Serviços, espaços e padrões de consumo

Urban inequality is widely debated but few studies examine developments over time and across cities. In this contribution, we develop a novel approach to study the dynamics of inequality in cities of the Global South. Using a sample that includes cities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, we track trends in equality since the 1990s in four domains: the labor market, education, private goods, and public amenities. With descriptive statistics, inequality indexes, and logistic regression analysis, we show that while inequality in educational attainment is decreasing across all cities in our sample, patterns in the other domains are more complex. Even though the middle occupational group is growing in most cities in our sample, there are important exceptions and substantial regional variations. While we find that inequality in material comfort more often decreased than increased, class position continues to predict access to both private goods and public amenities. Although the observed patterns are complex, we find no proof of escalating inequalities in the domains under study.

The city of São Paulo, home to 11 million people, suffers constantly the effects of  flooding caused by extreme precipitation. Localized floods occur every summer in various parts of the city. Besides the losses and inconvenience felt by the residents, floods produce damages that cross the city boundaries, affecting income and output in the metropolitan area as well as in other parts of the state and the country. The objective of this study is to evaluate the economic impacts of floods in the city of São Paulo through the use of a Spatial Computable General Equilibrium (SCGE) model integrated to GIS information related to the location of points of floods and the firms within their influence. It is estimated that floods contributed to reduce city growth and residents' welfare, as well as hampering local competitiveness in both domestic and international markets. An intra-city total impact-damage ratio of 2.2 and an economywide total impact-damage ratio of 5.0 were found.

User satisfaction has been studied extensively in social housing, but this has not had a significant impact on design factors in many cases. In recent years, such studies have included the assessment of values relating to design attributes. This paper presents a discussion on the concept of desired value in social housing, based on results of a study conducted in the region of the city of Campinas, in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. End-users of four multi-family social housing projects, based on five storey walk-up apartment blocks were asked to identify aspects of housing design, which are most valued. The research method was based on the concept of stated preferences, where approximately 200 respondents organized a list of design attributes in order of their desired values. The investigation tool was based on the analogy of a deck of cards. Data was statistically analyzed and a general importance index was created for each of the value attributes. Results showed that security was the main preference aspect. Analysis of general results indicates a list of possible improvements to projects with regard to value delivery to end-users at little or no costs. To contribute towards a process of incremental improvements to social housing models in the State of São Paulo, the results of the case study can be applied by agents of the local housing provision system, in conjunction with a conceptual framework of data on housing quality indicators.

The public policies programs for low-income housing in Brazil started in the 1930s. The most recent well advertised program Minha Casa, Minha Vida (MCMV) by the Federal government has the goals to improve the quality of life of poor people, to reduce the housing deficit, and to foster the economy. The objective in this research is to evaluate socioeconomic impacts of low-income housing on regional economic system, highlighting housing public policies developed by the state and the federal government. Under an emerging low-income housing policy, the state of Sao Paulo created the so-called CDHU. The question raised by this paper is how important was the contribution of these programs to the economic growth in the state of Sao Paulo and in the rest of Brazilian economy in previous years?

Thus, a specific interregional input-output model is estimated for two regions, state of São Paulo and rest of Brazil, with the usage of six different typologies of low income housing ranging from a single families housing to gated community housing. The impacts are measured in terms of GDP, tax collection, production, and employment in the State of Sao Paulo and in the rest of Brazil. The results show that the effect in the economy is different ~ depending on the chosen housing typology investment; in other words, the estimated model provide tools to decide about the best housing type for promoting economic growth. The MCMV program and the CDHU's program affect the state economy system by expanding the demand for inputs for the construction of new buildings (direct effect); by expanding the demand in other sectors due to the feedback effect (indirect effect), and by expanding the income of families - it also increases the demand for goods and services in the economy (induced effect).

Este texto reflete sobre a natureza das relações entre os jovens e a cidade, com um recorte que privilegia a esfera do consumo, dimensão essencial na construção identitária nesta etapa da vida. As reflexões partem de uma pesquisa feita em uma área específica do Distrito Federal, a cidade da Estrutural, uma das que compõem o espaço urbano da capital do País. Em se tratando de uma área pobre para os padrões locais, os jovens que ali moram são marcados por esta condição que, por um lado, deixa-os socialmente vulneráveis e, por outro, produz resistências que se manifestam no estilo de se comportar na vida cotidiana. Tem-se, neste caso, uma dupla determinação da posição social destes jovens: o local de moradia e as suas faixas etárias, ou seja, estigmatizados por um lado e vulneráveis pelo outro, criam uma forma de existência social particular, que nos auxiliam na compreensão dos vínculos sociais na cidade.

Studies of financialization have highlighted how politics, particularly through the state, drives the increasing entanglement of financial actors and rationales in the production of urban space. This article shifts the angle to consider the challenges that uncertain politics pose for such entanglement. Looking beyond techno-calculative practices, it explores how finance works politically to sustain value extraction within fragmented regulatory landscapes. It does so through historical and ethnographic analysis of financial investment in urban water and sanitation provision in Brazil, drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and a new dataset on public-private contracts to interrogate how private water companies navigate politico-regulatory relations under financial investors like private equity. It shows that while these providers were quite engaged in local politics under their original owners (construction groups), under financial investors they sought to “escape” it by curbing ties to public officials, reducing the autonomy of local subsidiaries, and successfully lobbying for national standards on regulatory norms. It argues these centralizing efforts constituted forms of centripetal politics meant to enhance asset monitoring, increase regulatory legibility, and reduce political uncertainty. The findings illuminate how financial investors work across political scales to navigate political risk and sustain financial value, thus problematizing the conventional analytical focus on how finance capitalizes on local forms of entrepreneurial politics. Crucially, they reveal the need to treat institutional environments not simply as filters for financial investment but as objects of political contestation by financial actors. This allows for blurring the boundaries between finance and politics, and for politicizing finance.

Explorando a perspectiva proposta por Marcel Mauss, este artigo apresenta algumas reflexões sobre a coexistência entre as lógicas do dom e do mercado na sociedade brasileira, tomando por base uma pesquisa etnográfica realizada em Curitiba (PR) sobre conflitos decorrentes de relações de consumo. A etnografia indica que a premissa da equivalência entre os parceiros – que evoca a economia do dom, na qual as trocas vinculam sujeitos enquanto sujeitos por meio de objetos – não é, de modo algum, um componente secundário das relações entre consumidores e fornecedores no mercado, presidindo inclusive a reivindicação de direitos pelos consumidores junto a instituições estatais. O desenvolvimento da análise sugere que as transações bem sucedidas e os conflitos nascidos de relações de consumo podem ser compreendidas como elementos de um mesmo sistema de comunicação, em que a lógica mercantil é englobada pelo princípio da reciprocidade.