Banca de DEFESA: MATHEUS OLIVEIRA MARTINS DA SILVA

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : MATHEUS OLIVEIRA MARTINS DA SILVA
DATE: 27/02/2026
TIME: 08:30
LOCAL: Remota
TITLE:

FROM NATURAL FLUIDITY TO TECHNICAL RIGIDITY: THE USE OF TERRITORY IN THE AMAZONIAN CITY OF BICYCLES

KEY WORDS:

Used territory; Amazon; Bicycle; Technique; Fluidity.

PAGES: 282
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: Geografia
SUBÁREA: Geografia Humana
SPECIALTY: Geografia Urbana
SUMMARY:

This thesis investigates the bicycle as a central mediation in the use of territory in the city of Afuá, located in the Marajó Archipelago, in the state of Pará, within the Amazonian floodplain. The research adopts historical-dialectical materialism as a methodological orientation and uses Milton Santos’ concept of used territory as a fundamental category for understanding the relationships between technique, nature, and everyday life. It assumes that Afuá can only be understood through the totality of determinations that shape its singularity: the floodplain environment and its cyclical inundations, the urbanization sustained by stilt houses and wooden walkways, the persistence of riverine practices, the selectivity of technical systems that reach the Amazon, and the ways of life that combine extractivism with corporeality-based forms of fluidity. In this context, the bicycle is not analyzed as a simple functional artifact nor as an emblem of sustainable mobility discourse, but as a technical object that reveals broader contradictions between technique and the material conditions of fluidity. The centrality of this object in Afuá does not emerge from structured urban policies, but from the historical articulation among the constraints imposed by the floodplain, the available technical systems, socio-spatial inequalities, and riverine strategies of coping with and reinventing everyday life. Thus, the bicycle simultaneously constitutes a form of adaptation and an expression of rationalities that produce specific rhythms and trajectories, often in conflict with the hegemonic logic of speed and accelerated fluidity characteristic of modernity. Methodologically, the thesis combines documentary, bibliographic, and cartographic analysis with statistical data and fieldwork. This approach requires correlating structural processes such as development policies, the expansion of motorization, and technical selectivity with the everyday practices that render the use of territory intelligible as a social construction. The bicycle structures work practices, regulates urban time, translates specific forms of sociability, and orients modes of territorial use that differ from other urban rationalities. It is argued that Afuá does not represent an idealized alternative model, but rather a form of territorial use in which natural, technical, and social fluidity is continuously reinvented through riverine life. The analysis of the bicycle, therefore, becomes a key to understanding the specificity of floodplain urbanization and, more broadly, to rethinking the relationship between technique, territory, and ways of life in the Amazon and in Brazil as a whole.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Interno - ***.978.969-** - NILSON CESAR FRAGA - UFPR
Interna - 2666681 - MARIA MADALENA DE AGUIAR CAVALCANTE
Interno - 396900 - JOSUE DA COSTA SILVA
Externa à Instituição - JANAINA ZITO LOSADA - UFSB
Externo à Instituição - FERNANDO LUIZ ARAUJO SOBRINHO - UnB
Externa à Instituição - MARIA ADÉLIA DE SOUZA - USP
Externo à Instituição - JOÃO LUÍS JESUS FERNANDES - UC