Onde o campo encontra a cidade: a vida nos agroecossistemas de um assentamento periurbano

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the peri-urban condition, shaped by the presence, absence, and mediation of the state, influences social reproduction and the ability of families to remain in the Araras IV settlement, in Araras, São Paulo. It seeks to understand how families perceive state action in agrarian, agricultural, and universal social policies, to investigate the socio-productive dynamics of family agroecosystems, and to analyze the emotions associated with everyday life in the settlement. The research combines family interviews, a focus group, georeferenced drone imagery, spatial analysis of land use, socio-productive flow mapping, sentiment analysis, and exploratory clustering of emotional profiles. The findings show that the peri-urban condition selectively expands access to services, infrastructure, mobility, and direct marketing, without leading to institutional recognition of the settlement’s specific characteristics. In agrarian policy, the state formally recognizes and regulates the territory but fails to consolidate the material and political conditions required for permanence. In agricultural policy, it operates through selective and standardized instruments that shift onto families the costs of the disconnect between credit, technical assistance, infrastructure, and markets. In universal social policy, access depends on partial arrangements linked to urban proximity. At the socio-productive level, agroecosystems are organized through a multifunctional logic centered on agroforestry home gardens, living fences, animal husbandry, self-provisioning, and informal marketing, revealing relative autonomy alongside partial dependence on external inputs. At the subjective level, sadness and fear are associated with pluriactivity, rural aging, climate instability, and fragile cooperative structures, while confidence and joy are linked to intergenerational succession, access to schooling, animal husbandry, secure housing, and financial stability. The dissertation concludes that the peri-urban condition shapes permanence in contradictory ways: it expands opportunities for social reproduction, mobility, and family continuity, while intensifying pressure on land use, rising land values, land commodification, and the limits of productive autonomy, thereby exposing the inadequacy of public policies designed around a rigid rural–urban divide.