Search

Over the past three decades, agrarian reform areas have transformed urban and rural spaces across Brazil. Although these areas' creation reduced inequalities and environmental problems, their residents still experience several constraints and vulnerabilities associated with water, energy, and food provision. Drawing on the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus' critical and territorial perspectives, this paper aims to better understand the agrarian reform areas' challenges in peri-urban interfaces towards social justice. We analyse a territory in the Northeast portion of the São Paulo State, where it is located the Sepé Tiaraju agrarian reform settlement in interface with two municipalities. We suggest that agrarian reform areas can activate a progressive and concrete environmental change at the local level where food is the key element to redefining the area's nexus. However, socio-political and spatial dynamics involving water and energy for the sugarcane sector, the municipal government, and tense relationships among residents around food also reproduce unequal access to resources. This paper contributes to the emerging critical literature and its efforts to politicize the nexus debate, giving more nuanced views to the complex and contradictory dynamics involving environmental problems and social justice struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growth pole concepts appear particularly useful to regional planners who are faced with the task of designing a strategy for analyzing and inducing regional growth. This study employs a form of trend surface analysis which identifies urban places that may be interpreted as growth poles and measures trends in growth outward from those poles. An empirical example is provided for the State of São Paulo, Brazil, for the period 1940 to 1960. Two types of growth poles are identified: 1) natural poles that result from a rapid postwar industrialization, and 2) planned poles that result from state governmental efforts to control economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]