Précarité urbaine et fragmentation socio-spatiale au sein des métropoles brésiliennes : le cas de Recife

The simultaneity of a strong spatial segmentation and of persistent social imbalances justifies the use of the concept of socio-spatial fragmentation, as a key to analysing the Brazilian metropolises. This is the way to renounce traditional dichotomised visions which oppose centre and periphery, and to explain the processes of segmentation, which transform the big Brazilian cities into kinds of patchworks, with contrasting morphologies and made up of ?pieces of town? occupied alternately by high-income people, or on the contrary by people in great precariousness. Nevertheless, even though the main aim of this paper is to display the particular geography of social inequalities in the big Brazilian cities, specifically focusing on the phenomenon of the favelas, it aims to propose thinking about the outcomes and effects of public action concerning the precarious residential areas. For many years, public policies have wavered between attempts to eradicate the spaces of poverty, which implies the removal of the inhabitants, and the desire to requalify in order to ensure the ?right to the city? and the right to tenancy for the populations concerned. This issue is all the more important, as the strategies of metropolitan marketing imposed by globalisation on the one hand, and the fight against urban fragmentation on the other, are difficult to reconcile. However, as we are not able to deal with the socio-spatial fragmentation in all big sized Brazilian cities, we focus in this paper on the case of Recife, which is, in many respects, paradigmatic of the issue of ?the right to city? in Brazil, evoking when necessary other examples. It is in particular in Recife that the inhabitants of the favelas, aided by NGOs and academics, already during the dictatorship, claimed measures of regularisation for their neighbourhoods, in the name of the ?right to the city?, which later became laws and juridical rules. Morever, not being able to deal with all the types of public action conceived to reduce urban fragmentation, we attempt to analyse the impacts and limits of the ?Regularization Plan of the special areas of social interest? (so-called PREZEIS), which was implemented in Recife in 1987, in order to consolidate and regularise the favelas and the areas of great urban precariousness, as the inhabitants had demanded. Thus the first part of the paper is dedicated to the consequences of metropolisation in terms of urban fragmentation, as we can observe in Recife, whereas the second part analyses the procedures and the effects of the PREZEIS regarding the requalification of precarious neighbourhoods and the fight against urban fragmentation.