Production of urban land use: The action of social and economic agents in the Island of the Santa Catarina/Brazil

Abstract

In order to understand the structure of urban space, it is first necessary to identify the processes that originated its spatial structure and the patterns they produce from it. Conzen (2009) emphasizes that the spatial patterns characteristic of a city are determined by the land use and by the types of constructions. Therefore, based on the unequal nature of urban growth, we intend to present in this research, the changes that occurred in urban land use that bordered the axis of SC 401 and SC 404 from the 2000s, as a response to economic cycles during that period in Florianópolis, a city located in the South of Brazil. Since the 1970s, the State of Santa Catarina Island has presented a series of public investments that have been determining the consequent and excessive capacity of valorization of urban land to the present day. The implantation of these investments directly reflects the production of the urban space, from the moment its location promotes changes in the morphological structure of the city, modifying the physical or built form, the interdependence of the plan, the urban fabric and the use of the soil, through action of the social and economic agents that shape and/or transform it.