Os becos sem saída da sustentabilidade no turismo: efeitos ambientais e sociais do crescimento urbano no distrito Serra do Cipó, Santana do Riacho/ MG

Abstract

Tourism has been recurrently exalted as a vector of development for different sectors of society, but after decades of its advent in the district of Serra do Cipó, Santana do Riacho/MG, the object of study of this research, it has generated economic growth with individual and social and environmental costs. The critique undertaken turns to the hegemonic conceptions that reverberate the affirmation that tourism leads to development, including sustainable development. With the objective of analyzing the environmental and social effects of tourism in its broader context: the capitalist (re) production of space, research seeks to scrutinize the relationships between tourism, sustainability, urban growth and second homes. The proposed theoretical path seeks to locate tourism in its historical determinations, reaffirming that it must be studied in the context of the progressive commodification of all aspects of life. The methodological basis includes ethnography, participant observation, non-directive interviews, application of questionnaires, participation/observations in public institutional meetings and municipal councils. It is revealed as one of the dead ends of sustainability in tourism, the overlap of residential and conventional tourism driven by the hegemonic perspective whose centrality lies in the urbanization, construction and commercialization of second homes as the best economic alternative for the place. Among the analyzed social and environmental effects are the precariousness of labor relations, the threats to the permanence of the native inhabitants, the production of spaces of exclusion/segregation by the purchasing power of the users and the deterioration of the environmental qualities of/in the space. The positive effects of tourism tend to cover economic aspects linked mainly to the generation of income and jobs. However, in the long term, its growth presents a number of structural deficits and creates a situation of environmental and social risk for the local community. Addressing environmental issues in the district will not advance if inequalities and social exclusion in the capitalist (re)production of space continue to be cushioned by superficial discourses of employment and income generation. In spite of the importance of the ecological movements, their limitations in facing the harmful effects of tourism, to question their constitutive relations with the neoliberal economic precepts, the reproduction of the social inequalities and the dynamics of use and occupation of the soil environmentally degrading stand out. Knowing more and better the dead ends that focus on the environmental debate is necessary to boost the rupture with the ecological ideology of sustainable tourism and the emergence of other possibilities for the development of/in the Serra do Cipó district.