Sociologia

Este texto reflete sobre a natureza das relações entre os jovens e a cidade, com um recorte que privilegia a esfera do consumo, dimensão essencial na construção identitária nesta etapa da vida. As reflexões partem de uma pesquisa feita em uma área específica do Distrito Federal, a cidade da Estrutural, uma das que compõem o espaço urbano da capital do País. Em se tratando de uma área pobre para os padrões locais, os jovens que ali moram são marcados por esta condição que, por um lado, deixa-os socialmente vulneráveis e, por outro, produz resistências que se manifestam no estilo de se comportar na vida cotidiana. Tem-se, neste caso, uma dupla determinação da posição social destes jovens: o local de moradia e as suas faixas etárias, ou seja, estigmatizados por um lado e vulneráveis pelo outro, criam uma forma de existência social particular, que nos auxiliam na compreensão dos vínculos sociais na cidade.

Nascida do ideal modernista do desenvolvimento nacional, Brasília — Capital da Esperança — desde sua gênese apresentou-se como a materialização da utopia desenvolvimentista brasileira. Teve o progresso planejado em cada linha do seu projeto urbanístico-arquitetônico, o qual traçou uma cidade sul-real, apresentada ao mundo capitalista como mais humana, igualitária e harmônica que as cidades reais efetivamente existentes. Hoje, 37 anos após sua inauguração, muitos se perguntam: o que aconteceu ao sonho? Da Utopia à Exclusão: vivendo nas ruas em Brasília é um livro que procura mostrar, sem uma pretensão generalizadora, um dos muitos aspectos nos quais falhou o sonho de Brasília: a utopia da integração depara-se, nos dias atuais, com uma triste realidade de miséria e exclusão.

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.

Waste pickers all over the world work innovatively to reduce the environmental footprint of cities as they struggle to meet their critical livelihood obligations. Informed by the case of waste picker organizations (WPOs) this article examines how grassroots initiatives and extreme-niche innovations are created and sustained by mobilizing resources, rationales and relations. The study is informed by a cross-national survey and in-depth interviews with WPOs in Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Kenya and Tanzania, and builds upon theories of grassroots innovation movements. The findings show how operating in contexts of extreme scarcity, these grassroots organisations tap into local resources, e.g. tacit knowledge, economies of affection and other socially embedded institutional resources. Blending material and environmental rationales, contributes to expanding their audiences and to gaining further support. In such deprived urban contexts, radical and cumulative crises and events hindering residents’ livelihoods can paradoxically also spark ingenuity out of necessity, and the transformation of these settings into extreme niches of innovation. Finally, the mobilization of relations through the formation of networks linking WPOs with supportive intermediaries and global circuits of solidarity becomes another fundamental resilience strategy by which WPOs can navigate contested environments and insert their extreme-niche innovations in governmental structures. By simultaneously adopting a broad repertoire of strategies of insertion, contention, and mobilization WPO and their innovations thrive in highly constrained environments. We conclude with reflecting on how ‘extreme’ niches of innovation − at the cracks of the formal city, economy and waste systems − can unleash the creative power of stigmatized, illiterate and neglected grassroots to experiment with new solutions in resource-poor environments.

Research on street-level bureaucrats has examined the various ways in which these professionals have implemented public policies in areas such as healthcare, education, and security, often emphasizing the role played by discretion in the implementation process. Despite its importance, the concept of street-level bureaucracy has scarcely been approached by housing studies. This study focuses on the role of street-level workers in the delivery of public housing to the lower-income population. We affirm the value of complementing street-level discretion with the concept of proximity, a premise borrowed from the microfinance literature, to increase the understanding of the interactions and relationships established between street-level workers and policy recipients during the implementation process. Such complementarity may contribute to a more accurate understanding of the housing policy implementation dynamics on the street-level and the possible adjustments to meet local needs. To explore this issue, we used a theoretical lens inspired by Goffman’s frame analysis that points to the importance of relational mechanisms that characterize the interactions between street-level workers and beneficiaries. These lenses were applied to a collective case study of Minha Casa Minha Vida-Entidades, a Brazilian subprogram in which street-level workers linked to social housing movements assume a leading role in the planning and execution of interventions. The results indicate that the combination of proximity and discretion has a positive influence on the implementation of housing policies. Our analysis shows the existence of nonprofit-oriented arrangements that may present different features and nuances at the implementation (micro) level and contribute to the (macro) debate on housing policies.

Populism is a notoriously unstable phenomenon. This instability has been on full display in contemporary Latin America where the progressive gains of the Pink Tide have confronted a rightwing backlash. How do we understand the sudden shift of fortunes from left to right? What tilted the balance of power in the region? One familiar answer to these questions is the exploitation by rightwing actors of tough-on-crime or mano dura rhetoric, which scapegoats already vulnerable populations (minorities, the poor, the “deviant,” etc.) as the source of insecurity. In conversation with this collection of papers on revanchist populism in Brazil, I want to propose a subtle twist on the theme of security and its role in rightwing populist mobilization. It draws on my research in neighboring Venezuela. Specifically, it looks at the unraveling of the Bolivarian Revolution’s progressive promise to defend the urban popular sectors against death squads, torture, arbitrary detention and other oppressive forms of policing. Comparing Venezuela, the vanguard of Latin America’s left turn, to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil may seem scandalous at first blush, but doing so asks us to confront an inconvenient truth about what I call the will to security. Rather than imagining security as something imposed from above, the will to security reframes it as an articulation of demands that resonate, at least in part, with the popular sectors. Adding this perspective to our analysis of rightwing populism provides an alternative spatial paradigm to the conversations about security that lends it historical depth and policy relevant positioning.

This paper aims to understand the multiple strategies developed by frontline workers to deal with situations of violence in vulnerable territories. We analyze the micro-dynamics within which workers operate to understand how the State deals with violence. Empirically, we analyzed data from interviews with 140 frontline workers implementing different policies not directly related to violence in neighborhoods located in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, known for their populations’ precariousness and vulnerability. The results expand the understanding of the different ways in which violence expresses itself in these places and show that the reactions developed by frontline workers are more complex than those suggested by the existing literature. The multiple violence to which these workers are exposed is used and manipulated by them in various ways during policy implementation. Frontline workers can ignore, negotiate with, or combat violence. They use their agency to develop different reactions based on how they and the policies are embedded or disconnected to the territories.

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.