Pobreza e desigualdade

O trabalho apresenta a estrutura dos cortiços no final do século XIX e os motivos pelos quais a população optava por habitar neste tipo de moradia. Com base na legislação sanitária, o estudo analisa de que forma os cortiços, condenados pelo Código Sanitário em 1894, continuaram a existir. A cidade de São Paulo precisava ser reestruturada para atender à demanda de trabalhadores que vinham atraídos pelo café e depois pela indústria, sendo indubitável a coexistência de preocupações higiênicas e estéticas nas transformações urbanas da cidade em fins do século XIX. Nesse sentido, a atenção da municipalidade com os cortiços paulistanos fez parte de um amplo plano de saneamento que buscava um ambiente belo e saudável, ou seja, útil ao bem estar social e à imagem promissora da cidade. Os vilões da saúde e da moral paulistana eram os cortiços: lugar de aglomeração, sujeira, vício e pobreza. Apesar de indesejadas, estas habitações coletivas existiam em grande número na capital paulista, e o poder público, baseado nas Posturas Municipais e no Código Sanitário, se utilizou principalmente de visitas domiciliares e interdições aos cortiços para diminuir este mal social, higiênico e estético nos arredores do centro paulistano.

This dissertation investigates the influence of religious cultural consonance on well-being. In particular, I ask if religious conceptions of ideal acolyte identity and behavior buffer daily stressors experienced by socially and economically marginalized Brazilian Pentecostals. Between 1960 and 1985, the Protestant population of Brazil quadrupled. This expansion however, is disproportionately among Brazil's poor, disenfranchised, and minority populations. This research posits that Pentecostal communities offer an alternative cultural-landscape to create identity, power, and status—which may contradict, compensate, and even challenge the dominant norms. Thus, religious cultural consonance may be a specific mechanism that marginalized Brazilian Pentecostals utilize to mitigate the physiological and psychological stress of their daily lives. This mixed-methods research is conducted in Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brazil. The project utilizes two specific communities: The Assembléia de Deus (AD) and Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD). The AD is theologically more sectarian than the IURD, advocating a greater separation between their faith and the secular world. This cross-cultural comparison is valuable for examining potential differences in the interaction of religiosity and sectarianism in the appraisal and embodiment of psychosocial stress. Research therefore focuses on: (1) the construction and distribution of religious cultural models of ideal personhood and lifestyle; and (2) evaluating well-being through psychological health measures in relation to religious models. This research offers an understanding of how religion influences psychological well-being. More specifically, this research empirically shows how religion is a cultural institution that can offer an alternative and attainable set of life goals and identities. By conceiving religion as composed of a series of cultural models, differential adherence or cultural consonance with religious and secular ideals can be evaluated by their influence on mental well-being. Ultimately, this research will contribute to understanding the ways culture and religion shape psychological health.

The arrangement of built space and propagates intrinsic values. In a society such as Brazil, and namely in the city of Sao Paulo, built space and propagates values associated with colonial attitudes toward race and class difference. In colonial times the slaves, regarded by the elite as inferior, dirty, and dangerous, were relegated to slave-quarters known as senzalas. After slavery's abolition, the poor were kept at the margins of cities. After the democratization in 1983, they live within the cities, but in filthy, dangerous slums, or slums. Even though the poor have been let into the city, they are still marginalized everywhere. From the high-tech security methods the elites use, to the fortified enclaves that turn their backs onto public space, to the sanitized, guarded shopping malls where elites go for leisure, the objective is still the segregation of classes, just like it was during slavery.

In the history of the cities, specially in the 20th century, a powerful web, unseen and silent is present: urban legality, that is, the collection of urban-related and building-related laws, decrees and rules regulating the production of the city's spaces. More than defining permitted or forbidden ways of apportioning space, more than actually regulating the city's development, urban laws act as demarcation signs defining frontiers of power. The law organizes, classifies and collects urban territories, conferring meanings and legitimacy to the way of life and family micro-policies of the groups most involved in the law's formulation. On the other hand, urban legality discriminates against forms of spatial and social organizations different from the pattern sanctioned by the law. Therefore, urban legality acts as a strong cultural paradigm, even when they fail to determine its final configuration. Urban legislation also has a great impact on the formation of a segmented real estate market in the city. The definition of spatial configurations related to specific areas, distinguishes markets reserved for certain social groups. Nevertheless, if urban legality has this economic power, the existence of vast non-regulated portions of the city reinforces even more the discriminatory and divisory role of the law. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the law: apparently it operates as a kind of mold for the ideal or desirable city. However, in the case of Sao Paulo and probably in the majority of Latin-American cities, it determines only the smallest part of the built-up space, since the product--the city--is not a result of the inert application of the model contained in the law; but of the relation that it establishes with the concrete form of real estate development in the city. Nevertheless, when defining the permitted and forbidden forms of producing spaces, it defines territories within and outside the law, that is, it defines full citizenship and limited citizenship regions. This is the theme of the thesis--to retrieve the history of urban legislation in the city of Sao Paulo (and of its non-regulated spaces) from the time of its first systematic formulation--the first Code of Ordinances of 1886, as a means of penetrating the city's history and clarifying its political, economic and cultural roles throughout this history.

This study explores the structure of earnings within and across firms and industries to evaluate the evidence for an Efficiency Wage interpretation of the Brazilian labor market utilizing a cross-sectional sample of 100,000 workers from 1000 private, formal-sector Sao Paulo manufacturing firms. Efficiency Wage theories demonstrate the possibility of persistent excess supply of labor associated with high wages originating in the firm's need to motivate workers or select better workers. We find: (i) minimum wages were not a binding constraint, (ii) large, significant inter-industry wage differentials exist after detailed worker quality controls, (iii) inter-industry differentials are highly correlated with similar estimates for the U.S. We also test the principal challenge to Efficiency Wage theories, Lazear-1981 ("L81"), of unemployment. L81 argues that seniority-wage profiles imply an implicit bond solving the incentive problem due to costly monitoring without the wage premium and rationing of labor supply of Efficiency Wages. L81 profiles imply a negative correlation between starting and ending wages across firms whereas Efficiency Wages implies a positive correlation. From estimated firm-level earnings functions we calculate predicted starting and ending wages and compute their cross-firm correlations. Going within firms and schooling segments purges the estimated tenure coefficients of most bias. Controlling for inter-firm disequilibrium, we find no support for L81 with positive correlations for all but the highly educated. Lastly we examine the correlates of high wage firms. Predicted wages are regressed onto firm and industry characteristics. We find that high wage firms tend to be multinational, concentrated, are principally sellers of final goods, those goods are consumer durables and that only uneducated, unskilled workers receive a clear return to capital. The evidence examined supports the hypothesis that for most Formal Sector firms the labor market does not clear. The evidence is generally inconsistent with temporary disequilibrium due to structural changes and consistent with a stable Efficiency equilibrium of rigid, high wages and excess labor supply.

Although sustainable frameworks for transportation have been widely discussed in the transportation planning field in recent decades, the issue of equity in transportation systems is still relatively unexplored in comparison to the other pillars of sustainability. Globally, the concept of equity gains different nuances in developed and developing countries, and have yet new implications when considering fast emerging nations. The objective of this paper is to investigate how transit policies in fast emerging economies are used to distribute equitable access to benefits and opportunities; and to derive lessons that can orient future cohorts of emerging cities and countries to use transit as means to provide equitable improvements in accessibility. Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC countries) have been treated as a unit since the turn of the millennium when economic analysts noticed similar patterns of extraordinary productivity and growth, and are the forerunners of a group of nations expected to become major economic actors on the global stage in a few decades. Case studies on the most populous and prominent metropolises of the BRIC countries were conducted, exploring three aspects of transit systems as they impact equity: system ownership and planning processes; mode predominance and choices; and fare structures and collection methods. Sao Paulo, Moscow, Mumbai and Shanghai were selected as case studies subjects because of their location in those fast emerging nations and because of their status as recognized global cities. This investigation revealed emerging nations are trying to equip their transit systems to deal with the pressures of growing population size and density, rising incomes, increasing rates of private automobile ownership and sprawling land use patterns. In order to cope with this new and fast changing environment, subjects sought to engage in long-range transportation planning, partnered with private entities for the provision of capital investment or operations, acted to strengthen (or implement) heavy rail as the anchor-mode, and moved towards automated fare collection methods. Lessons derived from these cities will serve to provide guidelines to equitable transit programs in fast emerging cities across the developed world that facing similar pressures, and to orient future research towards more complete economic efficiency evaluations of transit systems in emerging countries.

The phenomena of "children in specially difficult situations" (UNICEF) are increasingly national socioeconomic indicators. Societal response has been characterized by inaccurate definitions, poor planning, ineffective and self-serving programs. This also occurs in Brazil: 6,000,000 children are of/on the streets. An innovative field study was one of health of 77 street children, 7-19 years in Sao Paulo and Curitiba, Brazil. Foci included a mental and physical exam, an existential assessment, and selected interviews with professionals. Findings include the children's essential ordinariness; they showed less than expected, mostly situational, health pathologies, consciousness of their life circumstances and the hope necessary for daily life and anticipation of adulthood. In their context, these are healthy children and youth. In general, violence and drug use are endemic and there is AIDS awareness. Many children continue and/or reproduce family relationships, complementing it with strong peer connections. Significantly, prejudicial ideologies seem to prevent professionals from accurate assessment.

Policing is widely understood, empirically and theoretically, as a core function of the state. Much of the knowledge presumes that police are the only body that may kill and arbitrate killing, routinely and without retaliation from contesting parties, as a means of establishing and maintaining a legitimate legal order. This dissertation examines an urban circumstance where killing and its regulation is not simply the realm of police. São Paulo, Brazil is a city with parallel normative logics of killing. Via ethnographic research with homicide detectives, I examine these two logics: homicides and police killings known as resistencias. Under democratic restructuring, with failing public security and underwritten by historic and spatial inequities inscribed via disparate processes of urbanization and planning, investigations reveal the practice of a 'normal' homicide that is a product of a system of governance in the urban periphery. Killing has become the realm of an organized crime group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). Via a prison-periphery nexus, the PCC determines the moral borderlines of violence in the spaces it controls. In apparent moral contrast, police kill citizens at a rate of roughly one per day. Under the rubric of 'resisting arrest' there is a presumption of guilt for the dead and a presumption of innocence for the shooter. Homicide detectives investigate and arbitrate whether these presumptions are 'appropriate'. When not, a resistencia becomes a homicide and the offending police are arrested on the spot by detectives. I track the 'deservedness' of each logic and find that while the two appear antagonistic, there is often a confluence of imaginaries, coalescing in an implicit and obscured 'killing consensus'. This consensus is consolidated via co-orientation and everyday practices pointing towards mutually understood spatial and moral boundaries of who can be killed, why and where, underpinning a decline in homicides here by more than 75% since 2000. Yet, in a 2012 crisis that consensus was 'killed'. Violence erupted between police and the PCC, rupturing the everyday forms of equilibria that have given this city a false floor of security in recent years. Lastly, I examine how public debate and a modest effort to contribute to it led to contradictory reforms. 

My dissertation examines the representation of Afro-Brazilians within the contemporary culture production of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, specifically in three novels, rap music, and the hip-hop community. The novels form a diverse corpus of works. Two were published during the 1990s by middle-class canonical writers, Subúrbio (1994) by Fernando Bonassi and Cidade de Deus (1997) by Paulo Lins. Bonassi offers a homogenous vision of the margins while Lins presents them as diverse. Yet, both draw on a materialist approach that leads the protagonists toward an apocalyptic conclusion. The third novel was published by a resident of a favela in the outskirts of São Paulo, Graduado em Marginalidade (2004) by Sacolinha. This novel presents a complex and at times contradicting view of favela life. Graduado offers the possibility for social advancement as the novel seeks to redefine race within Brazil. Rap music and the hip-hop community present a critical view of Brazilian culture and history. Through lyrics, musical form, and activism hip-hoppers look to contest, question, and alter established ideas of race in Brazil. Much like Sacolinha’s novel, hip-hoppers redefine race in order to rewrite their future and in the process break from the cycle of violence and drugs that threatens the well-being of Brazil’s most marginalized. Utilizing materialist and postcolonial theories this study explores how these cultural forms contribute toward understanding representations of race within Brazilian urban culture.

Tendo em vista a carência de estudos historiográficos sobre o Varejo de Moda, setor dos mais competitivos e de importância crescente na economia brasileira e reconhecendo os expressivos avanços no poder aquisitivo das classes de menor renda nos últimos anos, o crescente potencial de consumo das classes emergentes tem sustentado a expansão econômica no Brasil , este estudo tem por objetivo evidenciar que historicamente o varejo não ficou imune ao potencial de consumo da população de baixa renda e seja pela ampliação das áreas comerciais, seja pela alteração dos formatos varejistas, seja pela oferta de novos produtos com preços mais acessíveis, procurou atender a essa crescente demanda. Por meio dos grandes varejistas de moda, dos polos comerciais de ruas e dos centros comerciais planejados, como os shopping centers, pretende refletir sobre a oferta mais democrática da moda, particularmente os produtos de vestuário feminino, revelando as políticas e estratégias varejistas que vão ao encontro de camadas mais amplas da população. Assim, a segunda metade do século XX mereceu destaque na pesquisa. Igualmente, examinando os formatos varejistas, as técnicas de vendas, os produtos comercializados, os pontos de venda, as campanhas publicitárias propõem desvelar que o varejo visualizou a desigualdade social inerente ao desenvolvimento do País e encontrou meios de atender à sucessiva demanda dos consumidores de baixa renda. Nesse sentido, são indagações intrínsecas a este estudo: Como a população de baixo poder aquisitivo teve acesso aos produtos de moda? A inserção do consumo de baixa renda deu-se por meio de políticas de vendas? De opções de financiamento? De que forma os preços se tornaram mais acessíveis? Que alterações foram promovidas nos produtos e nos pontos de venda? Há uma estética popular? Qual a participação da publicidade no incentivo ao consumo da moda? É possível perceber que a democratização da moda em São Paulo traduz as singularidades da vida econômica e social dos paulistanos.