The colonizations legacy of oriental Amazon: rural settlements network of proto urban networks?

Abstract

This article assumes case studies in Moju and Acará Municipalities to investigate a small network of settlements that constitutes the rural area of northeastern Pará. Normally invisible to official bodies and not considered in the design of rural and urban public policies, these settlements effectively structure the rural area, as it can be grasped through social mapping. The purpose of this article is to relate hierarchical levels of the rural settlements network to the remnants of colonial policies. The methodology was qualitative focused on the analysis of socio-spatial pattern, using as tools social mapping and graph theory to generate an urban-rural gradient and the hierarchy levels of the rural settlements network. Despite the prevalence of agrarian functions, taken as a starting point of colonization performed in the 1970s, it is observed the spreading of rural settlements classified by centrality, availability of services, livelihood strategies and social cohesion, articulating rural uses to consumer expectations and access to public policies normally associated with the urban universe, connecting these two worlds. The result of so many superpositions is a hybrid territory, which morphology and networks’ sociospatial patterns are barely understood and valued by both public and private sectors.