Processos de urbanização

This dissertation focuses attention on the relation between urban land rent and the reproduction of labor force, with concrete evidence from the city of Sao Paulo. In the capitalist city, the living conditions of the population are conditioned, to a great extent, by the process of appropriation of general conditions of (re)production such as transportation facilities, sanitation, education, etc. Since the distribution of these conditions is fixed in space, the urban land becomes a necessary condition for the reproduction of labor and capital. However, land is a condition subject to private property relations. Therefore, the useful effects attached to each property is subject to a monopoly of appropriation by the landowner. In economic terms, this appropriation is translated into rent, or land prices. In this dissertation we attempt to demonstrate that this price becomes an obstacle to the process of labor force reproduction. Such demonstration involves both a theoretical detour on the theory of rent, and a concrete analysis of the reproduction of labor force in the City of Sao Paulo. In this study, the theory of rent is interpreted from the perspective of the labor theory of value. We provide a detailed interpretation of Ricardo's and Marx's contributions, and a critical review of the literature on the subject, particularly those works that have attempted to apply the theory to the urban situation. We suggest an alternative explanation for the classicals' concepts of absolute, differential, and monopoly rent. This alternative interpretation involves the conceptualization of the general conditions of production and an analysis of their importance in the formation of the urban land market structure. The relation between the general conditions of (re)production and urban living conditions is examined in some detailed at both the theoretical and concrete levels. The empirical evidence is taken from the city of Sao Paulo. Finally, with the help of secondary data on land prices, it is attempted to demonstrate how the process of appropriation of the urban built environment is mediated by the power of land property relations. The results obtained strongly suggest that the process of exploitation of labor force involves not only the extraction of surplus-value, but also a series of extortions outside the working place. Underlying these extortions is the process of social segregation of the population in space via the land market mechanisms.

Working where social and labor history intersect with political and electoral history, this dissertation challenges the prevailing consensus on Latin American populism which portrayed a passive working class manipulated by the state and elites. A community- level study of the ABC region of greater Sao Paulo, this dissertation focuses on the internal dynamics and external relationships that underlay the emergence of a populist project, rhetoric, and political system. The anarchist anti-politics of Sao Paulo's emerging labor move- ment in the First Republic was shaped by employer/state repression and the disproportionate influence, within the workers' movement, of non-factory labor. The politicization of labor's strategies after 1920, exemplified by its search for non-working-class allies, reflected labor's organizing difficulties and the needs of a growing industrial working class. The legalization of a form of government-linked trade unionism after 1930, although restrictive, offered workers' new possibilities while industrialists resisted state intervention in labor relations; thus creating a partial coincidence of interests between labor and a centralizing national state. This potential working-class constituency underlay the emerging populist project of president Getulio Vargas. Marginalized by his elite opponents in 1945, Vargas gambled boldly by massively enfran- chising and mobilizing urban workers. Workers' widespread popular getulismo coincided with a class politics based on trade unions and the Communist Party of Luis Carlos Prestes- which, together with Getulio's Brazilian Labor Party, received three-quarters of ABC's votes. The subsequent explosion of working-class militancy and aggres- sive trade unionism contradicts the prevailing view of a corporatist unionism dependent upon the state. While triggering an anti-populist backlash by the elite, the newly-mobilized urban working-class vote became the basis for the upset victory of Adhemar de Barros in the 1947 state gubernatorial elections. In ending traditional boss rule, Adhemar's victory set the terms for the state's unique political system during the populist republic that was ended in 1964. With the labor left curbed in 1948, a transi- tion took place to a fully populist electoral system within ABC which revolved around a new relationship between workers and the middle class.

The objective of this thesis is to study the industrial wastewater pollution problem in Metropolitan Sao Paulo, Brazil, and to examine the applicability and consequences of alternative solutions for the problem, other than the traditional end-of-pipe approaches. After a brief description of the area, and identification of the interested parties, we presented several case studies of firms that adopted in-plant control measures designed to abate pollution, that were regarded as much cheaper than paying the user's charges to the public utility that owns the central treatment system. A methodology is proposed for estimating the industrial wastewater pollution loads in the region, taking into account the technological change and price elasticity of demand effects, using an input-output framework. Finally, the concept of near-optimality applied to the analysis of the industrial waste pollution control problem is discussed, using two case studies to illustrate the approach and its implications to the interested parties.

Health effects from air pollution are a top ten cause of disability worldwide. Although research has linked air pollution to health, critical questions remain. This work examines key aspects of air pollution's impact on human health, including: (1) use of regional air quality modeling to estimate air pollution exposure in the United States (U.S.) for use in health studies; (2) relationships between air pollution and hospital admissions in the U.S., including estimates for populations and locations that cannot be studied using monitoring data alone; and (3) factors affecting vulnerability to health effects from air pollution exposure in São Paulo, Brazil. Most epidemiological studies use ambient monitors to estimate air pollution exposure, and while there is a growing body of research in industrializing nations, studies tend to be concentrated in North America and Europe. Use of ambient monitoring data is an efficient approach but restricts studies to locations and populations near monitors. The first project investigates the use of an emerging method, regional air quality modeling, to estimate air pollutant exposure in the U.S. The second project investigates the hypothesis that relationships between air pollution and health are not fully captured in studies relying exclusively on monitoring data, by using modeled and measured exposures to estimate health effects for populations without monitoring data. The third project investigates vulnerability to air pollution-related mortality in São Paulo, Brazil by sex, age, education, race, marital status, and neighborhood-level socioeconomic status (SES). I also examine whether the relationship between air pollution and mortality differs depending on the location at time of death, e.g., in-hospital versus out of hospital. Results from the first project demonstrate that exposure estimates derived from regional air quality modeling covered 50% more population compared to monitor-derived estimates. Counties with monitors were more urban, with a higher percentage of college graduates, and lower percentage of individuals living in poverty. Modeled estimates provided higher spatial and temporal resolutions, but model performance varied by pollutant, season, and location. Air quality models allow estimation of air pollution exposure for populations that differ demographically from those near monitors, but model output also have temporal and spatial biases that should be considered. The second project utilizes air quality modeling to estimate exposures and health impacts in areas and times with and without monitoring data, evaluate possible effect modification by community-specific characteristics (e.g., urbanicity, income), and investigate health effect estimates associated with short-term cumulative exposures. Higher cardiovascular effect estimates were observed in more urban counties. Compared to single day lags, higher respiratory health effect estimates were observed for multi-day lags measuring short-term cumulative exposures. Lag structures differed for respiratory and cardiovascular hospital admissions: the highest effect estimate for cardiovascular hospitalizations was observed at lag 01 (0.89% [PI: 0.51%, 1.28%] per 10µg/m3 PM2.5 [particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter ≤2.5μ]), while the highest effect estimate for respiratory hospitalizations was observed at lag 06 (2.47% [0.29%, 4.69%] per 10µg/m3 PM2.5 ). Timing and pattern of exposure and health impacts may differ for respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes, and respiratory effect estimates based on a single day of exposure could underestimate the true effect. The third project contributes to knowledge of air pollution and health in São Paulo by investigating the role of individual- and community-level characteristics and the relationship between air pollution and mortality. Higher effect estimates for non-accidental mortality were observed for those with lower education: effects were 1.66% (0.23%, 3.08%), 1.51% (0.51%, 2.51%), and 2.82% (0.23%, 5.35%) higher for NO2, SO2, and CO exposure, respectively, in those with no education compared to those with postsecondary education. For cardiovascular mortality and PM10 exposure, effect estimates were 3.74% [0.044%, 7.30%] higher for no education compared to those with postsecondary education. Educational attainment is correlated with SES, but consistent trends of increasing health risks associated with pollutant exposure and residential SES were not observed. Positive, statistically significant associations between all air pollutants and mortality were observed for in-hospital deaths, whereas non-hospital deaths generally exhibited positive but not statistically significant associations. Scientific understanding of how air pollution affects health, including potentially vulnerable populations, requires new methods and analysis to answer questions that cannot be addressed with traditional approaches. Benefits from this research include the ability to estimate exposures for populations in times and locations without ambient monitors. This work provides some of the first estimates of air pollution-health risk using ambient modeling, estimates of risk for understudied rural populations, and potentially improved estimates for urban settings. The findings also provide evidence regarding which populations face the highest health burdens from air pollution.

Between 1930 and 1955 São Paulo, Brazil experienced a period of accelerated growth as the population nearly quadrupled from 550,000 to two million. In response, the municipal government undertook an aggressive public works program and commercial building boomed. Photographic representations of the cityscape were essential in directing modern São Paulo's physical evolution because they reflected both the real—a chaotically growing megacity—and the ideal—a literally new, modernized space. This dissertation centers on four case studies of artists practicing different photographic modalities in order to analyze the symbiotic relationship between São Paulo's urban development and its photographic representation. Construction sites, scaffolding, and building materials were ubiquitous in modern Paulistano visual culture. Chapter one discusses photography's incorporation of construction materials and processes through the fine art photography of Geraldo de Barros, arguing that these elements framed the way the city was seen and interpreted, offered new viewpoints, and shaped the city's identity as a space continually in-process. Chapter two builds on this foundation, explaining how photographs of skyscrapers (both those already built and those still under-construction) by early Brazilian photojournalist Hildegarde Rosenthal fueled ufanista, or patriotic, rhetoric that promoted São Paulo as an icon of national progress and located its modernity in its vertical rise. This chapter also examines the relationship between words and photographs in the popular press, suggesting that the city itself transformed into a text to be read as it was navigated. Evaluating the role of São Paulo's citizens in determining the shape of their city, chapter three analyzes photographs published in albums heralding the city's four hundredth anniversary in 1954. The books overwhelmingly linked regional modernism to a European legacy that excluded many Paulistanos on the basis of race, class, or gender. I argue that marginalizing these groups also marginalized their civic interests, altering the urban landscape. Documentary photographer Alice Brill's production is an exception to this rule and demonstrates a rare example of the "social documentary" mode operating in Brazil. Finally, the fourth chapter traces the development of São Paulo's advertising industry via the commercial photography of Hans Gunter Flieg, explaining how the broad definition of the term "propaganda" in Portuguese serves to link the country's public and private sectors. Here, my analysis focuses on advertising photographs that exploited urban imagery and embellished public space.

How does a city become a city? This dissertation offers an answer by explaining São Paulo’s rapid transition from village to metropolis. More precisely, it examines the Brazilian city’s theaters between 1854 and 1924 to elucidate how Paulistanos adapted to their nascent mass society. As hundreds of thousands of immigrants and migrants poured into São Paulo, residents from across the social spectrum turned to theaters for entertainment, community, and social uplift. It was inside São Paulo’s theaters, the dissertation argues, that different groups began to articulate and realize their own vision for an urban public, that is, a social body fit for the crowds and visibility of city life. To understand what this social body entailed, I analyze three groups of theater producers: government officials, associational leaders, and businessmen. I show that, while no single notion of an urban public spanned all of the producers examined, most agreed on the need for the orderly juxtaposition of individuals through a shared understanding of “culture.” Theaters in this manner offered Paulistanos the possibility of rethinking social transformation: not only could culture be learned by all Paulistanos, meaning that men and women of every age and background took part in the urban public, but it could also be learned and defined outside the church and home. In other words, by taking advantage of São Paulo’s minimally regulated growth to erect their own mass spaces, theater producers situated social transformation in the secular public arena and within reach of most Paulistanos. In explaining the mechanisms by which theater producers did so, this dissertation illuminates how Paulistanos shaped on a mass scale the social categories and norms of the inchoate metropolis.

This dissertation analyzes the physical expression of modernity through two overlapping narratives: the emergence of women in public spaces of leisure in Brazil, and the history of movie-going in its largest city, São Paulo. In the early and mid-twentieth century, both cinemas and movie-going women were powerful symbols of what was modern in Brazil. Cinemas screened the latest Hollywood films and imported advanced projection technologies. The presence of women in cinemas, streets, and shops signaled Brazil's entry into a cosmopolitan culture that was represented in glamorized images of Paris and New York. The focus on movie-going rather than movie-making reveals how modernity was physically constructed in the built space of cinemas, in the slender bodies of fashionable women, in the "photogenic" gestures of actors, and in the practices of everyday moviegoers. It also emphasizes the transnational dimensions of local film culture as Brazilian movie fans wrote letters to their favorite stars and interpreted the images of Hollywood. The geographic, material, and social accessibility of movie-going offers the opportunity to analyze how people of various class and racial backgrounds came together within cinemas, simultaneously sharing spaces and creating difference. An investigation of class in cinemas reveals the history of middle-class culture in Brazil, and how it was constructed through rituals of dating and images of romance. Through the close analysis of diverse sources such as photographs, blueprints, oral history, and literature, this dissertation examines how modern girls and cinema kings, Catholic women's societies and shopgirls, municipal officials and everyday moviegoers, constructed modernity in Brazil through their interaction with cinema.

This project examines Brazilian debates and projects of modernization during the Second Empire. To date, no such study has been undertaken; the majority of works that treat this subject center on European and North American influences, or on strictly economic components of modernization. By contrast, this project recovers an endogenous discourse, relying on government reports, government-sponsored journals, and manuscripts for a view of the "official" discourse on modernization, while letters to the editor, illustrations and advertisements, and caricatures provide insight into "public" responses. The first chapter locates and analyzes a Brazilian vocabulary of modernization; a key term was aperfeiçoar meaning "to improve or perfect." Aperfeiçoar conveyed an Enlightenment sensibility, and best captured the cautious approach of elite Brazilians towards modernization; they wanted the improvements of the modern age, but without the revolutionary consequences that often resulted from technological and social change. The challenges of building and improving the transportation network in the challenging topography and climatic conditions of this tropical nation comprise chapter two. On this topic, government officials and members of the public agreed: the deplorable state of transportation networks required immediate remedy. A discussion of the supporting technologies that developed, or failed to develop, around the transportation sector is included. Subsequent chapters examine efforts to develop native forest resources in support of domestic and international industrial production, and the parallel need to reform Brazilian agriculture. It was hoped that mechanized agricultural production would reduce the presence of slave laborers on plantations and farms in addition to ending slash-and-burn agriculture. This last practice was blamed for environmental and social problems, including the devaluation of land after its initial fertility was exhausted. An examination of Brazilian agricultural technology completes this chapter. The final chapter turns to the public sphere for responses to the arrival of Brazil's first railways, street trolleys, and factories. Conflicts between workers and passengers revealed social and class tensions. These interactions enliven the transformations then unfolding in Brazil, and offer a distinctly human voice to counter and complement more statistically derived economic analyses.

This study examines economic forces contributing toward the current shifts in manufacturing production away from Metropolitan São Paulo in São Paulo state. Locational pressures on manufacturing plants are explored in terms of the trade-off between productivity advantages due to lower wages in outlying areas. Spatial variations in productivity are examined using data for new manufacturing plants in Sao Paulo state. The analysis suggests that Metropolitan Sao Paulo has substantial agglomeration economies which enhance plant productivity. But, analysis of spatial variations in wages in Sao Paulo state shows that wages are substantially lower outside the metropolitan region, and result in substantially lower labor costs for plants in outlying regions. Comparison of the productivity advantages of central areas with the general face an even locational trade-off. The trend of industrial decentralization is consistent with this estimated trade-off. Because industrial decentralization is under way in Sao Paulo state without direct public intervention and, as much as this study could determine, without major distortions to market signals, no further policy intervention is recommend. Procedures for further encouraging the efficient decentralization of industry, nonetheless, are identified.