Pobreza e desigualdade

Cities have long been enmeshed in global economic and cultural networks, so the challenge is to differentiate what is distinctive in the current processes of globalization from long-standing trends. The major cities of Latin America have played an important role in global economic and political organization since the conquest of the Americas by Spain and Portugal. In Spanish America, cities such as Mexico City and Lima were important rodes in the organization both of transatlantic and transpacific trade. They were also essential elements in ordering the internal economies of the Spanish colonies so that these could contribute to the global economy (Morse, 1971). Other cities, such as Guanajua to in Mexico or Potosi in the viceroyalty of Peru performed specialized and subordinate roles within the urban hierarchy of the colonies as sites of mining and manufacturing. In Brazil, the cities were equally important in organizing the participation of the colony in the global economy of the day. Indeed, the unity of Brazil was, to a certain extent, maintained in the face of centrifugal forces by the trade and communication between its major coastal cities. With independence, the new countries of Latin America were configured around the major cities and around the economic and political projects of the elites that dominated those cities. 

Debates on global South urbanization have been an important focus of recent urban studies scholarship. Looking at the urban South from the point of view of the Latin American context, this article highlights a missing piece of the economic viewpoint in such debates: the instability that shapes the peripheral economies with which Southern urban dynamics interact. The article argues that this higher level of economic volatility is an important factor in many urban/sociospatial dynamics in Latin America—hence indispensable for an accurate theoretical understanding of the specificities of its cities and urban processes. The applicability of the idea for other regions of the global South is a hypothesis in need of verification and may involve important implications for current urban research. Moreover, I propose that the geographical approaches to precarity may be enhanced with the dimension of economic volatility, which is usually more intense in precarious (urban) contexts.

One of the largest urban centers in the world, the Brazilian city of São Paulo is characterized by high levels of socio-economic inequality and political polarization, significantly complicating issues of urban governance. Despite being designed to partially address these problems, São Paulo's participatory budget (PB) was bounded by its urban context, institutional design and the relative strength of the political actors involved. The article analyzes a mechanism created within the PB to incorporate historically disadvantaged groups, or ‘socially vulnerable segments’, during the Workers' Party administration of 2001–04. The segments methodology constitutes an intriguing example of how affirmative action can be used to improve decision-making processes and address social exclusion in urban contexts. In particular, the segments served as a ‘counterpublic’ within the PB, helping activists representing the segments to develop strategies influencing the city's urban and social policy.

Segregation has been one of the most persistent features of urban life and, accordingly, one of the main subjects of enquiry in urban studies. Stemming from a tradition that can be traced back to the Chicago School in the early twentieth century, social segregation has been seen as the natural consequence of the social division of space. Such naturalized understanding of segregation as ‘territorial segregation' takes space as a surrogate for social distance. We propose a shift in the focus from the static segregation of places—where social distance is assumed rather than fully explained—to how social segregation is reproduced through embodied urban trajectories. We aim to accomplish this by exploring the spatial behaviour of different social groups as networks of movement that constitute opportunities for co-presence. This alternative view recasts the original idea of segregation as ‘restrictions on interaction' by concentrating on the spatiality of segregation potentially active in the circumstances of social contact and encounters in the city. This approach to segregation as a subtle process that operates ultimately through trajectories of the body is illustrated by an empirical study in a Brazilian city.

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.

This essay demonstrates how mediations (called Dialogues) between the University of Belo Horizonte and the residents of the Eliana Silva Occupation in that city have secured not only the right to urban land and constitutional rights that have been historically violated in Brazil, but also the right to that which is of common interest. The essays peaks to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s contention that what is common goes far beyond the provision of public services. This starting point allows us to see that urban occupations are politically empowered, to the extent that poor people consciously violate the Brazilian law governing the right of possession and ownership over urban land through creative and cooperative actions that are undertaken and extended across networks.This essay will focus on the centrality of the struggle to build a common communication platform serving to nourish social ties and sociability among those social actors who share the same human deprivation –– lack of access to what should be widely available to all citizens. On the theoretical side, the essay takes Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour and Milton Santos as its guides to understanding how social actors act in the struggle for socio-spatial coexistence and urbanity.

This article deals with the state policies of urban infrastructure in São Paulo, Brazil, from 1975 to 2000. Working with primary information about the investments made by the state in public works, we discuss a series of arguments present in the urban studies literature about the patterns of state investment in urban spaces and propose an alternative explanation for state action in Brazilian urban spaces in recent decades. We analyze the main elements that have influenced the overall pattern of investments, describe the main characteristics of this policy over time and in each of the municipal governments of the period, as well as develop an evaluation of the spatial distribution of the resources among each of the main social groups in the city.

General consensus exists concerning the relevance of networks and space in poverty situations, despite a considerable dispute on the prominence of each element. While social-support and poverty debates highlight the joint importance of space and networks, the research agenda on contemporary communities suggests that networks have recently started replacing space in social integration. These debates mainly consider networks and ties normatively and are restricted to the global North, hampering the formulation of comparative interpretations and more theoretical conclusions. This article discusses the relationship between space, sociability and poverty, based on research results on networks of poor individuals in two major Brazilian metropolises — Salvador and São Paulo. Research indicates the existence of great heterogeneity in the networks of poor individuals, although with substantial differences, on average, to middle-class individuals. Certain types of networks and sociability are systematically associated with better living conditions, employment and income. Additionally, network mobilization by individuals presents important regularities associated with social mechanisms, understood as regular patterns that trigger or cause certain results. These mechanisms explain to a great extent the heterogeneity of networks, and mediate the individual's access to opportunities and everyday assistance. They therefore contribute decisively to the production (and reproduction) of urban poverty.

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 article considers the politics of resettlement within ongoing efforts to construct the Tietê River Valley Park (Parque Várzeas do Tietê), a linear park that upon completion will be the largest linear park in the world. Located in the eastern periphery of São Paulo, Brazil, the proposed project uses riverbank naturalization to dampen floodpeaks and bring green space to underserved populations. Due to the presence of low-income neighborhoods on the river's edge, however, the project calls for the removal of roughly 40,000 people. Drawing from urban political ecology and contemporary concerns about environmentally induced displacement, I consider the conflicts over resettlement that mark the project. I analyze the project itself and situate it within a regional context defined by autoconstruction, regularized flooding, and insecure tenure. I argue that despite claims that the project will yield less risky lives for displaced residents, the form through which the project is being developed actually puts displaced residents in heightened situations of risk. I consider how communities have organized to resist displacement, and call for an approach to governance in peripheral landscapes that takes seriously the histories of collective infrastructural provisioning and autoconstructed housing that have marked them for decades.