Arquitetura e urbanismo

This paper interrogates and expands understandings of agency in processes of knowledge circulation by focusing on actors switching their position from the demand-side to the supply side of policy knowledge. In doing so, we contribute to recent debates about the importance of accounting to other scales beyond the local–global binary that dominates the policy mobility literature and to the politics of policy translation and dissemination. Emphasis is given to the performative role of domestic actors and their practices in localising mobile policies of urban regeneration in ‘gateway cities’ while leveraging and recirculating knowledge within their national contexts. Conceptualised as policy brokers and policy entrepreneurs, such actors are attuned to the local dynamics and able to distil context-specific lessons that are sensitive to national regulatory frameworks, funding and political contingencies. We focus on two urban megaprojects of waterfront regeneration in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro that introduced new practices of land monetisation while making use of inter-referencing, drawing on in-depth interviews with policy actors and archival material. We argue that an attention to ‘follow the reformatted model’ reveals how policy models mutate as they conform to contextual factors and to particular interests. The analysis of such processes allows us to transcend the local–global dichotomy and to trace multiscalar connections between multiple projects.

In this article we explore the idea of public accountability in the contemporary entrepreneurial governance of cities, which are influenced by market dependency and private sector involvement. We specifically focus on the fragmentation of public accountability through hybrid contractual landscapes of governance, in which the public and private sector actors interactively produce a diversity of instruments to ensure performance in service. This is in sharp contrast to the traditional vague norms and values appealed to by urban planning institutions, to safeguard the public interest. We argue that within these complex contractual governance environments public accountability is produced by public and private sector actors, through highly diverse sets of contractual relations and diverse control instruments that define responsibilities of diverse actors who are involved in a project within a market-dependent planning and policy making environment, which contains context-specific characteristics set by the specific rules of public-private collaboration. These complexities mean public accountability has become fragmented and largely reduced to performance control. Moreover, our understanding of contractual urban governance remains vague and unclear due to very limited empirical studies focusing on the actual technologies of contractual urban development. By deciphering the complex hybrid landscapes of contractual governance, with comparative empirical evidence from The Netherlands, UK and Brazil, we demonstrate how public accountability is assuming a more ‘contractual’ and unpredictable meaning in policy and plan implementation process.

Since the 1970s, popular movements organized around the struggle for housing have been strong in São Paulo. Based on four central agendas – slums and precarious neighborhoods upgrading; better rental conditions; urban improvements and land tenure in peripheral subdivisions; and public funding for housing production – housing movements have consolidated as an essential political player in São Paulo, intersecting with the struggles for health, education, transportation, and urban infrastructure. With local action and national organization, São Paulo’s housing movements are responsible for empowering the community, qualifying their dialogue, preparing for confrontations with the public authorities, and ensuring access to housing through public programs via organized building squatting. This paper analyzes the importance of São Paulo housing movements and its prominent female participants in São Paulo in conquering social rights.

The appropriation of the housing sector by global finance has transformed housing policies worldwide while leading to new opportunities for capital accumulation. Financialized models have also become increasingly prevalent in the Global South, promoting mortgage and household debt and stark housing commodification impacting lower-middle-income communities and residents. Yet, despite adversity, housing social movements have worked to challenge some of these trends in struggles for housing justice and de-financialization. This study examines the organizing work of such housing struggles in Mexico and Brazil in the face of varied commodification and financialization processes through the analytical framework of bridging. Bridging as a strategy entails social movements’ dynamic relationships and practices in challenging and altering housing commodification and financialization processes in relation to changing political environments. Housing movements integrate reactive responses to immediate threats with proactive strategies for long-term structural change, emphasizing the importance of multifaceted approaches in addressing housing financialization. Bridging between invented and invited spaces of action showcases how housing movements adjust to evolving circumstances and establish new counter-hegemonic arenas to advance their objectives and ideas. Bridging scales enables further reach of demands and visibility, creating the possibility of challenging the distances inherent to financialization networks. The accomplishments, constraints, and paths of housing organizing for de-financialization provide critical lessons about the co-constitutive nature of social mobilization, housing policies, and the financial market.

In the past decade in Brazil, we have witnessed the rise of a new subaltern space, which has prompted a new theoretical category, incorporated in the contemporary epistemologies of Subaltern Urbanism: Urban Occupations. These new terrains of livelihood and self-organization have prompted a series of new resistance strategies, everyday practices and narratives that must be understood and decodified. The Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte —third largest in the country— accounts for over 25 housing occupations in its territory, more than half of which settled in the last five years. Occupation Rosa Leão, established in 2013, is one of them. As it happens in many other occupations, most of its dwellers are black women. They constitute majority in the coordination groups and are often more closely involved in the collective necessities of the community. The present article draws upon the experiences of these women as subjects of their own history to showcase urban occupation as a powerful place for understanding and dismantling the always existing but often overlooked intersection between coloniality and gender. It relies on the activist and academic engagement of both authors in these territories, and specifically in the experience with a women-only self-construction workshop organized in October 2017. Through this workshop, we sought to understand how “usually male” construction knowledge was employed (or not) by women, how it could be used as a tool for domination/emancipation and how gender relations intertwined with such issues in the process.

O presente artigo tem como objetivos (i) mostrar como a experiência de revitalização do Bairro do Recife foi desvirtuada, aproximando-se da tendência de city marketing, entendida como a aceleração da taxa de transformação de certas localidades, com ênfase especulativa sobre imóveis e grandes obras de renomados arquitetos, com importantes repercussões em termos de trânsito de veículos e fluxos de pessoas, e (ii) questionar sobre a legitimidade de projetos que, embora institucionalmente aprovados, comprometem as características de determinadas estruturas espaciais urbanas, como é o caso dos centros históricos.