BELÉM: URBANIZAÇÃO REGIONAL POLICÊNTRICA E CIDADE-REGIÃO

Abstract

The objectives of this article are to analyze the conceptions of city-region and polycentric regional urbanization in the context of the debate on urban-regional morphologies and recognize the main elements of the urban-regional reality configured, in recent decades, from Belém, capital of the State of Pará, in northern Brazil. Through the development of methodological procedures such as bibliographic and documentary surveys, as well as fieldwork, it was contacted that there is reasonable dissemination of urban-regional morphologies in the current world, with manifestation, including, in precarious realities such as that of Belém, where factors of the polycentric regional urbanization process and its spatial form are recorded, the city-region, such as: diversity of income and types of settlement of social groups in the old and new dispersed areas; dispersion of consumption spaces; expansion of the dispersion scale and configuration of the new peripheries; and strengthening of other centralities (besides the metropolitan nucleus) and, consequently, diversification and complexification of flows.