Urbanization and development strategies in Para State: from riverine occupation to "upgrade of informal settlements"

This paper investigates present investments on housing and urbanization of precarious settlements done by the first generation of the Program Growth Acceleration (PAC), on its modality of urban and social infrastructure provision, in Belem, capital of Para State, and in Maraba and Castanhal, cities that perform functions of medium size cities in Para State. To better contextualize the problem, the text presents how economic cycles lived in the region are associated to demographic growth, urban development and to the production of informal settlements within these cities, and explores how the interventions answer to variables such as access to land, insertion in the city, urban regulation available, practiced patterns of soil usage and occupation, and potential of consolidation of target settlements after interventions, in order to assess whether there are patterns among such actions and if so, what are their contributions to better structure these cities space.