A “venda” da assim chamada “cidade inteligente e sustentável” em João Pessoa-PB: discursos, realidades e contradições

Abstract

In Brazil, there are structural inequalities with political, economic and social roots, in addition to current and active forces in the production and (re)production of space, with various agents involved in the process. Correa (2013) works on the concept of socio-spatial segregation, where spatial organization is a product of the existence of social classes, and this antagonism is evidenced here. The concentration of income distribution, seen in the urban environment, is aggravated by the manifestation of the neoliberal agenda, in which financial institutions, especially the World Bank (WB) and the Inter-American Development Bank (BID), adopt a plan for Latin cities. articulated in their own projects of State reform, which concerns the administration of economic activities and political management, thus opening entry for companies with international capital. Our geographic focus is the places where the “João Pessoa Sustentável” Program operates, based on the contract of an external credit operation. Through this loan, there is a justification for promoting the social, economic and environmental development of the city, ranging from the modernization of urban planning instruments, the provision of services to the public and fiscal administration. The Program is divided into two components: one for investments and the other for administrative management, within the model required and guided by the BID. The deadline for execution is 54 months. The city is a dynamic and living organism, it changes quickly, mainly to absorb commercial interests, extensively, where poverty is inevitably expelled to the peripheries or areas not yet valued. This neoliberal city of bourgeois ideological expression, guided by these external and internal agents, overrides any egalitarian or compassionate sense or meaning. It does not matter whether it segregates or deepens inequalities, as these issues are not analyzed by bourgeois strategic planning, as it seeks profit and valorization of urban areas. Slopes, hilltops, rough terrain in general, which for decades were home to the exiled, in the configuration of the new "smart and sustainable city" is transformed ("requalifies" or "revitalizes itself") into amenities to please contemplative eyes of those who can pay for it, and the people who were there are removed to other locations, perhaps not so ecological and “modern”. Remembering that the lack of affordable income is the cause of irregular occupations, and until then, the occupation of these unhealthy areas for housing was never a concern of the government, only when these areas started to be perceived and valued by the market. From a social point of view, it is a very worrying process, as it distances the dispossessed townspeople belonging to the most vulnerable and socially oppressed fractions of their city, it deterritorializes, and therefore, within a geographical analysis from the perspective of concrete life and existing materiality, this work seeks to understand the disparities and current conditions, contrasting the plans proposed to transform the city of João Pessoa into “sustainabl e and intelligent” through external and market impulses. Understanding the capitalist production of space, from this perspective, which proposals for sustainability, intelligence and impact mitigation jointly promote socio-environmental justice? Since the local phenomena mentioned here have a global and systemic nature. The idea of this work starts from the concrete reality, and the opposing facts are from the abstract plane and, finally, the clashes of these two lead to a conclusion, sometimes a synthesis.