Rich Campinas, poor Campinas. Two distinct populations in a city of 1,2 million inhabitants, experiencing progress and setbacks. It is a corporate city, aimed mainly at large companies, and not at the population itself. It is a municipality that hides its periphery, the third largest in the State of São Paulo, with almost 15% of its population living in urban areas, irregular settlements or slums. “Around 150 thousand people are not properly heard and do not have access to urban infrastructure and services. Therefore, if we don't give them a voice in the Campinas Master Plan, they won't achieve anything in the future”. This is one of the conclusions of geographer Helena Rizzatti Fonseca in a master's study presented to the Institute of Geosciences (IG), when studying the two largest urban occupations in the city: Jardim Campo Belo and Parque Oziel. 

The occupation of Parque Oziel is 5 km from the center of Campinas and Campo Belo is 15 km away. The two areas were occupied simultaneously, in 1997, and are connected by the Santos Dumont Highway. These urban occupations were, well, ignored by City Hall for a long time and, in 2006, there was already a population of 50 thousand people in Campo Belo and 30 thousand in Parque Oziel, totaling 80 thousand inhabitants. They came mostly from the Metropolitan Region of Campinas (RMC), the RM of São Paulo and states such as Paraná, Mato Grosso and Maranhão. 

From 1997 to 2006, these people “made do” as best they could. They installed precarious urban infrastructure: they built pipes for the sewage network; they fetched water from nearby dams; they pulled electrical wiring from surrounding neighborhoods; they built schools and houses. “When they arrive at the land, the leaders seek to separate what would be streets and avenues, demarcate lots and remove all the bush”, reveals Helena who, in her dissertation, was supervised by professor Adriana Maria Bernardes da Silva. 

In 2006, the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC 2) came into being, a Federal Government initiative to promote the country's economic growth. Part of the PAC was destined for the urbanization of favelas and occupations in metropolitan regions. Campo Belo and Parque Oziel stood out as the main pockets of poverty in Campinas to receive interventions from this program.

Corporate urbanization

A first important aspect of this research was the understanding of corporate urbanization, defined as it guides large economic investments to meet the needs of corporations to the detriment of social investment. This was a concept proposed by geographer Milton Santos, when analyzing the expansion of the globalization process in the country in recent decades. 

Linked to the modernization of privileged fractions of the territory are the conditions of the crisis that permeate Brazilian cities: concentration of income and land, scarcity of land for popular housing, accentuated real estate speculation, lack of basic services and precariousness of existing services, among other factors. In this context, peripheralization, segregation, impoverishment and urban conflicts, such as those involving urban occupations, intensified.

In Campinas, in the 1990s, following the logic of corporate urbanization, the II High Technology Pole (Ciatec) was implemented, which includes companies, universities, research centers, all located in the district of Barão Geraldo; the Viracopos airport expansion project was resumed; and a large growth of condominiums and walled lots in the city was driven. All of these investments (with the exception of the airport) are located in the northern macro-region, above the Anhanguera Highway.  

Helena reaffirms that Campinas has a rich north macro-region and a poor south macro-region, divided by this highway. This was initially analyzed by economists Wilson Cano and Carlos Brandão, from the Unicamp Institute of Economics. According to the 2002 study, more than 70% of the poor irregular area of ​​Campinas was located in the southern macro-region and another 30% was dispersed in the north. “This division by Anhanguera has been going on for a long time,” she says. So much so that the first working-class village in the city, Vila Industrial, is south of Anhanguera and was built in 1911. “This is intentional planning that we need to show: there was planning so that the poor population would stay to the south”, denounces her.

In the 1990s, the installation of gated condominiums in rural areas, aimed at the high-income population, deepened socio-spatial segregation in Campinas. This brought a considerable burden to the city, according to Helena. Condominiums were built far from the urban fabric, including Barão Geraldo, Sousas and Joaquim Egídio, making it necessary to move asphalt, basic sanitation and electricity. “But this is to benefit the high-income population”, she compares. “This shows the faces of a corporate urbanization that concentrates investments in a small portion of the city, to the detriment of the whole.”

Urban occupation

In the 1990s, there was a 70% increase in urban occupations in Campinas, “which demonstrates a change in the struggle strategies of social movements, as people realized that favelas were more difficult to regularize”, observes Helena. Occupations are usually planned and installed on land where the owners have public debts, encouraging, subsequently, the regularization of the area.

Implemented in the 1988 Constitution and regulated from 2001 onwards with the City Statute, the Master Plan must assist in urban planning and management, for the benefit of everyone, making the social function of the city worthwhile. “But the 2006 Campinas plan did not properly incorporate the existence and internal conflicts of these poor parts of the city, silencing the problems of 80 thousand people, in this part alone that we analyzed”, he guarantees.

The Municipal Housing Plan, required by the Federal Government for all cities that want to receive investment from the Minha Casa, Minha Vida Program, was also analyzed. They are called Local Social Interest Housing Plans (PLHIS). It was the first of this type of plan in the municipality and it has a good combination of data on the housing situation in Campinas and its RM.

However, in 2006, the Viracopos airport expansion project began, making the Campo Belo region strategic for the city. The area where the occupation took place was intended for this expansion, planned since 1970, but which was slow to happen. With the resumption of plans to expand the airport, the public authorities had to deal with the resistance of 50 thousand people (almost eight thousand families) from Campo Belo, who would have to be removed from the site. The then mayor Hélio de Oliveira evaluated the region with President Lula's government and Infraero, and decided to change the expansion area, reducing the number of population to be removed. “It was, in a way, a popular victory”, he points out.

Along with this decision, the PAC's Precarious Settlement Urbanization Program was implemented, named Projeto Social Vip-Viracopos in the city. They brought asphalt, basic sanitation, an electricity network, schools and health centers to the two occupations studied and the regularization process began in both.

In the Oziel region, the implementation of the entire infrastructure has already taken place, and regularization in the area is underway, whereas, in Campo Belo, regularization is stagnant, because the area is located in the airport's noise cone. This issue continues to be debated at City Hall.

Regularization was also the subject of analysis in Helena's dissertation. To understand the constitution of this portion of the southern macro-region of the city, delimited as the southern region, the researcher studied the old urban land use concession law of 1981, drawn up by the People's Assembly of Campinas, and the recent land regularization law urban, from 2003, implemented with the Campinas Housing Secretariat (SeHab), which seeks to regularize the irregular centers of low-income population installed until 2001. There are a total of 234 centers existing in the municipality, including the regions studied.

Resistance

Another part of the research consisted of understanding the daily lives of this low-income population who live in occupations. “The poor population is finding ways to guarantee survival, they are resisting and building a city”, highlights Helena. She analyzed the action of Neighborhood Residents' Associations, the implementation of informal urban infrastructure, the production and distribution of information about the place and for the place (called bottom-up information), and the flows traced by the population to reach health services and education in the two regions studied.

One of the ways of demonstrating the strength of this population was by observing that when there are no public fixed facilities in occupations, or when they are insufficient, the population organizes itself to reach health centers and schools in other areas, creating routes, paths and flows. The São José Health Center, for example, serves the rural population of Campinas, the São José neighborhood and the Parque Oziel, which has only two health posts. Each of them has the capacity to serve six thousand people in an area with a population of more than 30 thousand people.

The author of the study points out on a map the flows to reach these public fixed assets, signaling how this other part of the city is being built, how the territory is being used by the population. When outlining it, she noticed that not only the population itself and the fixed-rate employees organize themselves to have access to health and education, but there are cases in which the population built streets to facilitate access to these fixed-sites.

“When I analyze these fixed occupations, they are all located in the Regional Administration (linked to the Infrastructure Secretariat), of which both regions are part, which is why I consider this regionalization to be more efficient for planning in search of social justice in the city”, he highlights. Helena, in contrast to the regionalization by macrozones, adopted to organize popular participation in the current Master Plan. 

“The Master Plan must actually incorporate popular participation and rely on new theoretical bases to regionalize the city. It is perverse to use regionalization by macrozone, used to equate economic variables, to manage social issues”, he teaches. “Regionalization is a political action. It defines who has more voice and who has less”, concludes Helena, who is part of the research group “Information circles, urbanization and territory”, coordinated by professor Adriana Bernardes, and who helps coordinate the Permanent Observatory of Urban Conflicts in Campinas. This Observatory reads the city from the perspective of its conflict, offering a rich set of knowledge that can support a new type of planned intervention.

Publication

Dissertation: “The recent urbanization process in the city of Campinas-SP (1990-2014): urban occupations - a study of the uses of the territory of the South Region”
Author: Helena Rizzatti Fonseca
Advisor: Adriana Maria Bernardes da Silva
Unity: Institute of Geosciences (IG)