SPECIFICITIES OF HOUSING PRECARIETY IN AMAZÔNIA RIBEIRINHA: The case of Baixo Tocantins Region
This thesis aims to characterize the specificities of precarious housing in riverside cities in the
Amazon. It starts with the hypothesis that there are specificities of precarious housing in
riverside cities in the Amazon that are not easily captured by the concepts, methodologies and
data available at the national level. It was analyzed the following three cities for this case study:
Cametá, Oeiras do Pará and Limoeiro do Ajuru located in the Baixo Tocantins region. The need
to incorporate regional, municipal and urban diversities as data for the formulation of public
policies aimed at housing in the Amazon is the mainly reason that motivated this research,
which is based on a theoretical references on housing as a commodity in the capitalist
production system, aspects related to the precariousness of housing and also on the complexity
of structuring the Amazonian space. It is also based on bibliographic, documentary analysis and
field research, a theoretical-methodological debate and the systematization of empirical
elements about and from the study area were constructed to identify their specificities of
housing precariousness. The results of this research indicates that the local specificities are
related to the way that the housing is built (stilts), the predominant material (wood), the place
of occupation (lowland area), the precarious or absent infrastructure (mainly sewage).
Therefore, it is connected with the way that the population relates to the place they are living,
which is expressed in the forms of occupation of the space (flooded, flooded and solid ground);
in the architectural model that carries the empirical knowledge inherited from traditional
peoples, in the symbols of the local culture. However, this paper aims to reveal diversities that
support the proposition of urban and housing policies with less generalized approaches.