The Curitiba Urbanization Process: The Case of Iguaçu Park Garden

This communication is inserting amid the debates of Urban Sociology, discussing the urbanization process of contemporary Brazilian cities. The literature specifies points to an uncontrolled growth of these cities, which together with a private residential market restricted to the upper classes, produces a context of urban and environmental segregation. As the real estate market is not for everyone, most of the housing production in Brazil is made outside the law, with the portion of the excluded population occupying spaces without of urban infrastructure and services in the areas rejected by the private market and public areas, located in devalued areas such as: Border streams, hillsides, land subject to flooding, polluted areas or environmental protection. In these spaces, there is no access to urban services and infrastructure, less opportunity for employment and professional training, increased exposure to violence, racial discrimination, discrimination against women and children, and a difficult access to justice and leisure. The object of our research is the process of emergence of a new neighborhood in the city of Curitiba, Paraná state capital in southern Brazil, the Garden Iguaçu Park. The neighborhood in question arose from a movement of illegal occupation of an area once used only for sand extraction. The research points to the formation of an informal housing market, within budget of the families participants in the movement. In this case the informal housing market replaced the organized social movement in the direction of the process with the neighborhood association working as an organizer of this market. We discussed this context from the authors of the literature of Urban Sociology, as Henri Lefebvre, Mike Davis and David Harvey, in a dialogue with authors of Cultural Studies as E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.