TERRITORY’S USES AND POTIGUAR URBAN NETWORK
Urban network. Hierarchy. Territory’s use. Technical-scientific-informational. Rio Grande do Norte.
The Rio Grande do Norte’s urban network has been restructured without any current deadline for changes related to the expansion of transportation and telecommunications engineering systems. For the dissemination of modern productive forms, in addition to the polarized regions, as well as the distribution of retail commercial networks and non-material forms of production, such as banking, cards and educational services. As the new uses of the state territory are realized, they increase the complexity of the urban network configuration. In this sense, our goal is to understand the urban network of Rio Grande do Norte in the technical-scientific-informational period, understanding that the advancement of this new way in the territory promotes its restructuring due to the superposition of networks that breaks any logic based on a rigid hierarchy. In order to do so, we sought to know the set of materialities and geographically actions in the state territory, from the diffusion of the technical-scientific-informational means, especially from the 1990s, as well as to understand the main changes occurred in the state territory from that period, Identifying and analyzing the main networks that cohabit and restructure the urban network in this period of time. The analyzes allowed us to consider that the changes occurred in the urban network from the technical-scientific-informational mean are of several orders and make it increasingly complex and differentiated. Previously, we could observe a network of interactions between the cities of the state that for a good part of the activities, even those more daily ones, maintained a situation of dependence in relation to the centers that exerted some level of centrality. In the current context, the Rio Grande do Norte’s territory use, given a certain density of technique, science and information, keeps the classic hierarchy in some networks, but coexist with these, networks with diverse hierarchies, whose flows are redirected even to local cities. Thus, as cities of Rio Grande do Norte participate in more than one network and in different scales simultaneously, with different functions and roles in each one of them.