Planejamento Urbano

Around the end of 2019, in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 were identified, and from then on, the world we were used to knowing changed globally. The role of population density, in relation to the spread of the pandemic, has been widely scrutinised in urban studies, believed to be the triggering variable. However, the results so far are inconclusive. This paper suggests instead to shift the focus to sociospatial vulnerabilities, as the effects of the pandemic’s spread have been more severe in urban units which feature long-standing inequalities. The paper’s aim is, therefore, twofold: on the one hand it aims at contributing to the debate on population density and COVID-19 in urban areas, and, on the other hand, to analyse the pandemic’s spread in relation to socio-spatial vulnerabilities. Different cities across the globe are drawn into a comparative project, where the pandemic’s spread is analysed in relation to variables of Population Density (PD) and a Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), by employing correlation matrices. The results suggest that there is no significant correlation between density and the spread of COVID-19. Instead, a positive correlation is in place when analysing the pandemic’s diffusion with socio-spatial inequalities.

The paper is based on quantitative evidence and case examples of city learning drawn from both developed and developing countries to explore selected questions raised in the literature on learning and competitiveness. Anecdotal and quantitative evidence suggest that a large shadow market for knowledge has already formed among cities around the world. Case observations reviewed here suggest that the best learners are deliberate and systematic, finding or creating new knowledge, converting it to use, and storing learning experiences that draw on collective memory. Acquired knowledge resides in two main forms: one is hard data, stored in documents, computers, or specialized units of government. Another is soft data stored in professional and social networks that link a wide array of actors in the community - not just staff in the city bureaucracy. The analysis leads to a number of propositions that deserve attention and testing: several kinds of learning systems can be observed, that the process of learning may be as important as the product in contributing to competitiveness, that policies can helpful to facilitate learning, and that a radical departure from customary policy, especially in donor institutions, may be needed to effectively meet requirements of institutional capacity building in cities of the developing world.

Appropriate finance can greatly increase the speed and lower the cost of incremental housing - the process used by much of the low/moderate-income majority of most developing countries to acquire shelter. Informal finance continues to dominate the funding of incremental housing. However, new sources have developed including housing microfinance, community-based finance savings and loan groups, and consumer credit for building materials. This paper examines informal and formal finance for incremental housing and makes recommendations for the vast expansion necessary to meet the affordable housing demand from the huge urban wave in developing countries projected over the next three decades.

This paper explores the housing challenges that Rio de Janeiro faces, which is specifically manifested in the form of favelas or squatter settlements, and that municipality’s strategies to overcome these challenges. The Favela Bairro slum upgrading program (FBP), which seeks to transform favelas into formal neighbourhoods, is seen as a complex and appropriate solution to Rio’s housing woes. The paper specifically focuses on land tenure challenges in Rio and the way the FBP dealt with this issue. The FBP is noteworthy as an example of slum upgrading without full land tenure legalization and for its use of state of exception, primarily the concession of right to use but not full ownership of land in order to allow this program to take place. This placed greater emphasis on infrastructural and living condition improvement rather than legalization of land tenure. As a result, the implementation of FBP has had the effect of increasing the security of tenure of favela residents.

Over the past decade there has been a sudden, extraordinarily large, and simultaneous expansion of multi-billion dollar housing programs in many emerging and developing economies. This shift occurred after a long period of limited public involvement in social housing production. Yet, despite the fact that countries and cities have introduced such large-scale programs, there has been little independent analysis of the rationale, efficacy and potential long-term effects of these interventions. Adopting a perspective that expands beyond typical public finance approaches, this paper examines the renewed shift in public housing provision. It provides an outlook of recent experiences in housing provision, showcases general trends in housing, proposes an evaluation framework, and offers a series of recommendations aiming at strengthening the programs. The paper concludes that if large-scale housing assistance is to help accommodate the almost 2 billion additional people who will live in cities over the next 35 years, as well as help to address the growing housing affordability issues, much more attention should be paid to the lasting effects that such programs can have on the structure of cities for generations to come.

Recently a large data set has been collected for LAC countries, which permits detailed study of household tenure. This data set constitutes the empirical basis of this paper in which the following research questions are addressed: What are the main patterns of urban housing tenure in LAC countries and how and why do they differ? What is the role of household income in determining urban housing tenure? To what extent does the presence of informal housing upset the positive linear relationship between income and tenure that is typically found in developed countries? The paper is organised as follows. The first section offers a brief review of the existing literature on the role of household income and tenure. The methodology employed in the study is explained in the second section and the results are presented in the third section.

Urban inequality is widely debated but few studies examine developments over time and across cities. In this contribution, we develop a novel approach to study the dynamics of inequality in cities of the Global South. Using a sample that includes cities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, we track trends in equality since the 1990s in four domains: the labor market, education, private goods, and public amenities. With descriptive statistics, inequality indexes, and logistic regression analysis, we show that while inequality in educational attainment is decreasing across all cities in our sample, patterns in the other domains are more complex. Even though the middle occupational group is growing in most cities in our sample, there are important exceptions and substantial regional variations. While we find that inequality in material comfort more often decreased than increased, class position continues to predict access to both private goods and public amenities. Although the observed patterns are complex, we find no proof of escalating inequalities in the domains under study.

What can the Participatory Budget (PB) teach us about slum upgrading in the cities of the Global South? This article describes the process of slum upgrading via PB in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Participatory budgeting (PB) is a renowned mechanism of resource allocation that transfers decision-making power over the capital expenditure portion of the municipal budget from the City Council to public assemblies. However, the impact of PB on municipal service delivery in general and housing in particular is understudied. Ethnographic findings are based on slum upgrading process via PB in an informal settlement in the East District of Porto Alegre. Fieldwork included 16 interviews with residents who had been PB delegates, PB councilors, municipal architects, lawyers, and the social worker involved in the slum upgrading project of Vila Radiante, East District. Furthermore, analysis of district-level expenditures on public works required for slum upgrading as well as analysis of site plans informed the conclusions. The Porto Alegre PB demonstrates that slum dwellers' involvement in all stages of the slum upgrading process, from resource allocation to service delivery, contributed to the effective distribution of housing and basic infrastructure. Slum dwellers are a heterogeneous group with diverse housing needs. Housing via PB addresses this diversity and provides an alternative to the dichotomist debate in international planning between, on one hand, slum clearance followed by public housing projects and, on the other, the promotion of assisted self-help housing through programs of land tenure and basic infrastructure provision.

The main purpose of this paper is to ascertain whether the concession of real right to use (CRRU) has been widely applied by Brazilian municipalities, and the extent to which beneficiaries (individuals living in regularised low-income settlements) make effective use of such an instrument to secure tenure status. Another relevant aspect is to review the relationship between securing land tenure and the use of land as collateral for investment. It is hoped that the paper can be used as the basis for a longitudinal study to monitor progress in the provision of secure tenure for the urban poor in Brazil, by investigating the strengths and weakness of CRRU to the formulation and implementation of pro-poor urban land tenure policies. Findings indicate that municipalities have to overcome problems related to the implementation of these programmes, such as; resistance on the part of the judiciary (at the municipal level) to incorporate newly acquired rights; the need to change attitudes towards the legalisation process of occupied land; and the need to change residents’ perceptions of this new instrument. The success of CRRU can depend on the articulation of these issues, as well as more integrated actions among planners, lawyers, city managers, and the residents of these settlements to advance performance.

The city of São Paulo, home to 11 million people, suffers constantly the effects of  flooding caused by extreme precipitation. Localized floods occur every summer in various parts of the city. Besides the losses and inconvenience felt by the residents, floods produce damages that cross the city boundaries, affecting income and output in the metropolitan area as well as in other parts of the state and the country. The objective of this study is to evaluate the economic impacts of floods in the city of São Paulo through the use of a Spatial Computable General Equilibrium (SCGE) model integrated to GIS information related to the location of points of floods and the firms within their influence. It is estimated that floods contributed to reduce city growth and residents' welfare, as well as hampering local competitiveness in both domestic and international markets. An intra-city total impact-damage ratio of 2.2 and an economywide total impact-damage ratio of 5.0 were found.