The countryside-city relationship in Primavera do Leste (MT)

landscapes of urban agribusiness

Abstract

The expansion of the agricultural frontier which, from the 1970s onwards, advanced rapidly over large areas of the Cerrado, as a result of the industrialization of agriculture and actions taken by the Brazilian state in the service of capital, produced a double phenomenon of settlement and urbanization in this region, from which several cities emerged, as well as the growth of the agricultural sector characterized by the large-scale production of commodities, along the lines of agribusiness. In this article, we seek to understand and explain how this model of capitalist production of space, both agrarian and urban, becomes perceptible in the urban landscape of cities like Primavera do Leste (MT), in which we can notice the synthesis of two typical phenomena of the current moment of the capitalist mode of production represented by agribusiness: a) the city¬-country relationship, represented by the dialectical unity formed through the physical structures, way of life and production characteristic of the countryside that are present in the city, and vice versa; b) the concentration of wealth and social inequality that is spatialized in the urban area of Primavera do Leste through the different housing and living conditions of its population. Through field research and a review of bibliographies such as Lefebrve (1991), Oliveira (2009) and Fioravanti (2018), among others, we concluded that the analysis of the urban landscape of Primavera do Leste therefore makes it possible to understand the consequences of this historical process of appropriation of agrarian and urban space by Capital, through agribusiness, creating an intense country-city relationship and also social inequalities.