Estrutura econômica e mercado de trabalho

Cities have long been enmeshed in global economic and cultural networks, so the challenge is to differentiate what is distinctive in the current processes of globalization from long-standing trends. The major cities of Latin America have played an important role in global economic and political organization since the conquest of the Americas by Spain and Portugal. In Spanish America, cities such as Mexico City and Lima were important rodes in the organization both of transatlantic and transpacific trade. They were also essential elements in ordering the internal economies of the Spanish colonies so that these could contribute to the global economy (Morse, 1971). Other cities, such as Guanajua to in Mexico or Potosi in the viceroyalty of Peru performed specialized and subordinate roles within the urban hierarchy of the colonies as sites of mining and manufacturing. In Brazil, the cities were equally important in organizing the participation of the colony in the global economy of the day. Indeed, the unity of Brazil was, to a certain extent, maintained in the face of centrifugal forces by the trade and communication between its major coastal cities. With independence, the new countries of Latin America were configured around the major cities and around the economic and political projects of the elites that dominated those cities. 

Debates on global South urbanization have been an important focus of recent urban studies scholarship. Looking at the urban South from the point of view of the Latin American context, this article highlights a missing piece of the economic viewpoint in such debates: the instability that shapes the peripheral economies with which Southern urban dynamics interact. The article argues that this higher level of economic volatility is an important factor in many urban/sociospatial dynamics in Latin America—hence indispensable for an accurate theoretical understanding of the specificities of its cities and urban processes. The applicability of the idea for other regions of the global South is a hypothesis in need of verification and may involve important implications for current urban research. Moreover, I propose that the geographical approaches to precarity may be enhanced with the dimension of economic volatility, which is usually more intense in precarious (urban) contexts.

The following article identifies two different urban policy regimes in Latin America —neoliberal and socialist — and traces their origins to the distinct interests and capacities of local elites and activists in the region’s cities in the mid-to-late twentieth century. While agricultural and commercial interests paid a high price for the growth ofimport-substituting industrialization, and therefore deployed free trade zones (andsimilar institutions) in traditional export centers in the 1960s and 1970s, their industrialrivals bore the brunt of austerity and adjustment in the free market era, and therefore adopted compensatory measures designed to increase the ‘social wage’ in the 1980s and1990s. Examples are drawn from municipalities in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela, and call the conventional portrait of impotent LatinAmerican cities — and omnipotent central governments — into question.

Using the experience of metropolitan Rio de Janeiro, this article contributes to the broader debate on development regimes, rescaling and state spatial restructuring in Brazil, and its specificities in relation to the international discussion on the transformations in Atlantic Fordism. I argue that the transition from a (peripheral) development state to a competitive and rescaled regime has been accompanied by important continuities. Legitimized through discourses around development poles and trickle-down effects, the national-developmental regime has systematically promoted some spaces as opposed to others, without much emphasis on the social and environmental dimensions of spatial policies. The emerging competitive state spatial regime, whether in its neoliberalized, or its more recent ‘rolled-out’ national-developmental version, is merely expected to aggravate the historical socio-environmental contradictions in the production of space. Moreover, scale has proven contested and strategic-relational, both molding and being influenced by actors that seek to use scalar politics to reach their interests. My analysis suggests that, within this scenario, neither economic growth, nor regulatory and institutional strengthening, nor financial resources are likely to produce structural transformation in the inherited spaces of Greater Rio de Janeiro.

Over the last two decades, numerous international conferences and organizations have espoused managing water as an economic good, involving participatory forums in systems of decentralized management at the river-basin level. In the 1990s, Brazil adopted such a model. More than a simple transfer of power from the national to the local level or from bureaucratic to deliberative decision-making, however, this process requires multi-directional power transfers among a variety of policy arenas and actors and among national, state, municipal and river-basin institutions, as well as a complex — and ongoing — negotiation over the meanings of both water pricing and participation. Focusing on the politics of reform legislation in the state of São Paulo and nationally, the article examines how political-institutional features of federalism and executive-legislative relations constrained the passage of reform legislation, and how pro-reform actors attempted to surmount such institutional limitations with networking strategies and by fostering incremental changes in practices on the ground.

This article deals with the state policies of urban infrastructure in São Paulo, Brazil, from 1975 to 2000. Working with primary information about the investments made by the state in public works, we discuss a series of arguments present in the urban studies literature about the patterns of state investment in urban spaces and propose an alternative explanation for state action in Brazilian urban spaces in recent decades. We analyze the main elements that have influenced the overall pattern of investments, describe the main characteristics of this policy over time and in each of the municipal governments of the period, as well as develop an evaluation of the spatial distribution of the resources among each of the main social groups in the city.

This article discusses the changes taking place in the Brazilian vehicle assembly industry of the 1990s with particular reference to the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It focuses upon a case study of Volkswagen’s bus and truck assembly plant, opened in 1996, and its workers at Resende. The experience of the `modular system’ of production has been presented as a major development in vehicle assembly. The article analyses the originality of VW’s new form of organization of production and the strategy of the firm to look for localities with weak labour unionism. It also argues that despite the difficulties the local union faced in its attempts to intervene in the process of wage bargaining and to influence the management of aspects of production, there has been a rapid process of mobilizing the new workers for effective labour union action.

After defaulting on their foreign-debt obligations in the 1980s, several Latin American countries had to restructure their economies to boost market-led growth. Some of the ensuing housing reforms promoted mortgage expansion and masshousing production. Mexico was among the first countries to follow this logic, and in aparticularly aggressive manner. Credit liberalization allowed a handful of real estate firms to experience massive expansions in their operations in the 2000s as they were able to build lower-middle-income housing at an accelerated rate by accessing public, pension and private equity funds. Brazil eventually appropriated some aspects of the Mexican housing model, but not others. In the late 2000s, Brazil began providing deep subsidies to low-income households to connect the private supply of housing with apublicly subsidized demand. This article discusses, challenges and moves beyond prior analyses of these processes by contrasting the two countries’ housing finance models and examining the more recent (2010s) evolution and normative shifts in their housing and urban development policy agendas. Despite the direct policy transfer between the two contexts, the South-South comparative analysis presented in the article highlights the fluctuating and unstable nature of financialization processes given the varied inclination of national governments to manage, promote or restrict them, or to contain or accentuate capitalist crises and their implications.

This essay explores the reasons for the reduced negative effects of the 2008 global financial crisis on Brazil and its cities by applying an analysis that connects these urban effects with the national dynamics. Despite substantial variation within the country, reduced impact can be credited to the response to the crisis by the current Lula administration and to features of the country’s urbanization process. First, universal redistributive social programmes, together with an enlarged domestic market, better insertion in the global economy, prudential regulation and a stable fiscal situation, have put the country in a comfortable position to react to the crisis by adopting countercyclical policies. Second, given the advanced urbanization in Brazil, social and active macroeconomic policies have produced decisive and specific effects on the urban fabric. Recent processes of in land urbanization have created new areas of regional and urban dynamics, thus the impact of the crisis on cities has not only been mild, affecting the most industrialized and internationally oriented metropolises hardest, but has also become an opportunity for strengthening urban areas through active macroeconomic and social policies and helping foster a more decentralized national urban network, thereby leading to stronger links between social inclusion and territorial cohesion.

Since the mid-1990s, Brazil has become one of the main recipients of foreign direct investment in the automobile sector. As in the late 1950s and early 1960s, world car manufacturers are investing heavily in the building of new car plants. The renewed interest of car companies in Brazil is a result of the huge and expanding internal market and the relatively stable macroeconomic panorama of the mid-1990s. However, and in contrast to what happened in the 1950s and 1960s, most new car plants are being located outside the São Paulo metropolitan area, the traditional hub of the Brazilian motor industry. Although some argue that, among other reasons, this is the result of lower labour costs elsewhere in Brazil and of improved infrastructure in the country, this article aims to demonstrate that the recent decentralization of the Brazilian motor industry is basically linked to perverse territorial competition among Brazilian states. This sort of territorial competition – known in Brazil as the ‘fiscal wars’– represents a pure waste of resources, both for the states engaged in them, as well as for Brazil as a whole.