Processos de urbanização

Financialisation and housing are predominantly associated to mortgages for homeownership and securitisation techniques. This paper looks at how financial markets influence the development industry, its business strategies, and the nature and location of its products. Adopting a supply-side account, the paper inquires into the rising role of financial markets as a source of funding for a consolidating development industry and its influence on the geography of housing in Brazilian cities. It develops the concept of resonance by combining two yet unrelated strands of literature on the study of financial markets (cultural economy and conventionalist economics). Narratives co-authored by the stock market community and development firms management over each individual firm, and the discursively linked strategic moves of developers, are shown to resonate, at the meso-level of the industry, into shared social representations (or conventions) on how to best assess and interpret the value of development firms. Analysing the wave of Initial Public Offerings occurring in the mid 2000s, the paper highlights that narratives of quick capital gains associated with the removal of the land banking bottleneck faced by developers supported a convention giving priority to the growth in total output, and contributed to the observed changes in the forms, scales and locations of housing projects in Brazilian cities. As discrepancies between the promises of returns for shareholders and actual financial results emerged, the growth convention unravelled, making way for other narratives and strategic moves to resonate anew and possibly change again the geographies of housing.

This essay discusses some key ideas and debates about urban studies in Brazil, considered historiographically, from the mid-1900s to the present. It presents the main components and particularities of what emerges as the Brazilian matrix of urban studies, interrogating the most influential work in the field with the country’s own experiences of industrialisation and urbanisation. It discusses some key urban debates of the 21st century, namely new planning models associated with globalisation, global mega-events, public–private partnerships, inner-city gentrification, housing and city financialisation, rising forms of urban warfare and social control in slums (favelas), and new activisms and urban insurgencies. Through this analysis, we point to contradictions and tensions in relation to European and North American urban theory, calling for the need to formulate new categories and hypotheses to better understand the unequal and extreme processes resulting from violent expansion of capitalist relations over the entire planet, and comment on the new practices and forms of social mobilisation emerging from turbulent contexts.

This essay critically engages with the book Urban Outcasts — A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality by Loïc Wacquant. In this book, studying poor neighborhoods in the United States and France in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wacquant argues that a new socio-economic configuration marked by dualization and polarization of the city and of the class structure has been formed in these metropolises as a result of structural shifts resulting from the breakdown of the Fordist regime and the recoiling of the welfare state. He calls ‘advanced marginality’ the new regime marked by a new form of urban poverty that makes part of the working classes ‘redundant’. This essay highlights the similarities between Wacquant's arguments and those of the theory of marginality of the 1960s and 1970s, which has been criticized and abandoned in Latin America. It also interrogates Wacquant's argument that advanced marginality is what will represent the future of metropolises everywhere, by introducing the case of Brazilian peripheries and asking questions about the increase of violence in poor neighborhoods.

This paper evaluates the perennial question of whether the urban poor in developing countries are autonomous political actors or co-opted tools of patronage. I develop a theoretical interpretation of urban politics, arguing that collective action is shaped by changing configurations of state, economy and civil society. Collective action is expressed in struggles over labor, public goods and political rights — issues of varying salience in different periods of development. The theoretical framework generates a set of propositions which I evaluate with reference to a wide range of secondary evidence. At bottom, the data indicate that collective action varies in form and intensity (militance) with specifiable conditions. Illustratively, clientism did predominate during the ‘developmental decades’ (1960–80) that followed earlier (1930–60) experiences of militant labor conflict and yielded in the current period of neoliberalism to struggles for political rights.

This article analyzes the evolution of the debate on socio-economic vulnerability, both in the United States and France, as well as commenting on the contemporary situation in Brazil. In the US study, which draws on the concept of ‘underclass’, the debate is openly political-ideological — blaming the victims (or not) for their marginalization and anomie — which has made some authors regard the so-called ‘well-being programs’ as responsible for promoting a culture of dependency and family breakdown. In the French study, by contrast and following the republican tradition, both the diagnoses and proposals emphasize the need for a strong state presence to provide a means of reinserting  the  marginalized  groups.  The  article  doesn’t  attempt  a  critical  evaluation of the literature, but making use of seminal works it aims to show that the parameters of the theoretical and empirical problem depend on the particularities of each national political ambience. The final section on Brazilian society focuses on the marginality-dependency debate of the 1970s and on what can be termed a process of disenfranchisement that affects the urban poor. Final comments are made concerning the matrix of extreme inequalities characterizing Brazilian society vis-à-vis the French and American cases.

Cities need law to thrive, but it is not clear how abstract texts become tangible policy outcomes. Existing research on the role of law in urban affairs conceives law as either an algorithm that shapes urban life or a reflection of political disputes. The former assumes that the meaning of law is obvious; the latter claims it is irrelevant. In contrast to these views, I argue that laws are multipurpose instruments that acquire a specific function when enforced by those government agents who operate at the frontlines of public service. To understand what these agents do and why, I conducted a qualitative study of the Ministério Público and the Defensoria Pública in São Paulo, Brazil. Through this process, I found that these government agencies are not cohesive bureaucracies but heterarchies composed of distinct internal factions with different evaluative principles. Moreover, officials within them are not isolated from other entities in society but tightly entangled with them, and these connections influence what these officials do. Finally, enforcement agents are not always resigned to solving conflicts as they arise. Rather, they strive to find acceptable solutions in the interstices of existing conditions or even change the circumstances that created the conflict in the first place.

The 1990s in Brazil were a time of institutional advances in the areas of housing and urban rights following the signing of the new constitution in 1988 that incorporated the principles of the social function of cities and property, recognition of the right to ownership of informal urban squatters and the direct participation of citizens in urban policy decision processes. These propositions are the pillars of the urban reform agenda which, since the creation of the Ministry of Cities by the Lula government, has come under the federal executive branch. This article evaluates the limitations and opportunities involved in implementing this agenda on the basis of two policies proposed by the ministry — the National Cities Council and the campaign for Participatory Master Plans — focusing the analysis on government organization in the area of urban development in its relationship with the political system and the characteristics of Brazilian democracy.