Geografia

This article compares two cases of displacement suffered by informal workers and informal residents in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, both connected to the hosting of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. It asks the following question: considering that the right to work and the right to housing are both enshrined in the Brazilian Constitution, why do claims upon space based on those constitutional rights have different degrees of legitimacy? Two cases are analysed in detail. The first one concerns a group of informal workers displaced from their workspace for the modernization of the local stadium. The second one tells the story of an informal settlement where 90 families were displaced due to the construction of a flyover designed to improve access to the football stadium. This article engages with current postcolonial debates around urban informality, tackling two points that have been absent from these discussions. First, it compares two ways of informally occupying urban space—for work and for housing—revealing the distinct degrees of legitimacy embedded in such practices due to pre-existing institutional arrangements. Second, it emphasizes the connection between work and home through the life strategies and place-making practices of the urban poor.

This paper examines the effects of the new economy on national city size distribution in 102 countries. Results show that the new economy has significant effects on city size distributions and such effects are heterogeneous across countries. Human capital contributes to the polarization of city size distribution in developed countries and service-dominated countries, while it helps to equalize city size distribution in industrial-dominated countries. While innovation promotes an equalized city size distribution in general, globalization promotes polarization and then equalization of city size distribution. Information and communication technology triggers an equalized followed by a polarized city size distribution, and has contributed to an equalized city size distribution in service-dominated countries. It is evident that thriving new economic processes are changing the global urban hierarchy and reshaping national city size distribution. This study facilitates an in-depth understanding of the effects of the new economy on city size distribution, which is of great importance to promote more equitable development and urbanization.

Since the early days of the self-help construction school that gave a definite switch to the urban housing debate in Latin America, the urban development discourse has shown some marked variations. Major multilateral agencies e especially the World Bank, UNCHS (UN-Habitat) and UNDP e played a key role in the evolution of this discourse. These institutions have also dominated the normative agendas that have brought about some definite shifts in urban policies and planning practices. Allowing for the differences between these international agencies' discourses, consensus was reached on the desired enabling roles of national and local governments. This article systematizes the switches in paradigms, central concepts, and planning approaches as witnessed by experience in the cities of Latin America over the past four decades.

This paper analyses trends in the living conditions of slum and non-slum populations over the period 1990–2003, using urban and slum indicators from several developing world cities. It explains why where a person lives might condition his/her general health and household vulnerability. The data used are from UN-Habitat’s Global Urban Observatory database for 188 cities belonging to 8 different Millennium Development Goals Regions. The study provides evidence of a general improvement in various slum indicators, such as durable structures, access to safe water and access to improved sanitation. However, although there has been a decrease in under-5 mortality at city level, we observe that the same indicator can be up to five times higher for slum than for non-slum groups. We conclude that this evidence supports the importance of slum improvement and highlights this issue as one of the major challenges that a predominantly urbanized world faces.

Across the world, approximately 1.2 billion people live in rented accommodation. This article attempts to summarise how that situation has come about, what role renting plays in the housing systems of different countries, and how governments might improve their policies towards the rental sector. The paper is premised on the assumption that rental housing is an essential ingredient in any shelter programme and laments the reluctance of so many governments to have paid it attention in recent years.

This article discusses the relationship between segregation and urban redevelopment projects through an analysis of São Paulo's metropolis. Our assumption is that segregation is one of the components of capitalist urban space, since it is produced as a commodity, which determines its fragmentation and hierarchy. In the peripheral countries, this condition prevents thousands of people to live with dignity. In recent decades, the space production has become a possibility of investment for the capital in crisis. This situation reveals the importance of the urban renewal projects, because they reinforce public and private investments in specific areas of the cities, increasing its valuation. In this article, the analysis of Nova Luz Project shows that the segregation is a content of contemporary urbanism and that the city's production process is increasingly tied to the private interests and to the capital.

This study investigated the mobility patterns of favela residents based on an analysis of their daily movements derived from high-frequency mobile phone data. Daily movements were measured considering the distance traveled at different times of day over the course of more than two months. Potential trip purposes for the most frequently visited locations were inferred based on land use data from property taxes. The high volume of geocoded data from mobile phones enabled the analysis during multiple days, also covering weekends, usually not considered in traditional transport surveys. The mobile phone data indicated that, on average, favela residents go farther from home during business days and perform less out of home activities during weekends when compared with non-favela residents. Further, distinct patterns for favelas and non-favela residents were mapped, considering different geographical areas, revealing space and time mobility inequalities.

Studies of urban development, and specifically studies of urban inequality, have tended to neglect the role of young people. While development studies more broadly have begun to take young people's experiences, perceptions and practices into account, research on urban development and inequality has remained largely focused on adults. This lack of attention to young people is all the more surprising given the large percentage of urban residents in low-income countries that is under 25. Drawing on research in Rio de Janeiro's Zona Sul, this article argues for including young people in debates on urban development and urban inequality. It argues that a relational approach, juxtaposing the views and experiences of both rich and poor youth, is especially valuable in this regard, as those studies that have paid attention to youth, development and inequality tend to focus on low-income youth living in informal settlements. Based on mixed-method research with adolescents and youth (age 14e24) from both low-income and high-income areas, the article analyses young people's socio-spatial perceptions and practices. The research highlights that both groups experience urban inequality and insecurity as major and interrelated development problems, and that these issues affect their opportunities and quality of life, albeit in different ways.

More than half of the world's population currently resides in urban areas. In the majority of developing countries slums are a defining part of the urban scape. Their supply with energy, basic infrastructure, among others is one of the main challenges of modern civilizations. To provide an optimal supply, the spatial patterns of slums in cities have to be explored. While most of current literature is focused on inter-urban dynamics, this paper is focused on intra-urban pattern (i.e. the spatial pattern of morphological slums within a city) and its link to the inter-urban ones. Therefore, census and remote sensing data are analyzed to create rank size distributions of morphological slums in different cities of developing countries. The observations were compared to rank size distributions of cities in a respective developing country. It is found that typical inter-urban pattern can be transferred to intra-urban pattern. Surprisingly is the fact that the size of slums is independent from city and global region in the analyzed cities. The slums in Mumbai, Manila, Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town have an average area of 0.016 km2 with a standard deviation of only 0.004 km2 .

Urban inequality is widely debated but few studies examine developments over time and across cities. In this contribution, we develop a novel approach to study the dynamics of inequality in cities of the Global South. Using a sample that includes cities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, we track trends in equality since the 1990s in four domains: the labor market, education, private goods, and public amenities. With descriptive statistics, inequality indexes, and logistic regression analysis, we show that while inequality in educational attainment is decreasing across all cities in our sample, patterns in the other domains are more complex. Even though the middle occupational group is growing in most cities in our sample, there are important exceptions and substantial regional variations. While we find that inequality in material comfort more often decreased than increased, class position continues to predict access to both private goods and public amenities. Although the observed patterns are complex, we find no proof of escalating inequalities in the domains under study.