The center is still the center

The context of the growth of the city of Londrina-PR, associated with the new arrangements of its intra-urban organization in recent decades, has led to interest in researching the center and its role in the decentralization process. In general, current circumstances show that urbanization has evidenced a process with trends toward greater complexity in its spatial organization, especially since the end of the 20th century. In this sense, the city center, which previously stood out for its unique presence, has become linked to other centers, and its function is no longer restricted to being a hub that converges infrastructure, flows, and the tertiary sector. This center, understood as the main center in the urban structure, also assumes a representative condition of the city, given its attributes: sectoral and territorial scope, greater diversity of activities, accessibility, nodality, in addition to the fact that the center is a plural space that is difficult to be dominated by social classes, but also the location of monuments, local history, and a concentration of symbolic values.