Evolução urbana

Overcrowding in informal housing is a core problem in international development debates, whereby slum upgrading is viewed as a dominant policy to integrate formal and informal areas. Conceptually, challenges to socio-spatial integration are associated with unbalanced development processes of urban de- and re-densification beyond the housing level. However, a lack of empirical understanding of these processes limits the case for redistributive land use policies to complement slum upgrading. To address this gap, our study adopts an exploratory approach, applying GIS-based techniques to population census and open data on land use in São Paulo, Brazil, in order to analyze the distribution of population densities across residential built-up types in informal and informal areas, although there are constrains related to small-scale spatial data sources on urban density. This shows that informal settlements are indeed the densest residential built-up type in the city while revealing the underlying spatial inequality between informal settlements and low-rise, high-standard residential areas. We suggest that more emphasis be placed on the design and implementation of redistributive policies to avoid spatialized forms of inequality associated with uneven urban development. This will ensure the spatial and social integration of urban areas.

As relações cidade/natureza a partir da abordagem sociopolítica da gestão ambiental são tema deste artigo. Tendo o Distrito Federal como recorte, e, em especial, a área compreendida pela sub-bacia do Riacho Fundo, a partir de uma abordagem sócio-histórica do processo de urbanização de Brasília, enfatizam-se os impasses gerados pelo impacto urbano sobre os recursos hídricos locais e o papel desempenhado pela sociedade civil e poder público, na regulação da dinâmica socioambiental urbana. É apontada a necessidade de se construir um saber ambiental que integre e ultrapasse a racionalidade instrumental e disjuntiva da visão moderna e acione as possibilidades de emergência de novas formas de construção de conhecimento e estratégias de ação. Nessa perspectiva, a integração da dimensão educativa no espaço político é condição de um efetivo surgimento de alternativas viáveis às questões ambientais concretas. A experiência de formação de redes solidárias é discutida como possibilidade de emergência de novos sujeitos coletivos e como prática de articulação entre saberes locais e científicos orientados a uma práxis responsável.

Many cities around the world have been largely constructed by their residents, who build not only their own houses, but also frequently their neighborhoods. In this article, I use the notion of peripheral urbanization to analyze this way of producing cities that is quite pervasive in the global south. I argue that peripheral urbanization refers to modes of the production of space that (a) operate with a specific temporality and agency, (b) engage transversally with official logics, (c) generate new modes of politics, and (d) create highly unequal and heterogeneous cities. I also argue that peripheral urbanization not only produces heterogeneity within the city as it unfolds over time, but also varies considerably from one city to another. I build my arguments by juxtaposing dissimilar cases from a few cities in the global south. To focus on peripheral urbanization means simultaneously to de-center urban theory and to offer a bold characterization of modes of the production of space that are different from those that generated the cities of the North Atlantic.

In this paper I argue that global urbanism produces peripherality in ways that cannot be adequately problematized without taking into account its actual extent and geographically uneven development. Therefore, planetary urbanization needs to engage scholarly traditions attuned to regional urbanization if the discourse is to move pastlimitations in the urban globalization canon and its narrow focus on cities. To that end, I examine research on extensive urbanization in the Amazon region. Illustrative case studies show how attempts to globalize Manaus precipitated territorial restructuring and sociospatial change far beyond the city’s boundaries. Manaus is now a more unequal city. Selective metropolitan expansion to the Rio Negro’s south bank has led to the simultaneous upgrading and peripheralization of Iranduba. Yet, the building of a city-centric regional network of roadways also shaped Roraima State’s transformation from isolated borderland to by passed periphery. Moreover, financial and symbolic appropriations of standing rainforests by metropolitan conservationism marginalize remote communities even in the absence of exploitative deforestation and resource extraction. Final remarks emphasize the need for further research on the hybrid (urban–rural) conditions andf unctional articulations of distant-yet-impacted peripheries. Such efforts may broadenthe political horizons of planetary urbanization by informing extensive contestations of entrepreneurial urbanism.

O presente artigo tem como objetivos (i) mostrar como a experiência de revitalização do Bairro do Recife foi desvirtuada, aproximando-se da tendência de city marketing, entendida como a aceleração da taxa de transformação de certas localidades, com ênfase especulativa sobre imóveis e grandes obras de renomados arquitetos, com importantes repercussões em termos de trânsito de veículos e fluxos de pessoas, e (ii) questionar sobre a legitimidade de projetos que, embora institucionalmente aprovados, comprometem as características de determinadas estruturas espaciais urbanas, como é o caso dos centros históricos.

The article explores cartographic and statistical registers of poverty as geo-legal technologies operating across shifting visual economies which structure ways of seeing and concealing ‘the poor’ in the urban landscape. Drawing on the fields of critical cartography and digital urbanism, and taking a 2013 controversy around Google Maps’ mapping of favelas in Rio de Janeiro as a starting point, it investigates the aesthetic role of digital maps and data in the legal geographies of urban poverty. It is argued that sociospatial encodings give form to poverty in ways that activate antipoverty responses and continuously support correlations between poverty and criminality. This argument entails a post-representational approach to maps considering their inscriptional, propositional and normative functions. Cartography, statistics and law are interrogated as devices of global governance that work aesthetically to shape poverty and its modes of appearance in the city, i.e., as productive methods of documentation as well as world-making, through which geocodings simultaneously create images of poverty and become functional of spatial transformations. Poverty is thus conceptualized as it is made into an aesthetic category subjected to continuous geo-legal modulations.

Assemblage thinking offers a new conceptual toolkit for analysing the relationship between society and space. However, major questions remain regarding both its ontological propositions and how it might be applied to the analysis of specific socio-spatial objects. This article contributes to these debates by using assemblage thinking to trace the long-term development of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. These territories have undergone a range of seemingly contradictory changes over recent decades. On one hand, expanded infrastructure and service provision and improved social outcomes have meant favelas have moved closer to, and in some cases surpassed, areas officially designated as “formal”. On the other, they continue to be heavily stigmatised, targeted by exceptional forms of governance, and subject to militarisation and abuse by police and non-state armed groups. Tracing these developments over time, I argue that the favela is best understood as an assemblage of heterogeneous, interacting elements that operate according to diverse logics. Despite continual pressures to deterritorialise, or break apart, a density of components and relations has ensured the continual reterritorialisation of the “favela” as a distinct object of perception and action over more than a century, with far reaching consequences for residents and the wider city.

Descreve a visita da socióloga francesa a Brasília e à Universidade de Brasília.