Estrutura regional e metropolitana

Since the mid-1990s, Brazil has become one of the main recipients of foreign direct investment in the automobile sector. As in the late 1950s and early 1960s, world car manufacturers are investing heavily in the building of new car plants. The renewed interest of car companies in Brazil is a result of the huge and expanding internal market and the relatively stable macroeconomic panorama of the mid-1990s. However, and in contrast to what happened in the 1950s and 1960s, most new car plants are being located outside the São Paulo metropolitan area, the traditional hub of the Brazilian motor industry. Although some argue that, among other reasons, this is the result of lower labour costs elsewhere in Brazil and of improved infrastructure in the country, this article aims to demonstrate that the recent decentralization of the Brazilian motor industry is basically linked to perverse territorial competition among Brazilian states. This sort of territorial competition – known in Brazil as the ‘fiscal wars’– represents a pure waste of resources, both for the states engaged in them, as well as for Brazil as a whole.

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.

Focusing on the labor market outcomes, we present the research methodology discussing the strategy to get rid of the usual identification hypothesis that restricts job locations to the central business district (CBD). Our strategy allows dealing with the simultaneous nature of business and housing locations, and urban prices determination in a richer geographical setting. Before proceeding to that, we look at some stylized facts concerning the spatial structure of our study region.

COVID-19 initially spread among prominent global cities and soon to the urban centers of countries across the globe. While cities are the hotbeds of activities, they also seem highly exposed to global risks including the pandemic. Using the case of COVID-19 and the World Risk Index framework, this paper examines if the leading cities from the global south are inherently vulnerable and exposed to global risks and can they exacerbate the overall risk of their respective nations. Compared against their respective national averages, most of the 20 cities from 10 countries analyzed in this paper, have higher exposure, lower adaptive capacity, higher coping capacity and varied susceptibility. As this relative understanding is based on respective national averages which are often lower than the global standards, even high performance on certain indicators may still result in elevated predisposition. This paper concludes that the leading urban centers from the global south are highly likely to be predisposed to global risks due to their inherent vulnerability and exposure, and many of the drivers of this predisposition are related to the process of urbanization itself. This predisposition can enhance the overall exposure and vulnerability of the nation in which they are located.

This paper interrogates and expands understandings of agency in processes of knowledge circulation by focusing on actors switching their position from the demand-side to the supply side of policy knowledge. In doing so, we contribute to recent debates about the importance of accounting to other scales beyond the local–global binary that dominates the policy mobility literature and to the politics of policy translation and dissemination. Emphasis is given to the performative role of domestic actors and their practices in localising mobile policies of urban regeneration in ‘gateway cities’ while leveraging and recirculating knowledge within their national contexts. Conceptualised as policy brokers and policy entrepreneurs, such actors are attuned to the local dynamics and able to distil context-specific lessons that are sensitive to national regulatory frameworks, funding and political contingencies. We focus on two urban megaprojects of waterfront regeneration in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro that introduced new practices of land monetisation while making use of inter-referencing, drawing on in-depth interviews with policy actors and archival material. We argue that an attention to ‘follow the reformatted model’ reveals how policy models mutate as they conform to contextual factors and to particular interests. The analysis of such processes allows us to transcend the local–global dichotomy and to trace multiscalar connections between multiple projects.

This article examines the mobilisation of spatial media technologies for digitally mapping informal settlements. It argues that digital mapping operates politically through a re-configuration of circulation, power, and territorial formations. Drawing on Stuart Elden’s understanding of territory, where space is ‘rendered’ as a political category, the coming together of digital mapping and the geoweb is uncovered as a political technique re-making territory through computational logics – operating as a calculative practice that, beyond simply representing space, is productive of the political spatiality that characterises territory. The article is based on an analysis of recent attempts by ICT corporates, particularly Google, to map favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, critically examining the claim that digitally mapping informal settlements is a mechanism for socio-economic inclusion. Providing a counterargument to claims around the power of digital maps to incorporate favelas, provide recognition, legitimacy, visibility and citizenship, we discuss how in the interface between digital and urban worlds, territory as a political space is constructed through economic incorporation. In doing so, the article unpacks the spatial politics of digital and smart urbanisms and the emerging sovereignties of digital territories, particularly in the context of the tension between inclusion and exclusion experienced by those who live in informal settlements in cities in the global South.

The notion of planetary urbanization has recently mobilized different strands in the field of urban studies and has generated extensive debates. This emerging research agenda aims to revise inherited concepts and produce a new vocabulary of urbanization through the construction of an ex-centric perspective that dislocates the focus of analysis from its conventional center: the city. The idea of extended urbanization is thus an imperative concept for it operationalizes this theoretical decentering and permits the exploration of urban questions beyond city-centrism, while encompassing urban agglomerations. This article discusses the conception of extended urbanization. We examine its vital insertion into the contemporary agenda of planetary urbanization and present its original formulation in and from Brazil, developed by Roberto Monte-Mór in the 1980s. In order to foster a productive dialogue between these formulations, we discuss the contradictions embedded within the process of extended urbanization and highlight Monte-Mór’s main theoretical and empirical contributions – particularly regarding urban politics and extended citizenship in the Brazilian Amazon. We contend that extended urbanization as formulated in and from Brazil offers important developments and goes far beyond a mere interesting empirical case in and from Brazil. Instead, it illuminates contemporary questions regarding planetary urbanization.