Raça, renda e (in)justiça ambiental nas cidades médias brasileiras

Abstract

This study examines how race, income, and environmental injustice intersect in the production of space in Brazilian intermediate cities, highlighting how colonial and slaveholding legacies continue to shape socio-environmental inequalities. Grounded in historical-dialectical materialism, the research combines geospatial analysis (GIS), statistical methods, and qualitative interpretation to investigate census data on income distribution, race, and access to basic sanitation services, water supply, sewage, and waste collection, across 92 intermediate cities, defined as those with urban populations between 100,000 and 500,000 inhabitants. The findings demonstrate that historically rooted processes such as structural racism and land concentration are materially expressed in patterns of socio-spatial segregation and in the unequal provision of public services, disproportionately affecting poorer populations, predominantly Black and Brown. Conversely, higher-income groups, more frequently associated with the white population, tend to occupy urban sectors with better infrastructure and lower exposure to environmental risks. The study thus reveals how capitalist dynamics shape urban space through the financialization of land, consolidating an “invisible apartheid” between central and peripheral areas and reproducing environmental injustices in cities of intermediate size. By showing that inequalities widely documented in large metropolitan areas are also reproduced, albeit at different scales, in intermediate cities, the research underscores the importance of understanding the territorialization of inequality and advancing public policies capable of confronting colonial legacies. It concludes that the effective democratization of these cities depends on addressing structural racism and expanding access to land rights and urban infrastructure, both central dimensions of environmental justice.