Solo urbano

Small municipalities are key to reducing waste and tackling climate change, but they often struggle to innovate and improve their capacity to deliver public services, especially in developing countries. This article explores how small municipalities can innovate in public service provision despite limited resources. Specifically, we analyzed municipal solid waste management (MSWM), a service typically overseen by municipalities and essential for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The study is based on a single case: Harmonia, a small Brazilian municipality selected for its exceptional waste recovery performance – the highest in the country – alongside composting and prevention initiatives. Following an economic and environmental assessment of MSWM effectiveness, including GHG emissions, the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) was applied to analyze the political, social, and institutional factors that enabled innovation in Harmonia’s MSWM system. Findings suggest that successful innovation in small municipalities tends to rely on small-scale initiatives that require neither advanced technologies nor major investments. However, this depends on long-term support from a landscape of actors and public policies to scale up and coordinate efforts across departments, overcoming resource limitations. In Harmonia, the effectiveness of prevention actions, home composting, and recycling was rooted in decades of environmental education, social engagement, public awareness, and collaboration with other levels of government. These technological and management efforts led to costs (US$24.40 per inhabitant/year) and emissions (37.02 kg CO2eq per inhabitant) significantly below the national average (US$35.70 and 396.83 kg CO2eq per inhabitant, respectively).

This paper is about changes in people's perceptions relating to security of land tenure in Recife, Brazil. This paper investigates why people living in contested settlements invest and consolidate their houses despite the apparent lack of land tenure security. The question is very simple, but the answer is highly complex. Although the topic has been widely researched, there is still insufficient understanding of what security means to individual households, and how security influences the consolidation and improvements of houses. Households invest in all kinds of processes and commodities to improve their plots, and their houses, and inevitably this changes their perceptions of security. Data were mainly gathered from in-depth interviews held with a total of 63 households living in five different informal settlements in Recife. The paper focuses on the informal claims made by households about their perceived rights over their property, since for the great majority of the households living in these settlements, property rights in the form of title deeds are not available. The key aspects highlighted in this papers are that (1) the lack of a better understanding about what tenure really means to low-income households can pose threats to the survival of low-income housing markets, and (2) contrary to orthodox knowledge, the paper contends that perceptions of tenure security increase as a result of housing consolidation.

The main purpose of this paper is to ascertain whether the concession of real right to use (CRRU) has been widely applied by Brazilian municipalities, and the extent to which beneficiaries (individuals living in regularised low-income settlements) make effective use of such an instrument to secure tenure status. Another relevant aspect is to review the relationship between securing land tenure and the use of land as collateral for investment. It is hoped that the paper can be used as the basis for a longitudinal study to monitor progress in the provision of secure tenure for the urban poor in Brazil, by investigating the strengths and weakness of CRRU to the formulation and implementation of pro-poor urban land tenure policies. Findings indicate that municipalities have to overcome problems related to the implementation of these programmes, such as; resistance on the part of the judiciary (at the municipal level) to incorporate newly acquired rights; the need to change attitudes towards the legalisation process of occupied land; and the need to change residents’ perceptions of this new instrument. The success of CRRU can depend on the articulation of these issues, as well as more integrated actions among planners, lawyers, city managers, and the residents of these settlements to advance performance.

In the context of the complexities related to the expansion of the planet's urban areas and sustainability, the aim of this article is to analyze the Muepo/Riortas Project, an initiative developed between 1989 and 1996 by the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) in partnership with the Brazilian National Agricultural Society (SNA) and Rio de Janeiro's Superintendency for the Environment. After conducting interviews with the coordinators and community leaders involved and analyzing technical reports produced by Rio's City Hall and PUC-Rio, the project's main lines of action were identified as the following: the political issues, sustainable soil productivity, range of vegetable species and economic viability of community allotments. The project addressed fundamental issues, such as the need for planning tools in order to guarantee the continuous production of a range of vegetable species over time and to maintain and expand the productive capacity of the soil through organic cultivation methods. The number of allotments established by the project was much lower than the 15 that were planned. Two units were opened during the period analyzed: the Allotment School and the Santa Cruz Community Allotment. Production at the Allotment School, located at the Wenceslau Bello School of Horticulture, involved the weekly harvest and sale of 250x2.5 kg vegetable bags for two years running. This was enough to guarantee the allotment's economic sustainability. The Santa Cruz Community Allotment, however, did not manage to achieve economic viability over the period analyzed. Technical issues associated with the planning and management of the soil were addressed well, but empowerment mechanisms and community involvement proved to be weak during the installation and maintenance of the allotment. In summary, the Muepo/Riortas Project has established new a paradigm for urban community allotments and should form the basis for any future multidisciplinary research seeking integrated solutions for the creation of more sustainable cities.

The city of São Paulo, home to 11 million people, suffers constantly the effects of  flooding caused by extreme precipitation. Localized floods occur every summer in various parts of the city. Besides the losses and inconvenience felt by the residents, floods produce damages that cross the city boundaries, affecting income and output in the metropolitan area as well as in other parts of the state and the country. The objective of this study is to evaluate the economic impacts of floods in the city of São Paulo through the use of a Spatial Computable General Equilibrium (SCGE) model integrated to GIS information related to the location of points of floods and the firms within their influence. It is estimated that floods contributed to reduce city growth and residents' welfare, as well as hampering local competitiveness in both domestic and international markets. An intra-city total impact-damage ratio of 2.2 and an economywide total impact-damage ratio of 5.0 were found.

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.

Waste pickers all over the world work innovatively to reduce the environmental footprint of cities as they struggle to meet their critical livelihood obligations. Informed by the case of waste picker organizations (WPOs) this article examines how grassroots initiatives and extreme-niche innovations are created and sustained by mobilizing resources, rationales and relations. The study is informed by a cross-national survey and in-depth interviews with WPOs in Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Kenya and Tanzania, and builds upon theories of grassroots innovation movements. The findings show how operating in contexts of extreme scarcity, these grassroots organisations tap into local resources, e.g. tacit knowledge, economies of affection and other socially embedded institutional resources. Blending material and environmental rationales, contributes to expanding their audiences and to gaining further support. In such deprived urban contexts, radical and cumulative crises and events hindering residents’ livelihoods can paradoxically also spark ingenuity out of necessity, and the transformation of these settings into extreme niches of innovation. Finally, the mobilization of relations through the formation of networks linking WPOs with supportive intermediaries and global circuits of solidarity becomes another fundamental resilience strategy by which WPOs can navigate contested environments and insert their extreme-niche innovations in governmental structures. By simultaneously adopting a broad repertoire of strategies of insertion, contention, and mobilization WPO and their innovations thrive in highly constrained environments. We conclude with reflecting on how ‘extreme’ niches of innovation − at the cracks of the formal city, economy and waste systems − can unleash the creative power of stigmatized, illiterate and neglected grassroots to experiment with new solutions in resource-poor environments.

In this paper I argue that global urbanism produces peripherality in ways that cannot be adequately problematized without taking into account its actual extent and geographically uneven development. Therefore, planetary urbanization needs to engage scholarly traditions attuned to regional urbanization if the discourse is to move pastlimitations in the urban globalization canon and its narrow focus on cities. To that end, I examine research on extensive urbanization in the Amazon region. Illustrative case studies show how attempts to globalize Manaus precipitated territorial restructuring and sociospatial change far beyond the city’s boundaries. Manaus is now a more unequal city. Selective metropolitan expansion to the Rio Negro’s south bank has led to the simultaneous upgrading and peripheralization of Iranduba. Yet, the building of a city-centric regional network of roadways also shaped Roraima State’s transformation from isolated borderland to by passed periphery. Moreover, financial and symbolic appropriations of standing rainforests by metropolitan conservationism marginalize remote communities even in the absence of exploitative deforestation and resource extraction. Final remarks emphasize the need for further research on the hybrid (urban–rural) conditions andf unctional articulations of distant-yet-impacted peripheries. Such efforts may broadenthe political horizons of planetary urbanization by informing extensive contestations of entrepreneurial urbanism.

The article explores cartographic and statistical registers of poverty as geo-legal technologies operating across shifting visual economies which structure ways of seeing and concealing ‘the poor’ in the urban landscape. Drawing on the fields of critical cartography and digital urbanism, and taking a 2013 controversy around Google Maps’ mapping of favelas in Rio de Janeiro as a starting point, it investigates the aesthetic role of digital maps and data in the legal geographies of urban poverty. It is argued that sociospatial encodings give form to poverty in ways that activate antipoverty responses and continuously support correlations between poverty and criminality. This argument entails a post-representational approach to maps considering their inscriptional, propositional and normative functions. Cartography, statistics and law are interrogated as devices of global governance that work aesthetically to shape poverty and its modes of appearance in the city, i.e., as productive methods of documentation as well as world-making, through which geocodings simultaneously create images of poverty and become functional of spatial transformations. Poverty is thus conceptualized as it is made into an aesthetic category subjected to continuous geo-legal modulations.

This paper explores the entanglement of dreams and reality in the production of economic infrastructures. It focuses on the Manta-Manaus multimodal transport corridor, which is currently being constructed between the Pacific coast of Ecuador and the Atlantic coast of Brazil, with the aim of integrating the Amazon into global production networks. Drawing on extensive field research conducted in Ecuador, we develop a fantastical materialism, as a theoretical and methodological approach to the intertwining of fantasy and materiality through which the spaces of capital are conceived, constructed, and brought to ruin. Manta-Manaus is revealed not only as a technocratic accumulation strategy, but also as a seductive dream of planetary integration and geographical freedom. This dream has become ensnarled in the material dynamics of uneven geographical development, and its infrastructures have been repurposed for the expansion of the oil frontier. The Real of Capital thus advances through the creative destruction of its own fantasies.