Infraestrutura urbana, serviços urbanos e equipamentos coletivos

This dissertation analyzes the effectiveness of institutions for nature conservation by studying the management of environmentally protected areas in the State of São Paulo, Brazil in the last two decades. Using the issue of illegal human occupation to guide research in four protected areas, the dissertation addresses the question of how management has confronted the disjunction between legislation barring occupation and the reality of occupation on the ground in these areas. I examine the legal, governmental, and practical structures for the administration of protected areas. The research finds that government agencies relegated decisionmaking responsibilities on human occupation to the managers and staff of protected areas. The staff, in turn, developed informal measures and agreements to attempt reconciliation of occupation and the legal mandate. These unofficial strategies were often plagued by inconsistency and other weaknesses.

Latin American and Caribbean countries are aging rapidly. The pace of this process along with the institutional and economic contexts varies across countries, but there are common regional norms. Across the region, the family unit continues to bear significant responsibility for the well-being of older adults and within the family, there are gender differentiated expectations for the provision and receipt of support. The stability of the family and the gender roles therein, with regard to support for older adults, takes on more significance in countries where mobility among younger adults is commonplace and fertility continues to decline. Using data from the 2000 Survey of Health Well-Being and Aging of Older Adults in Latin America and the Caribbean (SABE), this study provides a comparative assessment of intergenerational residential proximity and transfers of financial and functional support in the region among 9,259 older adults. It assesses the extent to which upward flows of support are conditioned by the prevailing economic and institutional contexts of aging as well as the gender systems of household organization in seven cities across the region. The findings reveal that patterns of residential proximity and support transfers in these cities generally differ according to the respective stage of demographic transition and the strength of social welfare systems in countries. Older adults in Montevideo are more likely to live further away from their children and to receive less support compared to those in Mexico City. Whereas older adults in Montevideo, Uruguay and Bridgetown, Barbados are less likely to receive financial support from children at further distances, older adults in Havana are not. Regarding gender, in all cities, except Buenos Aires, older women are more likely than men to receive support. Regional gender norms of sons being primarily responsible for economic support were not consistent across the cities. Altogether, findings reveal geographic proximity, gender systems, and macro level socioeconomic contexts shape intergenerational support.

The objective of this thesis is to study the industrial wastewater pollution problem in Metropolitan Sao Paulo, Brazil, and to examine the applicability and consequences of alternative solutions for the problem, other than the traditional end-of-pipe approaches. After a brief description of the area, and identification of the interested parties, we presented several case studies of firms that adopted in-plant control measures designed to abate pollution, that were regarded as much cheaper than paying the user's charges to the public utility that owns the central treatment system. A methodology is proposed for estimating the industrial wastewater pollution loads in the region, taking into account the technological change and price elasticity of demand effects, using an input-output framework. Finally, the concept of near-optimality applied to the analysis of the industrial waste pollution control problem is discussed, using two case studies to illustrate the approach and its implications to the interested parties.

This dissertation explores the contributions and limitations of gentrification theory to understand processes of upward urban redevelopment in São Paulo, Brazil. To this end, I develop a definition of gentrification that maintains its analytical consistency while also providing sufficient elasticity to illuminate diverging contexts. I apply this framework to two case studies in São Paulo that were locally recognized as experiencing gentrification. Ultimately, this research explores both the relevance of existing gentrification theory and the local meanings that it has assumed. Drawing on the classical and global definitions of gentrification, the analytical framework identifies three necessary dimensions common to all cases, even if mediating structures make their materialization context-specific. They are: (1) production of gentrifiable space; (2) upward socio-economic change with displacement; and (3) built environment upgrades. The two case studies in São Paulo expose the challenges of the straightforward importation of theory in each of these dimensions. First, the local urbanization pattern does not follow the central city disinvestment and suburbanization process of classical cases. Second, the presence of urban informality results in the displacement of both formal and informal residents. Third, in scenarios where apartments are valuable housing options, built environment upgrades promote verticalization and corporate developers become “pioneer” gentrifiers. Finally, by focusing on the state as a key mediating structure of gentrification, the case studies analyze the dynamics of one private-led and one state-led upward redevelopment process. In the first case, the state becomes an enabler by providing the support needed for gentrification to happen. By establishing a partnership with the private sector in the second case, the state becomes an entrepreneur, creating and benefiting from a speculative real estate market. Instead of reifying a homogeneous and invariable pro-market approach, though, they demonstrate the multiple and conflictive goals mediated and legitimized by the state and that can limit the impact of displacement. To be clear, these are indeed gentrification cases given the evidence of the necessary dimensions of the analytical framework. However, they posit the need to contextualize our understandings of gentrification since interactions between local and global patterns may alter the process over space and time.

This project analyzes efforts to remake the relationship between water and city in São Paulo, Brazil. Currently experiencing overlapping problems of flooding, scarcity, and pollution, São Paulo illustrates the challenges of managing water in a contemporary mega-city. This dissertation subsequently considers the city’s water management through an approach that borrows from urban political ecology, social studies of science, and post-colonial urban theory. With an epistemological grounding in these literatures, this project analyzes ongoing conversations about water management in São Paulo, and focuses on how water is encountered and engaged with in the landscape by engineers, artists, and activists. This project touches on many aspects of the city’s waterscape, but its specific focus is on the management of stormwater and efforts to deal with flooding in the city, both historically as well as in the contemporary moment. By considering urban infrastructure not as a technical system for managing water but rather a deeply political intervention that ties together the social and natural landscapes of the city, this project offers a textured, critical look at the forms in which water is made legible through diverse processes of representation and engagement. Through an understanding of urbanization as a deeply political process of landscape change that folds together social and natural processes, this project argues for an approach to water management that takes seriously the relationships between inequality, infrastructure, and urban development in considering how water is governed. More specifically, it argues that the city’s water crisis is fundamentally a crisis of urban inequality and inadequate housing provisioning, which is coupled with a propensity towards large-scale, monofunctional infrastructures. São Paulo makes clear how urban inequality influences management, complicating efforts to implant necessary infrastructure and equitably distribute drinking water.

The primary analytical focus of this dissertation is to assess municipal (district) human development by using spatial analysis and spatial econometric techniques with the intent of guiding decision-making processes. The Human Development Index (HDI) from the United Nations Development Program is the main focus of this study, which relies on geographic information systems (GIS) technology to incorporate the spatial dimension in the HDI, and to provide the data platform for analyses. Methods of Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis and Confirmatory Spatial Data Analysis are used to accomplish the research objectives. The results of this dissertation suggest that the geographic environment plays an important role in the understanding of the relationship between human development and public intervention. In the case of Brazil, public sector involvement in enlarging people's social choices must explicitly consider relative location if the goal is to create equitable access to opportunities through strategic investment in education, health, and skills of the people. This enhanced, spatial perspective will enable a greater number of the population to participate in the growth process as well as to share its benefits, and further expand people's capabilities. From the regional inequality perspective, that characterizes Brazil, Southeast municipalities have a comparative advantage because of their higher level of development; as a consequence, these municipalities have a stronger capacity to manage social issues. In contrast, Northeast municipalities, because of their lower level of development, do not have such a strong capacity. From the intra-urban perspective, similar, diverse spatial dynamics can be observed in the districts of Sao Paulo municipality. This dissertation draws three main conclusions concerning the relationship between human development and public intervention. First, the tendency to allow an uncontrolled decentralization process, common in many developing countries, may need to be replaced with some coordination mechanisms. Second, if there is a willingness to implement ‘pro-equality’ policies, social policies should be spatially focused, instead of being applied universally across all municipalities. Third, a few spatial strategies are proposed as alternatives to implement ‘pro-equality’ policies. These strategies are based on the existence of spatial diffusion processes that take place in the study areas.

Why do some bureaucratic bodies become robust after they are created, with adequate resources and authority to perform their tasks, while others remain underfunded and limited in scope? My dissertation explores this question using multisector regulatory agencies in Brazil. Before, during, and after the development of concessions and transfer of essential services to private control in Brazil, state governments created regulatory agencies to maintain an active state role overseeing of service delivery. Though regulatory agencies followed very similar formal outlines, their post-creation development varied widely. I explain this variation. My arguments are based in political principals’ electoral incentives. I begin with an instrumental explanation of agency creation. Governors created regulatory agencies to address a combination of consumer and concessionaire anxiety where they were unable to otherwise make long-term commitments to prevent abusive price increases or expropriation. I then argue that post-creation development was most pronounced where multisector bodies focused most heavily on work in electrical energy, sanitation, and piped natural gas distribution. Mayors and city councilmembers can claim credit for service improvements in these policy areas because these services are geographically bounded. By contrast, work in intercity highways and transportation provides few opportunities for improvement for which local officials can claim credit. Agencies focused on these second set of issues do not develop a positive reputation with mayors. Governors in turn care about mayors’ opinions, and receive credible information about bureaucratic work from them, because mayors’ support is key in future statewide elections. Agency leaders who employ their positive reputation to successfully lobby for more resources and authority produce robust agencies. I explore this argument in multiple areas. First, I explain the workings of the proposed causal mechanism through a comparison between the agency Agergs in moderately well-developed state of Rio Grande do Sul and the agency Arce in the less-developed state of Ceará. Agergs’s early focus on highway and transportation regulation meant that it grew far less robust by 2010 than did Arce, which focused on electricity and sanitation. I then test hypotheses across the case universe using descriptive statistics and causal process-tracing. I expand the argument slightly to examine sectoral agencies in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and hypothesize how different political institutions might affect subnational regulatory body development in Argentina and Mexico, the next-largest Latin American federations. My work contributes to our understanding of the functioning of the regulatory state in the global South. I raise new important questions about local state capacity in developing countries, and propose an explanation that can be transferred to multiple cases.

This dissertation analyzes literary representations of Brazilian public works to explore questions about power and narrative. It tracks how Brazil's major public works projects and the fiction surrounding them mark a twofold construction of the nation: the functional construction of the country's public infrastructure and the symbolic construction of nationhood.