Serviços, espaços e padrões de consumo

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.

Os anos 50 no Brasil transitaram do Nacionalismo de Vargas ao Desenvolvimento de JK, passando pela implantação definitiva de uma sociedade urbana modernizada. Sintonizada com a atmosfera desponta uma geração, imbuída de uma nova sensibilidade estética e novos hábitos de consumo. Neste universo criou-se a base da primeira estrutura de mercado de arte no país, nas cidades de São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro, tendo como condutor as galerias privadas de arte moderna e contemporânea.

O objetivo deste texto é apresentar parte dos resultados da pesquisa coletiva realizada durante o ano de 2007 na PUC-SP. A investigação mapeou 18 grupos envolvidos com a recriação de  culturas populares tradicionais brasileiras na cidade de São Paulo, buscando perceber as especificidades determinadas pela história  da transplantação de expressões pernambucanas, maranhenses e  sudestinas, bem como de quem as recriou na metrópole, muitos  deles jovens e de classe média, e dos circuitos de sociabilidade,  cultura e lazer pelos quais elas circulam. Tendo como base essas  práticas, seus agentes e representações, o artigo desenvolve uma  breve reflexão sobre os usos da “tradição” e o seu impacto na vida desses jovens.    

Despite boosting cities and preserving local culture in the face of changes imposed on urban markets in the global south, urban street fairs are territories that are still not well understood. Our objective is to evaluate urban street fairs as a locus of local territorial development from the perspective of the ecosocioeconomy. Methodologically, it is a survey with a sample of 334 on 485 street vendors in Curitiba, complemented by documentary surveys, interviews, and observations in-situ. As a result, urban street fairs are socio-productive arrangements emerging from the interaction among multiple rationalities; street vendors opt for their work due to tradition and preference for trade and not a market limitation; natural products (organic and traditional) are links between ecologically desirable commercial and productive practices. The perspective of ecosocioeconomy captures the material and symbolic constitution and development of urban street fairs as a complex relational territory embedded in the city, with its internalized and externalized interrelations in an urban governance system influenced by different rationalities and constituted by a multiplicity of actors in different spaces and times.

At a time when cities, particularly large Latin American cities, are increasingly polarized and overcome with violence, and public space has long been pronounced dead, an exceptionally vibrant public realm survives in Rio de Janeiro. In the elite beach neighborhood of Ipanema, residents spend a large part of their free time in public: on the street corner, in bars, and on the beach. Ipanema has a proliferation of what Ray Oldenburg calls “third places” where neighbors, friends, and colleagues plug into and out of an ongoing public social life. But below the idyllic surface lies a conflictual social space stratified along race and class lines. Through an analysis of the discursive construction of the beach, the politics of beach access, and a 15-year old tradition of beach riots, I question the notion—popularized by Oldenburg and others—of public space as the location of an organic civil society that greases the wheels of commerce, promotes democracy, and solves its own problems in the common interest. Rather, I argue that Rio’s famous beach neighborhoods are a key arena of the public sphere where the terms of Rio’s unjust social order are challenged, negotiated, and largely reproduced. Nevertheless, Ipanema’s public space represents political possibility for the otherwise excluded majority.

The critical geography scholarship on mega-events mostly adopts the framework of accumulation by dispossession, highlighting the disruptive legacies such as displacement and gentrification wrought upon host cities. Though the critique is largely correct, it has failed to capture the complex layers of historical and institutional contexts that underlie urban social change in mega-event cities. This article makes a case for broadening our analytical perspective by introducing the concept of aspirational urbanism, which refers to the diverse practices and discourses launched by state and business elites in an attempt to remake their cities bourgeois and world-class. Aspirational urbanism underscores the gap between global aspirations and local realities and draws our attention to the ad hoc economic, political, and cultural strategies used by state and business elites to bridge the gap. The concept is particularly useful for studying transformations in mega-event cities in the Global South, because these are the places marked by sharp contrasts between global city ambitions and developing-country realities. By way of introducing this special issue on urban transformations and spectacles in Brazil, this article presents a comparative analysis of the Rio de Janeiro 2016 and Beijing 2008 Olympics to examine how aspirational urbanism unfolded differently in the 2 cities.

Este artigo traz como proposta a reflexão sobre o consumo alimentar infantil em locais públicos, como escolas e creches, e a mobilização de setores da sociedade brasileira no sentido da normatização deste consumo. Este debate tem como cenário a mídia impressa, jornais e revistas de alcance nacional os jornais Folha de S. Paulo e O Globo e as revistas Época e Veja, investigada nos últimos dez anos. Trata-se de tema polêmico, recente em nossa sociedade, refletindo transformações ocorridas no contexto do estatuto da criança como sujeito (consumidor), de seu papel na família, bem como de uma nova ingerência do Estado nas ações de vida dos cidadãos.