Economia

With about 12 million inhabitants, São Paulo, Brazil, is the largest city in South America. As in many other major southern hemisphere cities, this extreme concentration of people imposes a number of mobility and security challenges. The objective of this article was to investigate the space-time patterns of mobility and violent victimisation in São Paulo’s metro stations from a gender perspective. The methodology combines use of a Geographical Information System (GIS), statistical analysis through negative binomial regression modelling and hypothesis testing. Results indicate that mobility and the level of victimisation are gender dependent. Women are at higher risk of victimisation than men in São Paulo’s central metro station, while men run higher risk of violence at end stations – both notably during late night periods. The presence of employees reduces the risk of violence, except during the mornings. The article suggests that crime prevention initiatives need to be gender informed and sensitive to the particular spatial and temporal features of rapid transit environments.

Emerging from the citizen movements of the early 2010s, New Municipalism merges the administrative capacity of municipal government with the organizational capacities of activists and social movements to build more equal, just and ecological local economies. In these contexts, Digital Municipal Currencies (DMCs) emerge as potent instruments of counter-hegemonic struggle, enabling cities to implement welfare policies and local economic revitalization. However, a trans-local paradox inheres to New Municipalism: how to remain local yet advance broader systemic transformation? This study compares three DMCs in Rio de Janeiro, addressing the paradox by introducing the notion of ‘standardized malleability’. It describes how cities adopt a uniform monetary infrastructure while adapting policies to local contexts, thus balancing local adaptation with trans-local scalability. The study reveals how the temporal dynamics of multi-scalar transformation shape the adoption patterns of DMCs across municipalities – from radical pioneer experiences to more pragmatic implementations – demonstrating that system change occurs through ‘repeated instances’ regardless of ideological orientation. Findings reveal DMCs as promising instruments for urban governance, enabling progressive policies amid financial constraints. However, their long-term viability depends on stable funding sources, prompting discussions on evolving DMC designs to enhance sustainability and wider adoption. The article ends with a reinterpretation of what constitutes ‘the political’ in multi-scalar transformation processes, from ‘radicalism’ to a shift of the boundaries of what is considered possible and the creation of new democratic spaces for co-governance.

The paper builds on the results of Clark and Stabler who associated Gibrat's law on the independence of growth rate and city size with unit root tests. The paper proposes a direct test of the unit root hypothesis for firm size based on recently developed panel data unit root tests. The results for a sample of Brazilian cities over the period 1980-2000 favour Gibrat's law. Moreover, the results are robust when one considers sub-samples defined for different population sizes and age of municipality.

Financialisation and housing are predominantly associated to mortgages for homeownership and securitisation techniques. This paper looks at how financial markets influence the development industry, its business strategies, and the nature and location of its products. Adopting a supply-side account, the paper inquires into the rising role of financial markets as a source of funding for a consolidating development industry and its influence on the geography of housing in Brazilian cities. It develops the concept of resonance by combining two yet unrelated strands of literature on the study of financial markets (cultural economy and conventionalist economics). Narratives co-authored by the stock market community and development firms management over each individual firm, and the discursively linked strategic moves of developers, are shown to resonate, at the meso-level of the industry, into shared social representations (or conventions) on how to best assess and interpret the value of development firms. Analysing the wave of Initial Public Offerings occurring in the mid 2000s, the paper highlights that narratives of quick capital gains associated with the removal of the land banking bottleneck faced by developers supported a convention giving priority to the growth in total output, and contributed to the observed changes in the forms, scales and locations of housing projects in Brazilian cities. As discrepancies between the promises of returns for shareholders and actual financial results emerged, the growth convention unravelled, making way for other narratives and strategic moves to resonate anew and possibly change again the geographies of housing.

This essay discusses some key ideas and debates about urban studies in Brazil, considered historiographically, from the mid-1900s to the present. It presents the main components and particularities of what emerges as the Brazilian matrix of urban studies, interrogating the most influential work in the field with the country’s own experiences of industrialisation and urbanisation. It discusses some key urban debates of the 21st century, namely new planning models associated with globalisation, global mega-events, public–private partnerships, inner-city gentrification, housing and city financialisation, rising forms of urban warfare and social control in slums (favelas), and new activisms and urban insurgencies. Through this analysis, we point to contradictions and tensions in relation to European and North American urban theory, calling for the need to formulate new categories and hypotheses to better understand the unequal and extreme processes resulting from violent expansion of capitalist relations over the entire planet, and comment on the new practices and forms of social mobilisation emerging from turbulent contexts.

The literature on urban financialisation has prioritised the analysis of what finance does in the context of industrialised countries. This paper contributes to an understanding of what it is, and specifically how it emerges from the entanglements between the accumulation of intergovernmental debt, pricing and valuation practices – involving state and municipal utilities, regulatory agencies and consultancies – in the gradual transformation of shared into shareholder water governance in Brazilian metropolitan areas. Moreover, we provide a first illustration of how a more articulate approach between political economics and social studies of finance might contribute to an understanding of the making of urban financialisation, with a particular relevance for a context of less developed capital markets.

This article analyses the influence of both contextual and individual urban characteristics on violence victimisation in Brazilian cities. A multilevel approach is used to capture the effects of the urban contextual variables with respect to the probability of becoming a robbery victim in Brazilian urban centres. The results demonstrate that factors associated with social context, such as proportions of cities’ recent migrants or female-headed households, affect victimisation, as do individual characteristics. Furthermore, based on an analysis of the intra-class correlation coefficients, the context produces a non-negligible amount of variability.

The financialization of housing has been increasingly identified as an important driver of social and economic change in contemporary capitalism. Focusing on the Brazilian context, this article considers the extent to which recent changes in housing regulations, policies and markets confirm or challenge narratives about the financialization of housing in the international academic debate. I argue that while many of the trends stressed in the literature are apparent, more extreme processes of financialization within the Brazilian housing sector remain limited––not only because of institutional and regulatory constraints, path dependence or political resistance, but also because of fundamental structural conditions of Brazil's position as a peripheral economy. Three different but mutually reinforcing processes are scrutinized in order to evaluate the financialization of housing and its limits in Brazil: the re-regulation of the real estate financial sector initiated in the 1990s; the changing funding patterns among real estate companies since the mid-2000s; and the increasing commodification of housing induced by a large-scale and heavily subsidized housing program launched in 2009.

This paper examines the systems of social relations underpinning the late 1980s’ office boom in São Paulo, Brazil. Using ‘institutionalist’ approaches to provide an empirical examination of these systems, it focuses on the nature of the dominant agents and their strategies, the linkages that allow them to perform their functions, and the relative position and power of the agents in the production and use of built structures. The paper tries to situate these systems in their economic and social environment and to point to the connections between socially constructed property markets, their environment, and the characteristics and outcomes of the property boom. In doing so, it aims to cast some light on the processes through which a mix of economic, social and cultural impulses, of global and a local origins, are related to the structures of provision of offices in the context of São Paulo and lead to the production of specific forms of built environment.