Centralidades urbanas : proposta de classificação com base nos fluxos de viagens em Belo Horizonte – MG

Abstract

The world's urban spaces have seen their territories and uses altered by the imposition of the logic of capitalist accumulation and the advent of industry, when cities began to concentrate more equipment and services, attracting masses of people and increasing the urban structure. In this context urban centers play an important role in the formation of cities, as they host and concentrate equipment and services, also converging the fluxes, establishing symbolisms of their importance and valuing their territory. However, as a result of urban growth, based on population growth and, especially in Brazil, on territorial expansion, displacement towards the centers becomes more difficult due to increasing distances and volume of people. Another point to be observed is that, with the valorization of the centers' terrains and with the urban territorial growth, some activities go to territorial portions until then empty, where there is an offer of terrains with lower costs. Thus, it is pointed to the fomentation and maintenance of poly centers, decentralizing the equipment, services and activities in more than one place/center, with potential to reduce distances and travel times, contributing to the improvement of urban life. Urban accessibility and mobility then play an important role as they provide access to centralities, presenting potential to support the process of changing urban uses. Therefore, thinking about accessibility and urban mobility is also thinking about the urban territorial structure. Therefore, it becomes possible to identify the territorial structure from the conformation and disposition of travel fluxes in urban space, being this the main proposal of the present study. This research is structured to develop and apply a methodological proposal for the classification of centralities, based on secondary data from government research and appropriate for the reality of large Brazilian cities. In this direction, the first stage is dedicated to the identification of the centralities from two groups of data: economic and fluxes. This first stage is used as a base for the second stage, which aims to classify the centralities based on travel fluxes in urban space. The application demonstrated that the methodological proposal is viable and returned important data that can support public policies on urban planning and transportation.