Geotecnologias aplicadas ao mapeamento do uso do solo urbano e da dinâmica da favela em cidade média: o caso de Montes Claros/MG

Abstract

The growth of cities is a global phenomenon, especially in developing countries. In the Brazilian context, cities are classified as intermediate sized or medium sized stand as convergent pole of immigrants, because they have important characteristics in the population attraction. This situation creates significant changes in the urban system, for example, in the form of land use. The city shows great complexity of land use due to population concentration and the regional centrality. There are specific areas for certain functions. The predominant use in cities is residential, that is, intended for housing. However, the demand for housing is incompatible with supply, this forces the low income population to occupy irregular spaces through the purchase of lots in an informal manner, or even invade the land of others. This scenario describes the reality of the city of Montes Claros, since it stands as a pole of a vast region that encompasses the whole North of Minas Gerais, and part of the southern state of Bahia. Furthermore, state intervention, with the installation of industries, has made the move to speed up this city. By being in a small region of economic dynamism and low social indicators, profile of the immigrant does not offer great job opportunities, being part of this population, and is marginalized. This was the context that prevailed in Montes Claros after deployment of the industries during the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, the city has grown without an effective control of municipal government and encroachments for housing purposes occurred. The use of geo-technology, especially remote sensing, images with high spatial resolution, and the Geographic Information System - GIS allowed to extract data on the organization of urban land use in Montes Claros. At that moment it was possible to quantify and qualify the dominant classes in this space. The construction of a methodology of mapping intra-urban space was essential to create a legend in hierarchical levels, allowing the mapping the land use with multiple focuses, with the main aim to identify the class of low-income areas classified as slums. In mapping the distribution of income classes, it was noticed that there is a predominance of lowincome population, concentrated in the areas north, east and south of the city, leaving the western part for the higher income population. The slums are concentrated in areas north and south of town. However, there are slums in the central-west, these being the oldest, which emerged in the 1930s. In the northern part are the largest shantytowns that arose with the creation of industrial clusters, and the occupation of the south are the most recent. A comparison of Ikonos satellite images of 2000, and Quick Bird, 2005, showed that the growth of slums in Montes Claros was representative and concentrated in the slums that had vacant spaces within it, moreover, it was found that the slums in the north are the fastest growing. Given this analysis, constant monitoring is important, through geo-technology and the use of urban land, since the illegal occupation of that land is a recurrent problem in medium-sized cities in Brazil.