Planejamento urbano

This paper examines the systems of social relations underpinning the late 1980s’ office boom in São Paulo, Brazil. Using ‘institutionalist’ approaches to provide an empirical examination of these systems, it focuses on the nature of the dominant agents and their strategies, the linkages that allow them to perform their functions, and the relative position and power of the agents in the production and use of built structures. The paper tries to situate these systems in their economic and social environment and to point to the connections between socially constructed property markets, their environment, and the characteristics and outcomes of the property boom. In doing so, it aims to cast some light on the processes through which a mix of economic, social and cultural impulses, of global and a local origins, are related to the structures of provision of offices in the context of São Paulo and lead to the production of specific forms of built environment.

Given the growing importance of populism in cities both empirically and in scholarly discourse, planning is increasingly grappling with this ‘unsettling era’, focusing on how to respond to these times. This opening provides an opportunity to re-engage with the idea of insurgent planning—practices that are counter-hegemonic, transgressive, and imaginative—within populist contexts. I explore the case of mobilizations by community communicators in Complexo da Maré, a set of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the spread of COVID-19 in 2020. In contrast to these mobilizations, Brazil's federal right-wing populist government failed to attend to the needs of favela residents. Through the case of Maré's communicators, I highlight the need for planning to account for the role of insurgent planning as a response to populist contexts in cities of the global South.

Using the experience of metropolitan Rio de Janeiro, this article contributes to the broader debate on development regimes, rescaling and state spatial restructuring in Brazil, and its specificities in relation to the international discussion on the transformations in Atlantic Fordism. I argue that the transition from a (peripheral) development state to a competitive and rescaled regime has been accompanied by important continuities. Legitimized through discourses around development poles and trickle-down effects, the national-developmental regime has systematically promoted some spaces as opposed to others, without much emphasis on the social and environmental dimensions of spatial policies. The emerging competitive state spatial regime, whether in its neoliberalized, or its more recent ‘rolled-out’ national-developmental version, is merely expected to aggravate the historical socio-environmental contradictions in the production of space. Moreover, scale has proven contested and strategic-relational, both molding and being influenced by actors that seek to use scalar politics to reach their interests. My analysis suggests that, within this scenario, neither economic growth, nor regulatory and institutional strengthening, nor financial resources are likely to produce structural transformation in the inherited spaces of Greater Rio de Janeiro.

The fate of the Jardim Colombo favela in São Paulo changed with the birth of a youth-led urban movement during the first art festival held in 2018. Planned and delivered in one month, the festival gathered dozens of volunteers and hundreds of residents to dream together about transforming a dumping site into a park for the community. The excitement of this initial action soon materialized into a self-aware social infrastructure ready to face future and unexpected challenges—including a pandemic, to which the young leaders in Jardim Colombo would respond with creativity, preventing devastating health outcomes. Drawing on three months of fieldwork and an ongoing relationship with the community leaders, I explore how this one-off celebration turned into an urban movement that is pursuing increasingly ambitious social and material goals. Sustained by four pillars—youth, women, creativity and planning—I present this story as a deployment of celebratory insurgency strategically engaging in festive practices to subtly push its counter-hegemonic political agenda in relation to cultural and identity matters. I argue that framing this creative approach as a planned urban celebration may inspire other planning initiatives seeking social justice in the peripheries of cities across the global South.

This article provides an ethnographic perspective on urban planning by presenting the creative practices of marginalized slum residents in Recife, Northeast Brazil, who are affected by planners’ decisions. It argues that such a perspective contributes to current critical urban theory in three ways. First, while many studies of urban planning follow the temporality of the timeframe of a particular project (‘project time’), this analysis emphasizes the timeframe of the lives of the affected residents (‘people's time’). Second, it attends to diversity, taking account of the variety of affected residents and the diverse consequences of urban planning on their lives. Third, it shows how urban interventions — similar to marriage, divorce, the birth of children and the death of loved ones — are high-impact life events for the urban poor. Finally, the article assesses the engagement between ethnography and critical urban theory and argues in favour of ‘grounding’ the latter better in the analysis of actual practices and experiences.

This paper reviews, using documentary evidence, the way in which gender equality and women’s empowerment was considered in the 2009 Global Report on Human Settlement (GRHS), Planning Sustainable Cities. Given the UN commitment to mainstreaming as a strategy and what we know about how planning impacts on women, expectations were high. The review concludes that gender failed to be effectively mainstreamed into the 2009 GRHS Planning Sustainable Cities. Since the decade of women in 1976e1985 it would seem that only limited progress has been made to improve the position of women relative to men when it comes to the pan global GRHS.

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.

The paper is based on quantitative evidence and case examples of city learning drawn from both developed and developing countries to explore selected questions raised in the literature on learning and competitiveness. Anecdotal and quantitative evidence suggest that a large shadow market for knowledge has already formed among cities around the world. Case observations reviewed here suggest that the best learners are deliberate and systematic, finding or creating new knowledge, converting it to use, and storing learning experiences that draw on collective memory. Acquired knowledge resides in two main forms: one is hard data, stored in documents, computers, or specialized units of government. Another is soft data stored in professional and social networks that link a wide array of actors in the community - not just staff in the city bureaucracy. The analysis leads to a number of propositions that deserve attention and testing: several kinds of learning systems can be observed, that the process of learning may be as important as the product in contributing to competitiveness, that policies can helpful to facilitate learning, and that a radical departure from customary policy, especially in donor institutions, may be needed to effectively meet requirements of institutional capacity building in cities of the developing world.

This article discusses the relationship between segregation and urban redevelopment projects through an analysis of São Paulo's metropolis. Our assumption is that segregation is one of the components of capitalist urban space, since it is produced as a commodity, which determines its fragmentation and hierarchy. In the peripheral countries, this condition prevents thousands of people to live with dignity. In recent decades, the space production has become a possibility of investment for the capital in crisis. This situation reveals the importance of the urban renewal projects, because they reinforce public and private investments in specific areas of the cities, increasing its valuation. In this article, the analysis of Nova Luz Project shows that the segregation is a content of contemporary urbanism and that the city's production process is increasingly tied to the private interests and to the capital.

Popular participation consolidates one of the ways for the accountability, on the one hand from the State to the society, with the political responsibility of the managers, and on the other hand, to receive population demands. This beneficial dynamic provides social control, which can guarantee the efficiency of public policies. This control in the municipal sphere is latent since the provision of public services occurs, in practice, in the place where the citizens’ life is developed, i.e. in the city.The municipality, therefore, constitutes the form of political organization closest to the population, playing an indispensable role in the viability of the permanent process of participation in the regulation, oversight, and control over services and public goods of local interest.