipality is part of trends observed in other metropolises, characterized by the emptying of the urban reform ideology, the simplification of processes and, above all, the reduced prominence given to the comprehensive urbanization of slums.