O circuito inferior da economia urbana e a refuncionalização dos fixos geográficos no entorno da feira central de Campina Grande - PB

Abstract

In this paper, we attempt to analyze the spatial implications of the lower circuit of the urban economy in some of the streets surrounding the central market in the city of Campina Grande - PB, in the current period. Our focus is not on the market, but rather on the small establishments that cluster around it and require a minimum degree of organization to operate and reproduce. Most of these establishments are home to content and activities linked to the lower circuit and are located in a section that, within the selective modernization inherent to the modern capitalist city, has not been affected by the recent modernizations of the current technical system that have arrived in Campina Grande. In this way, they are streets where the built environment has been gradually devalued and today constitutes an interstice between areas of recent modernization, and therefore a "focus" for low-capitalized activities. From the point of view of the method, we base ourselves on the idea proposed by Marial Laura Silveira that the city is a totality made up of two distinct market areas, which necessarily points to a territorial division of labor endogenous to the city (or as Milton Santos puts it, a political economy of the city) where agents, depending on their technical strength and volumes of capital, use the territory differently, either as a resource or as a shelter. From an empirical point of view, we carried out fieldwork in order to understand the specificities of the lower circuit in these streets - taking as our horizon the elements that distinguish the circuits: capital, technology and organization of activities - and how these activities gradually enter previous forms, refunctionalizing them. Our results show that the forms and functions of the lower circuit are diverse, forming a hybrid between what Milton Santos (2008) differentiated between the central lower circuit and the residential lower circuit, and that they are established there because of the centrality of the central market. Another fact is that these establishments, despite the frenetic vectors of globalization reaching the city, do not fully embrace the innovations of the current period, and are sometimes still very close to the reality outlined by Santos (1977) forty years ago. Therefore, seeking to understand the urban fact in its deep segmentation through circuit theory means thinking about how the poor find a place and the strength to exist.