Estrutura regional e metropolitana

Scholars have documented how financial capital has produced displacement driven by hypermodern urban spaces characterised by luxury and exclusivity. In this article we highlight how hypermodern public–private partnerships (PPPs) often re-write history, creating a futuristic global city image. Our case study of Porto Maravilha’s PPP reviews a dualistic narrative in the context of changes in Rio de Janeiro in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. Porto Maravilha aimed to position Rio de Janeiro as a centre of global competition and capital. However, this narrative re-framed the history of the transatlantic slave trade through discursive tactics that diluted and undermined the brutality of slavery in Rio’s port. Furthermore, this hypermodern PPP reinforced the post-abolition discriminatory urban planning policies that dislodged Africans and Afro-Brazilians from their places of residence, work and culture in the port district. The result is the erasure of the experiences of Black Brazilians in the port area for touristic consumption, selling the city on the world stage. Given this contradiction, we develop the concept of ‘legacy participation’ to secure the rights of Afro-Brazilians and their organisations to make decisions about their own territory.

The Brazilian city of Curitiba has long been recognised as an exemplary success in urban planning, particularly its sustainable urban transport, with modal splits strongly favouring public transit. Its success was achieved principally through rigorous and detailed planning, beginning in the 1970s, using policy tools that have been described, and sometimes criticised, as technocratic. After 40 years of a quite successful experience in transport planning and implementation, Curitiba, like many world cities, faces new challenges, particularly in the form of metropolitanisation and increased aspirations for citizen participation. In this paper we investigate which policy tools are being used to face these emerging challenges in Curitiba, whether they are the same as those used in the past and which led the city to be a recognised urban transport success case, or different, more flexible and participative tools presumed to be more in tune with the emerging context of metropolitanisation and increased demands for participation. The answer, coming from interviews within Curitiba transport representatives, current literature review and limited comparisons with other successful transport cities of the Americas, suggests a continuation of Curitiba’s proactive format, one which has led to its past successes, with some modest overtures to more interactive and participatory policy tools.

With about 12 million inhabitants, São Paulo, Brazil, is the largest city in South America. As in many other major southern hemisphere cities, this extreme concentration of people imposes a number of mobility and security challenges. The objective of this article was to investigate the space-time patterns of mobility and violent victimisation in São Paulo’s metro stations from a gender perspective. The methodology combines use of a Geographical Information System (GIS), statistical analysis through negative binomial regression modelling and hypothesis testing. Results indicate that mobility and the level of victimisation are gender dependent. Women are at higher risk of victimisation than men in São Paulo’s central metro station, while men run higher risk of violence at end stations – both notably during late night periods. The presence of employees reduces the risk of violence, except during the mornings. The article suggests that crime prevention initiatives need to be gender informed and sensitive to the particular spatial and temporal features of rapid transit environments.

The relationship between the state and informal land development in Global South metropolises has yet not received much attention in urban studies. Concerning that knowledge gap, this paper investigates how the state regulates and inspects irregular and clandestine land subdivisions in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte (MRBH). A mixed-methods approach, focused on the inner workings of the land development control policy led by the MRBH Agency between 2009 and 2018, provides new evidence of the relationships between inspectors, developers, and prosecutors, among other actors. By delving deep into the intricate nexus between a changing regulatory landscape and the bureaucratic, street-level, and everyday enforcement practices by officials, the paper reveals how land development control, directly and indirectly, shapes informal land development in the MRBH. Particularly, it sheds light on how land development control unrolls through a contradictory combination of overregulation on one side and tolerance on the other. In light of this, I argue that, as land development control evolves without effectively tackling the land question and the structural drivers of informality, the state becomes paradoxically entangled in the production of the same forms of informality it is expected to curb. Therefore, land development control is better understood as a fragile and ambivalent state compromise between the need to regulate urban expansion and market-driven informal urbanisation. By creating opportunities for rent extraction and capital accumulation which are explored by informal land developers, the state has been crucial for property-led informal urbanisation in metropolitan Brazil.

The paper builds on the results of Clark and Stabler who associated Gibrat's law on the independence of growth rate and city size with unit root tests. The paper proposes a direct test of the unit root hypothesis for firm size based on recently developed panel data unit root tests. The results for a sample of Brazilian cities over the period 1980-2000 favour Gibrat's law. Moreover, the results are robust when one considers sub-samples defined for different population sizes and age of municipality.

The literature on urban financialisation has prioritised the analysis of what finance does in the context of industrialised countries. This paper contributes to an understanding of what it is, and specifically how it emerges from the entanglements between the accumulation of intergovernmental debt, pricing and valuation practices – involving state and municipal utilities, regulatory agencies and consultancies – in the gradual transformation of shared into shareholder water governance in Brazilian metropolitan areas. Moreover, we provide a first illustration of how a more articulate approach between political economics and social studies of finance might contribute to an understanding of the making of urban financialisation, with a particular relevance for a context of less developed capital markets.

This article analyses the influence of both contextual and individual urban characteristics on violence victimisation in Brazilian cities. A multilevel approach is used to capture the effects of the urban contextual variables with respect to the probability of becoming a robbery victim in Brazilian urban centres. The results demonstrate that factors associated with social context, such as proportions of cities’ recent migrants or female-headed households, affect victimisation, as do individual characteristics. Furthermore, based on an analysis of the intra-class correlation coefficients, the context produces a non-negligible amount of variability.

In this article I present the concept of the ‘peripheral condition’ in the context of theoretical discussion on planetary urbanization. Inspired by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's interpretation of urbanization, which draws from Lefebvre's oeuvre, I suggest taking into consideration Robert Kurz's key insights about the internal contradiction of capital. In this study I seek to integrate the ‘critique of value’ theory's crisis-centric approach into the literature on planetary urbanization, as it allows us to move beyond accounts that focus on extensive urbanization through operational landscapes and instead encompass the social relations that accompany it. Consequently, I argue that this comprehension reveals the periphery-form as a relevant idea to qualify discussions on planetary urbanization once an ever-growing population faces situations of precarity that were previously considered restricted to the peripheries. Hence, I suggest that planetary urbanization cannot be fully understood without considering its dark side, the peripheral condition.