Arquitetura e urbanismo

This essay discusses some key ideas and debates about urban studies in Brazil, considered historiographically, from the mid-1900s to the present. It presents the main components and particularities of what emerges as the Brazilian matrix of urban studies, interrogating the most influential work in the field with the country’s own experiences of industrialisation and urbanisation. It discusses some key urban debates of the 21st century, namely new planning models associated with globalisation, global mega-events, public–private partnerships, inner-city gentrification, housing and city financialisation, rising forms of urban warfare and social control in slums (favelas), and new activisms and urban insurgencies. Through this analysis, we point to contradictions and tensions in relation to European and North American urban theory, calling for the need to formulate new categories and hypotheses to better understand the unequal and extreme processes resulting from violent expansion of capitalist relations over the entire planet, and comment on the new practices and forms of social mobilisation emerging from turbulent contexts.

The Brazilian urban reform movement expanded citizen participation in decision-making processes through a policy environment motivated by a right to the city (RTC), a collective development strategy for political transformation. Yet recent events evidence that social exclusion and spatial segregation remain dominant features of the Brazilian city. These contradictions have led planning scholars and practitioners to grapple with misalignment between the reform movement’s paradigmatic goals and its paradoxical failures. We build upon this genre of thinking to assess critical areas of paradigm and paradox in Brazilian planning – insurgent urbanism, informality and knowledge – each of which is rooted in the lesser-understood concept of autogestão for improving the equity of land division through urban planning. Although not all inclusive of the issues faced by Brazilian cities, these three categories were selected for best representing how Brazil’s participatory turn established a range of paradigmatic and paradoxical conditions that can help us to understand cities in Brazil and beyond and might better leverage autogestão in the future.

This article discusses the reproduction of housing as a commons in São Paulo. It analyzes the occupation of vacant real estate properties and their subsequent transformation into low-income housing in central São Paulo as instances of commoning. It examines the mechanisms through which housing commons are protected, with a particular focus on the mediating role of social movements and property claims. We draw on a combined methodology of participatory action research and semi-structured interviews to explore the dynamics between the commons as a political ideal and its practical application in the urban environment, focusing on the long-term sustainability of housing commons amid capitalist urbanization. Through the lens of two autonomous housing projects, Dandara and Marisa Letícia, we illustrate the transformation of occupied buildings into permanent housing through collective self-management. We also consider the protection of housing as commons through five processes: regularization, restoration, integration, ideation and federation. Our analysis calls for further research into the potential for creating interconnected commons ecosystems.

In this article I present the concept of the ‘peripheral condition’ in the context of theoretical discussion on planetary urbanization. Inspired by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's interpretation of urbanization, which draws from Lefebvre's oeuvre, I suggest taking into consideration Robert Kurz's key insights about the internal contradiction of capital. In this study I seek to integrate the ‘critique of value’ theory's crisis-centric approach into the literature on planetary urbanization, as it allows us to move beyond accounts that focus on extensive urbanization through operational landscapes and instead encompass the social relations that accompany it. Consequently, I argue that this comprehension reveals the periphery-form as a relevant idea to qualify discussions on planetary urbanization once an ever-growing population faces situations of precarity that were previously considered restricted to the peripheries. Hence, I suggest that planetary urbanization cannot be fully understood without considering its dark side, the peripheral condition.

The 1990s in Brazil were a time of institutional advances in the areas of housing and urban rights following the signing of the new constitution in 1988 that incorporated the principles of the social function of cities and property, recognition of the right to ownership of informal urban squatters and the direct participation of citizens in urban policy decision processes. These propositions are the pillars of the urban reform agenda which, since the creation of the Ministry of Cities by the Lula government, has come under the federal executive branch. This article evaluates the limitations and opportunities involved in implementing this agenda on the basis of two policies proposed by the ministry — the National Cities Council and the campaign for Participatory Master Plans — focusing the analysis on government organization in the area of urban development in its relationship with the political system and the characteristics of Brazilian democracy.

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.