Habitação

This paper evaluates the compatibility of public–private partnerships (PPP) for housing in Brazil with the notion of the right to the city, enshrined in the Constitution. A 3-year investigation of the country’s first housing PPP, Casa Paulista, located in downtown São Paulo city, informs the analysis. Drawing from the international debate on the right to the city and its application in Brazil, I offer a definition of the term that transcends the notion of rights-based policy, and implies urban dwellers’ appropriation of urban production and city space. While failing to scale up centrally located housing delivery, the PPP facilitates a new housing regime marked by the decreased ability of citizens, particularly grassroots movements, to appropriate housing production, directly contradicting the right to the city ideal. Finally, I describe an outcome from this new regime—an ad hoc and opaque system of public land allocation for PPP housing developments.

Rights-based urban social movements have proliferated since the mid-1970s, but our understanding of their real impacts remains insufficient. Using the housing movements in São Paulo as an example, the article demonstrates both the limits and the strengths of the rights-based approach. It argues that housing movements in São Paulo must be understood in the global context of the coexistence of two contradictory trajectories: the neoliberal urbanism and the rights-based movements. While the rights-based approach has yet to bring fundamental changes to the unequal housing distribution in Brazil, it provides the housing movements with new legal and institutional devices to justify their actions and influence the policy process, thus contributing to the unusual resilience and scale of the movements. The article reveals that the gap between rights promised and rights delivered can be utilized as a political opportunity for facilitating collective mobilization, contesting neoliberalism, and advancing new conceptions of citizenship.

In the Global South, the notion of the right to the city has increasingly been used to challenge the effects of uneven development on vulnerable informal residents. Yet, under a neoliberal spatial regime, acknowledging rights of informal residents does not necessarily lead to increasing access to the opportunities that cities produce. The article documents a contradictory process of,simultaneously, institutionalization of rights and implementation of profit-driven urban investments associated with 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. It is based on local-level, case-specific analysis of a dispute around the mega-event mobility investments and the demands of residents of Lagamar— a low-income, informal community in Fortaleza— adopting participant observation methods during a 3-year field research period. The case illustrates how Brazilian right to the city policies have gone beyond the mere recognition of land rights of informal residents, yet they have fallen short of addressing the needs of the urban poor, highlighting the role of mega-event investments in this process. The contradiction of simultaneously expanding and eroding the rights of the urban poor in Brazil has given room for manipulative state practices that I have called “undoing the right to the city.”

Brazilian housing movements often use the slogan “a home is an entryway to all other rights,” which embodies the belief that a secure home is just the beginning of claiming the rights of citizenship. These movements rejoiced when President Lula da Silva came to office in the 2000s and enacted social programs meant to reshape the relationship between citizens, the state, and the market. But how did reform of social programs prove to be empowering of individuals and transformative in urban governance? In this paper, I evaluate how the Minha Casa Minha Vida Entidades Program, based on the principles of auto-gestão (self-management), shaped feelings of self-efficacy and civic participation of residents at the time of construction and beyond. Through interviews and surveys with residents in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador, I find their experiences led to feelings of empowerment and many sought to work collaboratively to make further claims of the state. These individual and community-level transformations may also be the start of greater movement toward the right to the city across Brazil.

Data from the First Census of Homeless People in the City of São Paulo, carried out in 2000, show that the spatial distribution of this population is not random and points to a number of high-incidence districts. The authors estimated a regression model that related this distribution to a series of indicators. The values found appear to confirm, initially, the relationship between the spatial distribution of street people and the presence of verticalized premises for use by commercial establishments and services, the presence of people not living in the districts, and the per capita income of families living in the districts.

It is usually considered that urban policy change happens gradually or abruptly, provoked by coalition shifts, political pressure, or by agenda changes in public policies. However, a broad set of urban policies in São Paulo, Brazil shows the relevance of the third kind of oscillating trajectory not yet accounted for by the literature. Departing from compared urban policies in São Paulo, this article shows incremental progressive trends due jointly to political competition (pushed by progressive governments) and policy production itself. While some programs entered the agenda to stay, others swung between implementation, latency, and reanimation. To investigate these processes, we compare four programs—(a) in situ slum upgrading and (b) bus integration (gradually imposing themselves), (c) cooperative housing construction, and (d) bus lanes/corridors (oscillating between latency and reanimation). The results challenge explanations of urban policy change, contributing to closer dialogues between urban studies and political science.

This research note seeks to update our understanding of the factors that influence shifts in social movement strategies. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, I assess the role of crisis in whether and how social movements reshape their strategies and perhaps redefine their fight for the right to the city. Though previous research has shown the importance of political opportunities and ideology for social movement strategies, we need to reassess these variables and the direction of change in times of crisis. Using the case of the Union of Housing Movements in São Paulo, I find that though the tactics of the movement responded to a conflictual relationship at the federal level and a need to meet immediate needs of members, the ideology of the movement provided the structure for continuing to engage in inclusionary governance strategies and renewed energy for transformational change.

O presente artigo visa discutir como os processos de neoliberalização se fazem presentes na gestão urbana municipalista. Esses processos podem ser observados na privatização de espaços e nos modelos de gestão implantados, principalmente a partir dos anos 1990, quando os condomínios fechados se destacaram no mercado imobiliário. No texto, são apresentados conceitos gerais, referentes a esses processos, e seus impactos na governança das cidades. Ao longo da discussão, os conceitos são analisados no contexto da cidadania e das peculiaridades do federalismo municipalista brasileiro. Por fim, é discutido se a descentralização favoreceu ou não as políticas neoliberais no âmbito da gestão municipal, bem como nas propostas de participação popular elencadas pelo direito à cidade traçado depois da Constituição de 1988. O texto, ao analisar o municipalismo e a privatização da gestão urbana, exemplifica a discussão com casos da Região Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte.