Brazilian cities reveal contradictions concerning the development of their environmental sensitive spaces. If, in one hand, private developers appropriate some ecosystems in order to foster real estate profits, on the other hand, the association between urban precariousness and environmental degradation is recurrent. This paper establishes relations between this two contrasting processes of appropriation of ecological sensitive spaces, with a critical perspective about Brazilian urban environmental legislation. It adopts as a central question, the role of environmental attributes in determining real estate prices, influencing the possibility of low-income population in affording the urbanized space. In disregarding such aspect, legal instruments for controlling land development present a partial understanding of urban socio-environmental dyna mics, failing to achieve their goals of environmental protection and urban inclusion. In one hand, environmental regulations suggest a restrictive development pattern making it impossible to meet the huge low-income housing demand; on the other hand, the regularization policies accepts the development of environment sensitive ecosystems, because they are the most viable spaces: they tend to have low prices due to their physical attributes. In order to support such line of thought the paper studies a specific territory, Metropolitan Region of Fortaleza, adopting methods of spatial overlay using environmental, socioeconomic and urban data.
Urban Illegality; Environmental Degradation; Fortaleza