Arquitetura e urbanismo

The housing shortage in Brazil, which is currently estimated at 5.5 million units, is the constant subject of architectural and urbanistic studies. The theoretical affiliations and methodological tools used in these studies are diverse and, as befits the complexity of the issues involved, utilise ideologies and methods from several fields—even antagonistic ideologies and methods. In Brazil, there is a consensus on the need to reorganise cities, in which approximately 84% of the population lives, through strategies that address the relationship between social housing and urban density. This need exists primarily in major metropolises, where rapid and abstruse growth overcomes collective and sustainable practices. This paper analyzes the relationship between urban policies and social housing in the redevelopment process occurring in the central area of São Paulo. It focuses on transformations that occurred during the beginning of the 21st century, a period when Brazil was prominent in terms of economic growth in the international arena. As a case study, it focuses on the Habitasampa architectural competition, which is considered to be one of the most innovative and important contests during this period. This analysis of the winning Habitasampa project designs, in terms of their theoretical and political frameworks, will help create new methodological guidelines for the preparation of urban plans and policies related to social housing in dense urban areas.

The paper presents a historical overview of the relations between housing, housing finance and capital markets in Brazil, while embedding it into an analysis of the recently launched housing program My House My Life (MCMV). Considering the absence of a consolidated market for mortgage finance and a public housing stock, Brazilian financialization doesn't fit standard narratives that have either prioritized US or European experience. Brazilian financialization has been truncated in the sense that it has always depended on the contradictory territorial intervention of a developmental state that has never reached out to lowest income groups.

While MCMV has seen continuities in relation to the housing delivery and finance of the technocratic developmental state in terms of not matching low-income housing targets and priorities of national urban reform, it is argued that contradictions are not inscribed in space. More particularly, where proactive local governments have been able to make use of city statute instruments in order to articulate land delivery, the program has been able to produce affordable and well-located housing units.

Finally, the inherent contradictions of financialization are not likely to lead to subprime crises, contagion and ex-post state rescue operations as occurred in the US and European context. Instead, endogenous state involvement in subsidized housing finance will increasingly face budgetary and monetary restrictions, leading to a relatively soft landing and gradual public withdrawal from low income housing finance. In that sense, MCMV might prove to become another innovation that fails to live up to expectations.

This research addresses accessibility inequalities within the context of a major Latin American metropolis, using a longitudinal analysis focused on the low-income population. Emphasizing the paradigm of sustainable accessibility planning, the study examines the evolution of job accessibility over two 15-year-apart timeframes in Fortaleza, the 4th most populous Brazilian city. The findings reveal persistent spatial mismatch and unsustainable changes in land-use patterns, highlighting ongoing challenges for low-income vulnerable groups. Despite overall improvements in accessibility, inequality patterns endure, particularly affecting those relying on public transport. The study underscores the necessity for planning processes in developing countries to address the complex causes and consequences associated with accessibility inequalities. Recommendations include a deeper exploration of differences among precarious settlements, considering population density variations, central location impact, and inequalities in job accessibility between self-built and state-constructed settlements.

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.

This paper seeks to illuminate the multiple ways in which South–South collaboration may reorganize knowledge production and learning processes across scales and beyond the unilateral transfer of expertise. Drawing on empirical evidence from a knowledge exchange partnership between water and sanitation operators in Salta, Argentina, and Brasılia, Brazil, we provide a grounded, contextual account of the partnership to examine what was learned, under what circumstances, and with what potential effects. We contend that common claims by proponents of South–South cooperation around the centrality of shared geopolitical history are not enough to understand South–South cooperation at the project level. At this scale, we find that other forms of proximity, including organizational, linguistic, technological, and cultural, also matter in shaping the constitution of collaborative partnerships and the forms of learning that occur through them. In the case that we examine, partners’ multiple shared proximities resulted in a subversion of traditional mentor–mentee relations and emergence of a process of mutual learning. Further, we suggest that flows of knowledge in the partnership can be characterized across a learning spectrum, from technical and processual learning to experiential understanding and self-reflection, each with different consequences for institutional and material change at different scales. Crucially, such forms of learning bolstered participants’ bargaining power for implementing improvements at home and fostered advances in operators’ tactical thinking.

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.