Arquitetura e urbanismo

Given the growing importance of populism in cities both empirically and in scholarly discourse, planning is increasingly grappling with this ‘unsettling era’, focusing on how to respond to these times. This opening provides an opportunity to re-engage with the idea of insurgent planning—practices that are counter-hegemonic, transgressive, and imaginative—within populist contexts. I explore the case of mobilizations by community communicators in Complexo da Maré, a set of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the spread of COVID-19 in 2020. In contrast to these mobilizations, Brazil's federal right-wing populist government failed to attend to the needs of favela residents. Through the case of Maré's communicators, I highlight the need for planning to account for the role of insurgent planning as a response to populist contexts in cities of the global South.

Using the experience of metropolitan Rio de Janeiro, this article contributes to the broader debate on development regimes, rescaling and state spatial restructuring in Brazil, and its specificities in relation to the international discussion on the transformations in Atlantic Fordism. I argue that the transition from a (peripheral) development state to a competitive and rescaled regime has been accompanied by important continuities. Legitimized through discourses around development poles and trickle-down effects, the national-developmental regime has systematically promoted some spaces as opposed to others, without much emphasis on the social and environmental dimensions of spatial policies. The emerging competitive state spatial regime, whether in its neoliberalized, or its more recent ‘rolled-out’ national-developmental version, is merely expected to aggravate the historical socio-environmental contradictions in the production of space. Moreover, scale has proven contested and strategic-relational, both molding and being influenced by actors that seek to use scalar politics to reach their interests. My analysis suggests that, within this scenario, neither economic growth, nor regulatory and institutional strengthening, nor financial resources are likely to produce structural transformation in the inherited spaces of Greater Rio de Janeiro.

This essay demonstrates how mediations (called Dialogues) between the University of Belo Horizonte and the residents of the Eliana Silva Occupation in that city have secured not only the right to urban land and constitutional rights that have been historically violated in Brazil, but also the right to that which is of common interest. The essays peaks to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s contention that what is common goes far beyond the provision of public services. This starting point allows us to see that urban occupations are politically empowered, to the extent that poor people consciously violate the Brazilian law governing the right of possession and ownership over urban land through creative and cooperative actions that are undertaken and extended across networks.This essay will focus on the centrality of the struggle to build a common communication platform serving to nourish social ties and sociability among those social actors who share the same human deprivation –– lack of access to what should be widely available to all citizens. On the theoretical side, the essay takes Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour and Milton Santos as its guides to understanding how social actors act in the struggle for socio-spatial coexistence and urbanity.

After defaulting on their foreign-debt obligations in the 1980s, several Latin American countries had to restructure their economies to boost market-led growth. Some of the ensuing housing reforms promoted mortgage expansion and masshousing production. Mexico was among the first countries to follow this logic, and in aparticularly aggressive manner. Credit liberalization allowed a handful of real estate firms to experience massive expansions in their operations in the 2000s as they were able to build lower-middle-income housing at an accelerated rate by accessing public, pension and private equity funds. Brazil eventually appropriated some aspects of the Mexican housing model, but not others. In the late 2000s, Brazil began providing deep subsidies to low-income households to connect the private supply of housing with apublicly subsidized demand. This article discusses, challenges and moves beyond prior analyses of these processes by contrasting the two countries’ housing finance models and examining the more recent (2010s) evolution and normative shifts in their housing and urban development policy agendas. Despite the direct policy transfer between the two contexts, the South-South comparative analysis presented in the article highlights the fluctuating and unstable nature of financialization processes given the varied inclination of national governments to manage, promote or restrict them, or to contain or accentuate capitalist crises and their implications.

With this study we join the conversation on housing aspirations from a Brazilian perspective, which is marked by coexisting formal and informal markets, investigating how market- driven narratives and socioeconomic factors shape these aspirations across generations in urban areas. We surveyed middle-class individuals and applied exploratory factor analysis alongside intergenerational comparisons, and our findings reveal that, despite the growing prevalence of renting as a response to market constraints, homeownership persists as a predominant aspiration, particularly for long-term security. The concept of aspirational postponement emerges as a key framework, illustrating how temporary adaptations to renting do not supplant the enduring desire for property ownership. Moreover, this research introduces the experience effect, wherein older generations recognize the practical advantages of apartments over houses, based on lived housing arrangements, and the adjustment effect, which reflects the tempering of idealistic aspirations among younger generations owing to financial and practical constraints. By situating Brazilian housing dynamics within a global context, we highlight the interplay of structural inequalities, cultural norms and generational preferences to offer perspectivesfor housing policy frameworks in developing economies.

One of the new challenges globalization raises to urban management is the increasing number of international migrants moving to cities of developing countries and their impact on urban governance. Although there is growing perception that urban cultural diversity is a desirable outcome of globalization, most international migrants add to the low-income population and are particularly affected by urban exclusion. Furthermore, local governments in developing countries are seldom prepared to cope with the ad hoc policies needed to integrate people with different cultural, social and religious traditions into the urban society. Such policies should aim to encourage mobility and temporary vs. permanent migration, strengthen civic identity, deal with the cultural differences and the resulting discriminatory reactions from local residents, promote participation and representation, and fight the social and economic exclusion that often expose migrants to illegal activities contributing to raising urban violence.