Da periferia distante à periferia próxima

notas sobre a construção de um bairro popular na Região Metropolitana de Salvador

Abstract

In the middle of the 1960s, Itinga — located in Lauro of Freitas, municipality of the Metropolitan Area of Salvador — was considered a distant area and characterized by the presence of great abandoned farms, therefore, being a land that attract no commercial interests. On that same decade, among the consequences of the insertion of Bahia State in the national project of industrialization, it happened some alterations in the social-spatial structure of Salvador that expanded its kind of logic and spatial occupation to contiguous municipalities, like Lauro de Freitas. So, Itinga, under the condition of peripheral district of Salvador, started to be an interesting object to the real estate market: in its territory it was quickly established countless popular divisions into lots, without any infrastructure and presenting precarious life conditions. In 2005, Itinga, consolidated as popular neighborhood, counted with countless popular divisions into lots, commercial establishments and public and private services. The life conditions changed and, as their residents use to say, the “progress” of the neighborhood is visible. However, Itinga is still periphery of Salvador and, at the same time, periphery of Lauro de Freitas. In that sense, this article intends to discuss some of the consequences of living in the periphery, for so much, it analyzes the living conditions of Itinga at the beginning of its “urbanization” and nowadays, and it compares such conditions with the existent ones, in other neighborhoods of Lauro de Freitas.