Estrutura econômica e mercado de trabalho

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.

Over the past few decades, the desire of residents on urban peripheries in Brazil to have their own businesses has grown. Consequently, several authors have critically pointed out the advance of neoliberal ideas among the urban popular classes. In this article I discuss the origins of this ‘entrepreneurial disposition’ and its relationship with neoliberal discourse that seeks to encourage ‘entrepreneurialism of oneself’. The analysis presented in this article is based on ethnographic research carried out among entrepreneurial workers on the outskirts of São Paulo through in-depth interviews focusing on life histories and participant observation in strategic spaces (online and in person) during 2020 and 2021. I explore adherence and opposition to and resignification of neoliberal entrepreneurial ideology from different cultural and material backgrounds by retelling the history of five entrepreneurs from three different families. I argue that rather than neoliberal ideas being an ideological conviction, they are embedded in social practices that are quite common in the periphery of São Paulo. Therefore, they should be analysed in the light of these previously existing practices and moralities. From a peripheral point of view, ethnographic analysis also allows us to examine the limits of this embeddedness and shed light on possible forms of resistance.

This article explores the strategic importance of information systems for social control of networked services on urban and regional scales, and the nature of the information required for that purpose. The standard indicators of infrastructure coverage – by and large based on the number and encompassment of connections – no longer respond to the real conditions of supply and consumption. The technological and managerial innovations in flow control and dispatch, along with the effects of combined access to multi-mode networks, render the evaluation of services’ connectivity considerably more complex than it used to be in the past. Private domination over the supply structure of these services tends to make the political struggle for equitability more dependent on the technical reliability of information than it could have been under the model of state supply. Networked services’ management has evolved to a more demand-oriented structure, but this structure has so far reproduced the structural inequalities of Brazilian society in favor of powerful stakeholders, e.g. large consumers. The potential for more democratic control associated with this new balance between supply and demand in networked services can only evolve if more vulnerable social groups have access to sound technological and managerial information. To support this idea the article shows the importance of connectivity indicators in determining the effective access to networked utilities in the Metropolitan Area of São Paulo, in contrast to the traditional indicators of services’ coverage.

Recent decades have seen a rising interest in the peripheral nature of urbanization processes. While research has put the spotlight on large-scale, transnational and financialized real estate actors, less attention has been paid to informal land developers. Addressing that knowledge gap, this article underscores the key role of land developers in informal urbanization through a case study of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. A mixed-methods approach provides new evidence of the widespread, variegated and spatially uneven development of irregular and clandestine subdivisions over the last two decades, revealing a heterogeneous landscape of informal developers. The study shows that informal development has been shifting from the typical popular and peripheral subdivision, which provided precarious yet affordable housing for working-class families, to new forms of speculative investment for the middle and upper classes, such as country homes and gated communities in peri-urban and rural areas. I argue that this shift is explained by both national and local changing regulatory frameworks and processes of economic restructuring, urban neoliberalism and housing financialization in the periphery. In light of this, I propose the notion of ‘property-led informality’ to refer to a regime of informal urbanization increasingly dominated by commodified, rentiership and speculative land dynamics in the sprawling metropolises of the global South.

This article considers processes of urban development within the context of mega-event preparations in Rio de Janeiro. We begin with a brief overview of these development processes, highlighting their connections to political and economic change in recent years. Proponents of these mega-event-led initiatives argue that Rio is undergoing a period of inclusive growth and integration: a perspective we call here a ‘post-Third-World city' narrative of urban renewal. Critics, however, contend that urban officials are harnessing mega-events (e.g. the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games) to push forward a neoliberal agenda of socially unjust policies benefiting the interests of capital and marginalizing the city's poor and especially its favelas (i.e. the ‘city-of-exception' thesis). In this article we explore the insights of these two perspectives and consider why they have grown popular in recent years. Though we side generally with the city-of-exception thesis, we argue that important geographic and historical particularities must also be accounted for. Without carefully situating analytical perspectives empirically—in particular, cases in which theoretical models are drawn from European and North American contexts—urban researchers risk concealing more than they reveal in analyses of rapidly developing countries like Brazil.

Suburban shrinkage, understood as a degenerative urban process stemming from the demise of the Fordist mode of urbanism, is generally manifested in a decline in population, industry and employment. It is also intimately linked to the global restructuring of industrial organization associated with the rise of the post-Fordist mode of urbanism and, more recently, the thrust of Asian industrialization. Framed in the discourse of industrial urbanism, this article examines the first ring of industrial suburbs that developed around large cities in their most rapid Fordist urbanization phase. These industrial suburbs, although they were formed at different times, are today experiencing specific mutations and undergoing profound restructuring on account of their particular spatial position between the central area and the expanding peripheries of the post-Fordist metropolis. This article describes and compares suburban decline in two European cities (Glasgow and Paris) and two Latin American Cities (São Paulo, Brazil and Guadalajara, Mexico), as different instances of places asymmetrically and fragmentarily integrated into the geography of globalization.

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.