Aglomeração urbana e metropolização no Brasil e na Colômbia: um estudo comparativo das cidades de Ilhéus-Itabuna no Brasil e Girardot-Ricaurte-Flandes na Colômbia.

Abstract

The city, as man-made space, serves as a reflection of society in a moment of history. From enslavement to present-day capitalism, socioeconomic models (the result of man's relationships in society) have been spatially expressed in the city, in the urban forms and functions. This means that, in order to analyze the current city, it is necessary to understand both the current and the past socioeconomic relations, understanding time as linear as the succession of events that impact space and have produced the increase in the urban complexity. In this logic, to understand the transformation process of the city in an urban agglomeration, as well as its spatial and functional characteristics, requires to comprehend the spatial and temporal contexts in which it has developed. Therefore, the present work intends, with a comparative analysis in the context of a deductive reasoning, to understand the development process of two urban agglomerations (Ilhéus-Itabuna e Girardot-Ricaurte-Flandes) located in two countries with different States models: Brazilian federal model and Colombian Unitary model. States models in which the power relations between the national and subnational governments acquired biases both centralizing and decentralizing, depending on the governments in power. This taking into account the existence of a superstructure that has three principles today: the financial-informational capitalism, the flexible accumulation regime and the globalization. A superstructure that impacts the urban agglomeration through the action of two groups of actors. The first one, the big capital, represented by the national states, the transnational corporations and the private banks; and the second one, the medium and small capital, this group being the commercial, industrial and real estate enterprises as well as landowners. The impact of this superstructure on the urban agglomeration produces socio-spatial reorganizations in the urban space (intra-urban) and, therefore, in the urban-regional structure (inter-urban). These socio-spatial reorganizations have produced, among others, urban phenomena such as the conurbation and metropolization of urban space; phenomena that are present in many urban agglomerations nowadays and whose study allows to understand the contemporary society.