Racial and economic segregation in Curitiba

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the effects of racial and economic transformation on the social and spatial structure of the second-tier Brazilian city Curitiba. In the last two decades of the twentieth century and in the first decade of the twenty first century, new factors and determinants exerted decisive influence on the evolution of Brazilian cities. A fundamental change in the model of economic development took place during this period. Import-substitution industrialization (ISI), present since the 1930s, was replaced by neoliberal policies of “open markets”. On the one hand, globalization has been argued to contribute to social polarization, unemployment and informal employment, poverty, and insecurity, which later acted as a catalyst for the development of gated communities and strong fragmentation of urban space. On the other hand, recent studies and statistics on the social and economic development of Curitiba revealed that the city’s planning policy and marketing and promotional campaigns were successful, resulting in industrial development and unprecedented population increase. Population of the city of Curitiba has grown almost threefold from 609,000 in 1970 to 1,751,900 in 2010. The racial composition of Curitiba’s population has also changed over the last few decades. According to census data, the number of black and mixed-race residents was 138,200 in 1980 (13.5% of the city’s population) and increased by almost 250% to 344,100 by 2010 (19.6% of the city’s population). The paper focuses on determining the degree of racial and economic segregation and the analysis of the social and spatial structure of the city of Curitiba, using data from the latest population censuses. The research was based on household income, which was used to identify five income groups. The index of dissimilarity was then used to measure the degree of segregation for each group. Racial segregation was measured using the index of segregation and the index of dissimilarity for the largest racial minorities in Curitiba: whites (brancos), blacks (pretos), mixed-race (pardos), Asians (amarelos). The spatial concentration of income and racial groups was measured using a modified location quotient. The above data were used along with other demographic and social statistics to provide a comprehensive picture of Curitiba’s racial, economic, and spatial issues.