Infraestrutura urbana, serviços urbanos e equipamentos coletivos

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 considers the politics of resettlement within ongoing efforts to construct the Tietê River Valley Park (Parque Várzeas do Tietê), a linear park that upon completion will be the largest linear park in the world. Located in the eastern periphery of São Paulo, Brazil, the proposed project uses riverbank naturalization to dampen floodpeaks and bring green space to underserved populations. Due to the presence of low-income neighborhoods on the river's edge, however, the project calls for the removal of roughly 40,000 people. Drawing from urban political ecology and contemporary concerns about environmentally induced displacement, I consider the conflicts over resettlement that mark the project. I analyze the project itself and situate it within a regional context defined by autoconstruction, regularized flooding, and insecure tenure. I argue that despite claims that the project will yield less risky lives for displaced residents, the form through which the project is being developed actually puts displaced residents in heightened situations of risk. I consider how communities have organized to resist displacement, and call for an approach to governance in peripheral landscapes that takes seriously the histories of collective infrastructural provisioning and autoconstructed housing that have marked them for decades.

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.

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.

A majority of people now live in cities. Countries need to accommodate such a rapidly growing urban population, which is often living and working informally, and which is lacking access to decent working and living conditions. By integrating economic promotion policies with social protection instruments public policies not only mitigate the effects of social risks on poverty, particularly in low-income settlements, but also create the necessary conditions to allow the poor to work out of poverty. Some international organizations including the International Labour Office (ILO) consider that low-income countries can afford a basic package of social benefits. In face of growing informalization of the labour force worldwide, universal and targeted social cash transfers to poor people, which are not related to their employment status, are contributing today to curb poverty and reduce inequality in a number of developing countries. But, for poor people in petty jobs, poor housing and living conditions, social and economic rights are indivisible. Case studies show how social protection and local development in urban areas can be combined to achieve progressive universal coverage. These studies provide evidence that workers and families, who need to secure and enhance their vulnerable household economies, can largely benefit from measures that aim to extend further the reach of social protection. A major challenge lies in breaking down the conceptual and administrative barriers that artificially oppose economic development and social protection, in order to reduce the costs of the access to productive and basic social services and remove hurdles to local development in urban areas.

Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSWM) is a challenging issue for low-income countries, impacting on the environment, socio-economic, health, aesthetics and infrastructure, due to the generated volume of wastes, treatment and disposal methods. This challenge is often impacted by the transitioning of MSWM from mostly unsustainable methods to a sustainable level. A meaningful MSWM transition requires an understanding and consideration of historical developments and common themes. This paper reviews the common themes limiting MSWM sustainability in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries as well as the historical transition of MSWM to a sustainable level in some high-income countries (United States, Japan, Denmark, and Australia). The study focuses on the interaction of MSWM with technology systems, related environmental issues, socioeconomic factors, influence on policy and decision making. The objective of the paper is to develop a holistic MSWM framework to address the prevailing issues, by systematic analysis of related and relevant literatures. The key MSWM findings drawn from the BRIC countries in this study is used to develop a thematic framework, underpinned by the different interacting factors of policy; environmental; socio-economic; and technology (PEST). The PEST thematic framework presents an adaptable systematic tool to policy and decision makers towards improving MSWM in low-income countries.

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) as the emerging leading powers in the world have great influence on the world development. Urbanization process has been a significant engine for development in these countries, which has important effect on the sustainable development globally. However, rapid urbanization has induced various problems, such as air pollution, traffic congestion, habitat destruction, and loss of arable land. These problems present the threats to the sustainable development of urbanization in these countries. This paper presents an evaluation on the dynamic sustainability performance during urbanization process in these countries by applying an elastic coefficient method and a new-type McKinsey matrix. The data used for analysis are collected from World Bank database for the period of 1990-2011. The findings from this study suggest that during the surveyed period the Brazil, Russia and India have been engaging a sustainable urbanization practice, whilst the urbanization processes in China and South Africa are unsustainable. The study provides valuable reference in searching for solutions to further promote sustainable urbanization practice globally.

Around the end of 2019, in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 were identified, and from then on, the world we were used to knowing changed globally. The role of population density, in relation to the spread of the pandemic, has been widely scrutinised in urban studies, believed to be the triggering variable. However, the results so far are inconclusive. This paper suggests instead to shift the focus to sociospatial vulnerabilities, as the effects of the pandemic’s spread have been more severe in urban units which feature long-standing inequalities. The paper’s aim is, therefore, twofold: on the one hand it aims at contributing to the debate on population density and COVID-19 in urban areas, and, on the other hand, to analyse the pandemic’s spread in relation to socio-spatial vulnerabilities. Different cities across the globe are drawn into a comparative project, where the pandemic’s spread is analysed in relation to variables of Population Density (PD) and a Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), by employing correlation matrices. The results suggest that there is no significant correlation between density and the spread of COVID-19. Instead, a positive correlation is in place when analysing the pandemic’s diffusion with socio-spatial inequalities.

This paper analyses trends in the living conditions of slum and non-slum populations over the period 1990–2003, using urban and slum indicators from several developing world cities. It explains why where a person lives might condition his/her general health and household vulnerability. The data used are from UN-Habitat’s Global Urban Observatory database for 188 cities belonging to 8 different Millennium Development Goals Regions. The study provides evidence of a general improvement in various slum indicators, such as durable structures, access to safe water and access to improved sanitation. However, although there has been a decrease in under-5 mortality at city level, we observe that the same indicator can be up to five times higher for slum than for non-slum groups. We conclude that this evidence supports the importance of slum improvement and highlights this issue as one of the major challenges that a predominantly urbanized world faces.