Construção civil

The building sector has a significant environmental impact and environmental rating systems could indicate some guidelines for achieving sustainable developments. There are several systems, but the certifications in general are adjusted to peculiar conditions of developing countries. The Brazilian bank Caixa Economica Federal created and is responsible to assign the Selo Casa Azul (“Blue House Seal”). This certification is apparently the most applicable to Brazilian conditions. However, there are few studies about the procedures for analysis of housing projects. The aim of this study is to analyse the adequacy of typical housing developments with respect to Selo Casa Azul criteria by verifying existing facilities and considering the limitations of real projects. This research analyses 13 developments certified by the bank and seven new projects in Caxias do Sul, a city in southern Brazil. As a result, we found that the Selo Casa Azul constitutes a viable tool, demonstrating the relative ease of application. We verify that some criteria were not present in any of these projects and that alignment with Selo's criteria depends on a company's strategy, no matter the economic standard of its buildings. Lastly, we observe that most actions needed to reach unsatisfied criteria may be solved in the design stage, and these modifications do not require large investments. This study aims to contribute to the discussion about sustainable construction in Brazil.

The paper presents a historical overview of the relations between housing, housing finance and capital markets in Brazil, while embedding it into an analysis of the recently launched housing program My House My Life (MCMV). Considering the absence of a consolidated market for mortgage finance and a public housing stock, Brazilian financialization doesn't fit standard narratives that have either prioritized US or European experience. Brazilian financialization has been truncated in the sense that it has always depended on the contradictory territorial intervention of a developmental state that has never reached out to lowest income groups.

While MCMV has seen continuities in relation to the housing delivery and finance of the technocratic developmental state in terms of not matching low-income housing targets and priorities of national urban reform, it is argued that contradictions are not inscribed in space. More particularly, where proactive local governments have been able to make use of city statute instruments in order to articulate land delivery, the program has been able to produce affordable and well-located housing units.

Finally, the inherent contradictions of financialization are not likely to lead to subprime crises, contagion and ex-post state rescue operations as occurred in the US and European context. Instead, endogenous state involvement in subsidized housing finance will increasingly face budgetary and monetary restrictions, leading to a relatively soft landing and gradual public withdrawal from low income housing finance. In that sense, MCMV might prove to become another innovation that fails to live up to expectations.

The verticalization of cities impacts the quality of urban life. The empirical investigation of the determinants of the floor-area ratio (FAR) of lots using the traditional econometric approaches, however, has little explanatory power, and research about it using machine learning (ML) is almost nonexistent. This study applies two ensemble machine learning strategies, random forest (RF) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), to investigate the determinants of the FAR of all formally registered multifamily residential lots in the city of Recife, Brazil. Taking into account a collection of key determinants influencing the floor area ratio (FAR), which encompass structural, accessibility, environmental, amenity, and policy variables, the findings reveal that the ensemble random forest approach significantly enhances the explanatory ability of these determinants when compared to conventional strategies like ordinary least squares (OLS) or locally weighted regression (LWR). Although generally in line with traditional urban economic arguments, the evidence also reveals important non-linearities in the effects of the variables on the FAR that are useful for urban planning and public housing policy.

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.

Research on street-level bureaucrats has examined the various ways in which these professionals have implemented public policies in areas such as healthcare, education, and security, often emphasizing the role played by discretion in the implementation process. Despite its importance, the concept of street-level bureaucracy has scarcely been approached by housing studies. This study focuses on the role of street-level workers in the delivery of public housing to the lower-income population. We affirm the value of complementing street-level discretion with the concept of proximity, a premise borrowed from the microfinance literature, to increase the understanding of the interactions and relationships established between street-level workers and policy recipients during the implementation process. Such complementarity may contribute to a more accurate understanding of the housing policy implementation dynamics on the street-level and the possible adjustments to meet local needs. To explore this issue, we used a theoretical lens inspired by Goffman’s frame analysis that points to the importance of relational mechanisms that characterize the interactions between street-level workers and beneficiaries. These lenses were applied to a collective case study of Minha Casa Minha Vida-Entidades, a Brazilian subprogram in which street-level workers linked to social housing movements assume a leading role in the planning and execution of interventions. The results indicate that the combination of proximity and discretion has a positive influence on the implementation of housing policies. Our analysis shows the existence of nonprofit-oriented arrangements that may present different features and nuances at the implementation (micro) level and contribute to the (macro) debate on housing policies.

O presente artigo tem como objetivos (i) mostrar como a experiência de revitalização do Bairro do Recife foi desvirtuada, aproximando-se da tendência de city marketing, entendida como a aceleração da taxa de transformação de certas localidades, com ênfase especulativa sobre imóveis e grandes obras de renomados arquitetos, com importantes repercussões em termos de trânsito de veículos e fluxos de pessoas, e (ii) questionar sobre a legitimidade de projetos que, embora institucionalmente aprovados, comprometem as características de determinadas estruturas espaciais urbanas, como é o caso dos centros históricos.

This article focuses on the struggle of a group of street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil – displaced in the run up to the 2014 World Cup – to claim back their traditionally occupied workspace. Their displacement dramatically ruptured their pursuit of dignified livelihoods in the city’s informal economy. Using prolonged ethnography between 2014 and 2016, I describe how the workers engaged with an affective governance regime in which narrow avenues of negotiation are opened but promises are never kept, generating a constant state of unpredictability and possibility. This cycle of hope and frustration demobilises their resistance movement while their charismatic leader struggles to produce and maintain the hope that they might achieve relocation. This labour of hope keeps their association alive but also generates frustration and further demobilisation. The article foregrounds the ambiguous role played by hope in the life of political movements and their everyday relationships with states.