TEMPORAL ANALYSIS OF URBAN EXPANSION IN THE MUNICIPALITIES OF THE PARAÍBA PAULISTA VALLEY

ABSTRACT This study investigates the President Dutra Highway, inaugurated in the 1950s, and its influence on the urbanization process of the Paraíba Paulista Valley. Supported on the findings of Villaça (2001), which point to regional roads as urbanization routes, the President Dutra Highway has taken on a primary role for the growth of cities. In the 1970s, the President Dutra Highway was an important vector of the process of industrial relocation from the Greater São Paulo (LENCIONI, 1998). More recently, the President Dutra Highway was again pointed to in the proposals for the adoption of Territorial Vectors in the State of São Paulo. By means of axial maps, the temporal analysis aimed to explore urban expansion and the urban regional road system. To this end, topographical charts created for the year 1977 and the database of urban roads existing in 2015, obtained from the Open Street Map (OSM) project were used. The cartography resulting from the integration index of the urban roads provided a spatial view of the intra-urban road system revealing indications of a dispersed urbanization process, thus evidencing the President Dutra Highway as a structuring element of the urban-regional space in the Paraíba Paulista Valley.