Ciência Política

In this article, we scrutinize the concept of ‘urban informality’ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. By unpacking key moments in Rio’s history when conceptualizations of informal housing (i.e., favelas) changed, we explain why favelas have been understood in different ways over the last century. Our argument is that the concept of informality, while signaling an important shift in how favelas were understood, also perpetuated orientalist epistemologies in theories of urban development. This helps to explain why the term gained traction when it did, as well as why it remains salient today. In Rio, this means that changing understandings of favelas over the last century reveal little about actual changes within favelas, and more about how different geographic imaginaries were projected onto them, reflecting specific ‘problems’ confronting the city at different moments in history. This is important for seeing how conceptualizations of favelas – including the ways we understand urban informality – tend to mirror a host of latent social and political anxieties connected to urban development, including attempts to govern and control informal space.

Este  estudo  compara  certas  características  básicas  da cultura  política  nas  cidades  de  Curitiba  e  Porto  Alegre,  analisando  as suas  diferenças  e  convergências  como  formas  locais  complementares de  manifestação  da  conquista  da  cidadania,  em  distintos  contextos histórico-sociais,  durante  o  processo  de  democratização  da  esfera pública.  Este  trabalho  se  opõe  aos  estudos  empíricos  convencionais da  cultura  política,  inspirados  nas  teorias  da  modernização, argumentando  contra  o  viés  determinista  desses  estudos,  e  os procedimentos  de  hipergeneralização  por  eles  geralmente  adotados. O  estudo  argumenta  por  uma  abordagem  que  retrate  e  interprete  o pluralismo  constitutivo  da  cultura  política,  expresso  no  exercício  da cidadania  durante  os  processos  de  democratização.  

O autor analisa a relação entre a literatura que trata da configuração das instituições democráticas, em décadas recentes, e aqueles trabalhos que abordam as características da cultura política dos espaços urbanos. Argumenta sobre a necessidade de se viabilizar o diálogo entre as perspectivas teóricas culturalista e institucionalista, que, até agora, se desenvolvem de forma paralela e estanque.    

Despite boosting cities and preserving local culture in the face of changes imposed on urban markets in the global south, urban street fairs are territories that are still not well understood. Our objective is to evaluate urban street fairs as a locus of local territorial development from the perspective of the ecosocioeconomy. Methodologically, it is a survey with a sample of 334 on 485 street vendors in Curitiba, complemented by documentary surveys, interviews, and observations in-situ. As a result, urban street fairs are socio-productive arrangements emerging from the interaction among multiple rationalities; street vendors opt for their work due to tradition and preference for trade and not a market limitation; natural products (organic and traditional) are links between ecologically desirable commercial and productive practices. The perspective of ecosocioeconomy captures the material and symbolic constitution and development of urban street fairs as a complex relational territory embedded in the city, with its internalized and externalized interrelations in an urban governance system influenced by different rationalities and constituted by a multiplicity of actors in different spaces and times.

Rio de Janeiro continues to invest significantly in becoming a smart and innovative capital, with the 1746 platform as a cornerstone of this strategy. Aligned with the principle of High-Performance Management in urban governance, the 1746 platform facilitates service requests and complaints, enabling citizens to connect with the municipality through multiple communication channels. This system is intended to generate valuable insights for improving urban management. Contrary to positivist views of technology, this study highlights the emergence of new technopolitical dimensions of injustice linked to data flow management. Its key contribution lies in framing data-driven Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM) systems through the lens of data justice, addressing questions about how data is generated, analyzed, and processed, who benefits or is excluded, and how data relates to a broader social justice agenda. Methodologically, the research adopts a case study approach, integrating quantitative and qualitative methods such as data mining, geospatial analysis, interviews, and content analysis. The research findings reveal that the system has a limited capacity to democratize urban governance in Rio de Janeiro. While it facilitates the communication between citizens and the City Hall, it falls short in influencing long-term urban planning, fostering the inclusion of marginalized groups, and addressing underlying social structures.

Existing studies about the politics of southern cities, particularly Latin American cities, need to pay more attention to the political institutions behind urban governance. These institutions, additionally, were not created by design but are a product of intertwined historical processes. This article analyzes the main features and transformations of Latin American local governments, their politics, and governance, looked at from the angle of their historical formation. Mobilizing arguments from urban studies and political science usually developed apart, I start with the legacies of two intertwined historical processes—urbanization(s) and state formation(s)—to later observe their recent transformations since the recent return(s) to democracy. The reconstruction of these intertwined historical trajectories and of the effects of the present democratic period help to jointly explain the most important features of the politics of local governments in Latin America that influence their governance and actions—capacities, political grammars, actors, and coalitions—as well as their recent transformations.

At a time when cities, particularly large Latin American cities, are increasingly polarized and overcome with violence, and public space has long been pronounced dead, an exceptionally vibrant public realm survives in Rio de Janeiro. In the elite beach neighborhood of Ipanema, residents spend a large part of their free time in public: on the street corner, in bars, and on the beach. Ipanema has a proliferation of what Ray Oldenburg calls “third places” where neighbors, friends, and colleagues plug into and out of an ongoing public social life. But below the idyllic surface lies a conflictual social space stratified along race and class lines. Through an analysis of the discursive construction of the beach, the politics of beach access, and a 15-year old tradition of beach riots, I question the notion—popularized by Oldenburg and others—of public space as the location of an organic civil society that greases the wheels of commerce, promotes democracy, and solves its own problems in the common interest. Rather, I argue that Rio’s famous beach neighborhoods are a key arena of the public sphere where the terms of Rio’s unjust social order are challenged, negotiated, and largely reproduced. Nevertheless, Ipanema’s public space represents political possibility for the otherwise excluded majority.

This article explores how two community-led newspapers in Maré and Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, promoted social resilience in their respective favelas during the first 6 months of COVID-19. We reviewed stories published in both newspapers and interviewed a sample of their journalists to investigate the newspapers’ responses to the pandemic’s effects, government policies (or lack thereof), and resident reactions to evolving virus-related risks during our study period. We employed Keck and Sakdapolrak’s social resilience framework to examine our data and found that the newspapers contributed significantly to the resilience of both communities during our study period. Contrary to the neoliberal view of resilience as self-reliance, these newspapers sought instead to encourage sustained collective agency and to challenge oppressive governance through generative activities and advocacy. Our findings deepen understanding of the role of community-organized activities in marginalized populations’ struggles to assert their right to the city, particularly during crises.

This article explores Rio’s housing policy transformation over the past 2 decades to reveal how it has contributed to rendering evictions and relocations possible and acceptable in the wake of mega-events. Theoretically, the article adopts actor-network theory (ANT) and the political sociology of public policy instruments (PPI) and delves into the unfolding of Rio’s slum upgrading instrumentation from 1993 to 2012. This article argues that the weakening of slum upgrading as a central policy instrument to address Rio’s housing problem together with the reemergence of housing construction as a suitable solution have contributed to the development evictions and relocations in the wake of mega-events. Therefore, the article highlights that evictions relate not only to capitalist accumulation and the neoliberal paradigm but also to other dynamics, contributing to a more nuanced account of Rio’s urban transformations in recent years.

Why do local governments produce redistributive urban policies, particularly in cities of the Global South? Present debates oscillate between highlighting these cities’ governmental problems or sustaining the enabling role of institutionalized social participation. From the standpoint of São Paulo, Brazil, this article shows a different picture. The trajectories of 27 redistributive urban programs follow a conflictive and incremental expansion and diversification of redistributive policies through time. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) techniques indicate that program creation usually happened in left-wing administrations. Most of them were maintained after government swings, although at lower pace, due mainly to the pressure of political competition, but also on account of multi-level politics and policy routinization. Even previously discontinued programs tended to reemerge later, due to the embeddedness of civil society actors in policy communities and multi-level politics. Therefore, trajectories were explained by a combination of partisan politics and median voter mechanisms with policy production processes and actors.