Direito

The entrepreneurial city discourse has been adopted around the globe by policymakers, with the urban redevelopment project as one of its most representative symbols. The predominantly favourable discourse revolving around this new political economy of urban space is supported by claims that newly regenerated areas bring multiple benefits to the city and its citizens. These narratives have been used in Brazil to justify increasing reliance on an urban planning tool known as Urban Operations. This planning tool, developed in the 1990s, seeks to facilitate cooperation between public and private actors in the production of new urban spaces. While projected by some as a ‘magic formula’ that enables major urban redevelopment projects without public expenditure, the outcomes of Urban Operations often differ significantly from expectations. The cases of Água Espraiada (São Paulo) and Porto Maravilha (Rio de Janeiro) are used to demonstrate that regenerated areas, as preferred spaces for the penetration of financialised practices into the built environment, have brought forward new dynamics that are serving to reinforce pre-existing social inequalities and to exacerbate uneven development in Brazil’s main cities.

Social Forums, modeled on the World Social Forums, are not social movements in the classic sense. They are not, and do not purport to be, the organizational form through which basic social change will be achieved, or can best be pursued. But they do bring together elements of many social movements, afford an opportunity for coalition-building among them, frequently around urban issues, and thus make a significant contribution to achieving such change. Conceivably they may be the foundation for an international social movement for change, but if so it is likely to coalesce about a specifically political program. Some concrete suggestions are made which might enhance their effectiveness.

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 financialization of housing has been increasingly identified as an important driver of social and economic change in contemporary capitalism. Focusing on the Brazilian context, this article considers the extent to which recent changes in housing regulations, policies and markets confirm or challenge narratives about the financialization of housing in the international academic debate. I argue that while many of the trends stressed in the literature are apparent, more extreme processes of financialization within the Brazilian housing sector remain limited––not only because of institutional and regulatory constraints, path dependence or political resistance, but also because of fundamental structural conditions of Brazil's position as a peripheral economy. Three different but mutually reinforcing processes are scrutinized in order to evaluate the financialization of housing and its limits in Brazil: the re-regulation of the real estate financial sector initiated in the 1990s; the changing funding patterns among real estate companies since the mid-2000s; and the increasing commodification of housing induced by a large-scale and heavily subsidized housing program launched in 2009.

This essay explores the reasons for the reduced negative effects of the 2008 global financial crisis on Brazil and its cities by applying an analysis that connects these urban effects with the national dynamics. Despite substantial variation within the country, reduced impact can be credited to the response to the crisis by the current Lula administration and to features of the country’s urbanization process. First, universal redistributive social programmes, together with an enlarged domestic market, better insertion in the global economy, prudential regulation and a stable fiscal situation, have put the country in a comfortable position to react to the crisis by adopting countercyclical policies. Second, given the advanced urbanization in Brazil, social and active macroeconomic policies have produced decisive and specific effects on the urban fabric. Recent processes of in land urbanization have created new areas of regional and urban dynamics, thus the impact of the crisis on cities has not only been mild, affecting the most industrialized and internationally oriented metropolises hardest, but has also become an opportunity for strengthening urban areas through active macroeconomic and social policies and helping foster a more decentralized national urban network, thereby leading to stronger links between social inclusion and territorial cohesion.

Populism is a notoriously unstable phenomenon. This instability has been on full display in contemporary Latin America where the progressive gains of the Pink Tide have confronted a rightwing backlash. How do we understand the sudden shift of fortunes from left to right? What tilted the balance of power in the region? One familiar answer to these questions is the exploitation by rightwing actors of tough-on-crime or mano dura rhetoric, which scapegoats already vulnerable populations (minorities, the poor, the “deviant,” etc.) as the source of insecurity. In conversation with this collection of papers on revanchist populism in Brazil, I want to propose a subtle twist on the theme of security and its role in rightwing populist mobilization. It draws on my research in neighboring Venezuela. Specifically, it looks at the unraveling of the Bolivarian Revolution’s progressive promise to defend the urban popular sectors against death squads, torture, arbitrary detention and other oppressive forms of policing. Comparing Venezuela, the vanguard of Latin America’s left turn, to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil may seem scandalous at first blush, but doing so asks us to confront an inconvenient truth about what I call the will to security. Rather than imagining security as something imposed from above, the will to security reframes it as an articulation of demands that resonate, at least in part, with the popular sectors. Adding this perspective to our analysis of rightwing populism provides an alternative spatial paradigm to the conversations about security that lends it historical depth and policy relevant positioning.