Sociologia

This paper evaluates the compatibility of public–private partnerships (PPP) for housing in Brazil with the notion of the right to the city, enshrined in the Constitution. A 3-year investigation of the country’s first housing PPP, Casa Paulista, located in downtown São Paulo city, informs the analysis. Drawing from the international debate on the right to the city and its application in Brazil, I offer a definition of the term that transcends the notion of rights-based policy, and implies urban dwellers’ appropriation of urban production and city space. While failing to scale up centrally located housing delivery, the PPP facilitates a new housing regime marked by the decreased ability of citizens, particularly grassroots movements, to appropriate housing production, directly contradicting the right to the city ideal. Finally, I describe an outcome from this new regime—an ad hoc and opaque system of public land allocation for PPP housing developments.

Rights-based urban social movements have proliferated since the mid-1970s, but our understanding of their real impacts remains insufficient. Using the housing movements in São Paulo as an example, the article demonstrates both the limits and the strengths of the rights-based approach. It argues that housing movements in São Paulo must be understood in the global context of the coexistence of two contradictory trajectories: the neoliberal urbanism and the rights-based movements. While the rights-based approach has yet to bring fundamental changes to the unequal housing distribution in Brazil, it provides the housing movements with new legal and institutional devices to justify their actions and influence the policy process, thus contributing to the unusual resilience and scale of the movements. The article reveals that the gap between rights promised and rights delivered can be utilized as a political opportunity for facilitating collective mobilization, contesting neoliberalism, and advancing new conceptions of citizenship.

A process is recognized as collaborative when it demonstrates the involvement of multiple stakeholders who are mobilized to interact and negotiate horizontally in order to achieve common objectives. Although efforts can be made to make a process collaborative, a governance process is situated in particular histories and geographies, and collectively shared cultures, norms, and behaviors can help or hinder the emergence of inclusive democratic practices. As a result of broader urban reforms that have been occurring in Brazil over the last 20 years, and particularly a shift in the institutional arrangement of planning in Curitiba, the 2014 Curitiba Master Plan was developed within a more democratic framework, with the engagement of several governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders. Despite adopting a more collaborative approach to planning, this plan is as generic as the 2004 Curitiba Master Plan it replaced, which was proposed within a technocratic framework. If the 2004 and 2014 institutional arrangements and processes were so different, why did they achieve similar results? To answer this question, this study investigates which elements influence the endurance of established practices in urban planning processes. The basic assumption is that the final product of a planning process is heavily influenced by existing and long-lasting institutions, which carry internal beliefs and procedures into new planning approaches. The evidence pre-sented in this study shows that path dependence on ideas, behaviors, and actions has been perpetuating planning practices that have been established in Curitiba for decades.

Despite the broad celebration of Brazil’s urban reform movement, recent events in Brazil have called attention to a paradox focused on the disappointing results of this movement to deal with Brazil’s complex urban context.Taking this “impasse” as a starting point, this article focuses on the role of politics and its relationship to economic interests in urban development in which much decision making around urban policy takes place to understand why Brazil’s progressive legislation has not succeeded in creating a more just and equitable urban environment. Using a case study of the city of Niterói, I show that patterns of state and nonstate actors are connected through both formal and informal relationships, and connections between public and private actors have a considerable impact on urban politics and policies. Focusing on the limits of participatory processes in Niterói, I call attention to the contradictions of participatory planning in Brazil.

In the Global South, the notion of the right to the city has increasingly been used to challenge the effects of uneven development on vulnerable informal residents. Yet, under a neoliberal spatial regime, acknowledging rights of informal residents does not necessarily lead to increasing access to the opportunities that cities produce. The article documents a contradictory process of,simultaneously, institutionalization of rights and implementation of profit-driven urban investments associated with 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. It is based on local-level, case-specific analysis of a dispute around the mega-event mobility investments and the demands of residents of Lagamar— a low-income, informal community in Fortaleza— adopting participant observation methods during a 3-year field research period. The case illustrates how Brazilian right to the city policies have gone beyond the mere recognition of land rights of informal residents, yet they have fallen short of addressing the needs of the urban poor, highlighting the role of mega-event investments in this process. The contradiction of simultaneously expanding and eroding the rights of the urban poor in Brazil has given room for manipulative state practices that I have called “undoing the right to the city.”

What affects police killings of denizens in the cities of developing democracies? Brazil is one of the countries with the most casualties from police lethality, yet deaths from police interventions vary greatly across its cities, as well as over time. Since most of its police forces are formally responsive to state-level governments, the political dynamics at this government tier are essential to comprehend urban policing — and its resort to deadly violence. I argue that subnational political competition explains whether state-level governments can implement reforms to reduce police lethality. I illustrate this argument through a within-case, cross-case comparison of the city-states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro since re-democratization in the 1980s. While lower fragmentation and partisan continuity at the state-level government enabled and consolidated reforms that mitigated police violence in São Paulo, higher fragmentation and turnover inhibited reforms and increased police lethality in Rio. Building on interviews with subnational politicians and police officers as well as statistics on police killings, this paper helps spark an urgent conversation in urban studies on police violence in the urban Global South and expands the police reform literature by developing a theory of how politics influences police violence.

In June 2013, Brazil witnessed one of its largest protest movements in history when more than 1 million Brazilians marched on city streets to demand improvements to urban life. As the epicenters of protests, cities have become an important location for examining the demands, politics, and social change strategies of contemporary citizenship. In this article, we analyze the evolution of Brazil’s protest movement. Based on participant observation, archival research, secondary data, and thick description, we conduct a historical event analysis. By examining the narratives, practices, and forms that emerged in Brazil’s 2013 protests, we argue that contemporary urban citizenship is transformed in important ways in response to both global and local changes. Policymakers and planners need to be prepared to deal with the realities of urbanization, and we offer perspectives on how citizenship can better accommodate new growth and societal changes.

Brazilian housing movements often use the slogan “a home is an entryway to all other rights,” which embodies the belief that a secure home is just the beginning of claiming the rights of citizenship. These movements rejoiced when President Lula da Silva came to office in the 2000s and enacted social programs meant to reshape the relationship between citizens, the state, and the market. But how did reform of social programs prove to be empowering of individuals and transformative in urban governance? In this paper, I evaluate how the Minha Casa Minha Vida Entidades Program, based on the principles of auto-gestão (self-management), shaped feelings of self-efficacy and civic participation of residents at the time of construction and beyond. Through interviews and surveys with residents in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador, I find their experiences led to feelings of empowerment and many sought to work collaboratively to make further claims of the state. These individual and community-level transformations may also be the start of greater movement toward the right to the city across Brazil.

Este artigo discute a cultura e a indústria do medo no Brasil atual, através da relação entre juventude e violência, e no avaliar as consequências desta correlação por meio das proposições levantadas pela mídia brasileira no imaginário nacional. Essa problemática é compreendida tendo em vista a questão da formação dos jovens no país nessa primeira década do século XXI, e em um momento de mudanças significativas nos padrões de comportamento nacional. Mudanças que pulverizam os valores sociais e caminham a passos largos para o individualismo crescente nas relações societárias e uma ampliação do medo do outro, no interior das formas interativas a que estão sujeitos não apenas a juventude, mas a população em geral.