Social Vulnerability in the Metropolitan Context: The Case of Campinas

Jose Marcos Pinto da Cunha, Universidade Estadual de Campinas
Alberto A.E. Jakob, Universidade Estadual de Campinas
Daniel Joseph Hogan, Universidade Estadual de Campinas
Roberto L. Carmo, Universidade Estadual de Campinas

One of the consequences of socio-demographic and economic changes in Brazil in recent decades is the diversity of population movements and of human settlements, as well as the consolidation of a pattern of urban expansion characterized by social, demographic, economic and environmental differentiation and segmentation, low quality of urban life and territorial sprawl, with phenomena such as conurbation, demographic deconcentration and peripheralization. In this paper we present a new form of analysis of the spatial heterogeneity of the families and households of the municipality of Campinas. From the perspective of the concept of social vulnerability, we seek to understand the sources of individual and family differentiation in terms of the inability to respond and adapt to daily risks. A division of the city in “vulnerability zones” is presented, based on the Brazilian Census of 2000, which permits us to identify how inhabitants mobilize non-material resources to respond to risk