Estrutura econômica e mercado de trabalho

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.

With this study we join the conversation on housing aspirations from a Brazilian perspective, which is marked by coexisting formal and informal markets, investigating how market- driven narratives and socioeconomic factors shape these aspirations across generations in urban areas. We surveyed middle-class individuals and applied exploratory factor analysis alongside intergenerational comparisons, and our findings reveal that, despite the growing prevalence of renting as a response to market constraints, homeownership persists as a predominant aspiration, particularly for long-term security. The concept of aspirational postponement emerges as a key framework, illustrating how temporary adaptations to renting do not supplant the enduring desire for property ownership. Moreover, this research introduces the experience effect, wherein older generations recognize the practical advantages of apartments over houses, based on lived housing arrangements, and the adjustment effect, which reflects the tempering of idealistic aspirations among younger generations owing to financial and practical constraints. By situating Brazilian housing dynamics within a global context, we highlight the interplay of structural inequalities, cultural norms and generational preferences to offer perspectivesfor housing policy frameworks in developing economies.

This article compares two cases of displacement suffered by informal workers and informal residents in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, both connected to the hosting of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. It asks the following question: considering that the right to work and the right to housing are both enshrined in the Brazilian Constitution, why do claims upon space based on those constitutional rights have different degrees of legitimacy? Two cases are analysed in detail. The first one concerns a group of informal workers displaced from their workspace for the modernization of the local stadium. The second one tells the story of an informal settlement where 90 families were displaced due to the construction of a flyover designed to improve access to the football stadium. This article engages with current postcolonial debates around urban informality, tackling two points that have been absent from these discussions. First, it compares two ways of informally occupying urban space—for work and for housing—revealing the distinct degrees of legitimacy embedded in such practices due to pre-existing institutional arrangements. Second, it emphasizes the connection between work and home through the life strategies and place-making practices of the urban poor.

One of the main factors of imbalance in the urban development of cities is undoubtedly their growth rate. In this sense, one of the main characteristics of rural-urban migration phenomena that have shaped the development of megacities in developing countries has been the need to integrate a large mass of people through processes of rapid growth of its urban plot. In this paper the growth of five different cities in Latin America is analyzed from the perspective of the impact of these processes of transformation in the urban landscape, describing different levels of pathology in their development. Consumption of periurban space, cityscape misconfiguration, or the longterm sustainability of these processes of transformation are complex issues that need to be addressed from a rigorous and technical perspective. These variables will be subject to GIS evaluation and diagnosis by territorial indicators in order to establish patterns of behaviour.