Pobreza e desigualdade

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.

After defaulting on their foreign-debt obligations in the 1980s, several Latin American countries had to restructure their economies to boost market-led growth. Some of the ensuing housing reforms promoted mortgage expansion and masshousing production. Mexico was among the first countries to follow this logic, and in aparticularly aggressive manner. Credit liberalization allowed a handful of real estate firms to experience massive expansions in their operations in the 2000s as they were able to build lower-middle-income housing at an accelerated rate by accessing public, pension and private equity funds. Brazil eventually appropriated some aspects of the Mexican housing model, but not others. In the late 2000s, Brazil began providing deep subsidies to low-income households to connect the private supply of housing with apublicly subsidized demand. This article discusses, challenges and moves beyond prior analyses of these processes by contrasting the two countries’ housing finance models and examining the more recent (2010s) evolution and normative shifts in their housing and urban development policy agendas. Despite the direct policy transfer between the two contexts, the South-South comparative analysis presented in the article highlights the fluctuating and unstable nature of financialization processes given the varied inclination of national governments to manage, promote or restrict them, or to contain or accentuate capitalist crises and their implications.

Contemporary discussions of ‘democratic innovation experiences’ have evolved into aheated debate about how effective these ‘new spaces’ are in including ordinary citizens, particularly those traditionally marginalized and excluded. This article focuses on the Brazilian experience with Health Councils and begins by discussing the conditions that have been pointed out by previous studies as favouring the inclusion of these groups in these ‘new spaces’. On the basis of these studies, one question that remains is about the democratic legitimacy of these experiences, as it seems that there is a bias towards the inclusion of those that already have political ties with the traditional political system.The local Health Councils in 31 subprefeituras (new administrative subdivisions) of the city of São Paulo were researched and a continuum was observed: ranging from a small number of one or two sectors that have historical ties with political parties included in the council to a far more diversified composition, including up to seven sectors with autonomous representatives and various types of association. Using these results as their starting-point, the analyses conclude with a discussion of the relative significance of the factors previously identified as central in establishing the democratic legitimacy of these ‘new democratic spaces’.

This article compares two cases of displacement suffered by informal workers and informal residents in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, both connected to the hosting of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. It asks the following question: considering that the right to work and the right to housing are both enshrined in the Brazilian Constitution, why do claims upon space based on those constitutional rights have different degrees of legitimacy? Two cases are analysed in detail. The first one concerns a group of informal workers displaced from their workspace for the modernization of the local stadium. The second one tells the story of an informal settlement where 90 families were displaced due to the construction of a flyover designed to improve access to the football stadium. This article engages with current postcolonial debates around urban informality, tackling two points that have been absent from these discussions. First, it compares two ways of informally occupying urban space—for work and for housing—revealing the distinct degrees of legitimacy embedded in such practices due to pre-existing institutional arrangements. Second, it emphasizes the connection between work and home through the life strategies and place-making practices of the urban poor.

One of the new challenges globalization raises to urban management is the increasing number of international migrants moving to cities of developing countries and their impact on urban governance. Although there is growing perception that urban cultural diversity is a desirable outcome of globalization, most international migrants add to the low-income population and are particularly affected by urban exclusion. Furthermore, local governments in developing countries are seldom prepared to cope with the ad hoc policies needed to integrate people with different cultural, social and religious traditions into the urban society. Such policies should aim to encourage mobility and temporary vs. permanent migration, strengthen civic identity, deal with the cultural differences and the resulting discriminatory reactions from local residents, promote participation and representation, and fight the social and economic exclusion that often expose migrants to illegal activities contributing to raising urban violence.

A majority of people now live in cities. Countries need to accommodate such a rapidly growing urban population, which is often living and working informally, and which is lacking access to decent working and living conditions. By integrating economic promotion policies with social protection instruments public policies not only mitigate the effects of social risks on poverty, particularly in low-income settlements, but also create the necessary conditions to allow the poor to work out of poverty. Some international organizations including the International Labour Office (ILO) consider that low-income countries can afford a basic package of social benefits. In face of growing informalization of the labour force worldwide, universal and targeted social cash transfers to poor people, which are not related to their employment status, are contributing today to curb poverty and reduce inequality in a number of developing countries. But, for poor people in petty jobs, poor housing and living conditions, social and economic rights are indivisible. Case studies show how social protection and local development in urban areas can be combined to achieve progressive universal coverage. These studies provide evidence that workers and families, who need to secure and enhance their vulnerable household economies, can largely benefit from measures that aim to extend further the reach of social protection. A major challenge lies in breaking down the conceptual and administrative barriers that artificially oppose economic development and social protection, in order to reduce the costs of the access to productive and basic social services and remove hurdles to local development in urban areas.

This paper presents the results of an international research project completed by the University of Geneva in partnership the ILO and consultants. This applied research project analyses whether the concept of decent work is known and applied by local authorities in their policy definition and project implementation in the construction sector and related services. This interdisciplinary research project involves a wide-ranging study of documentary sources and four case studies in Bulawayo (Zimbabwe), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Santo André (Brazil), and Esmeraldas (Ecuador). This paper briefly summarises the aims and rationale of this research project, the hypothesis tested and key research questions related to it. Then it briefly summarises the findings which clearly show that decent work remains a marginal concept which has not been widely applied at the international, national and local levels. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for the improved dissemination and application of decent work.