Planejamento Urbano

The turn of the 21st century saw two important pieces of legislation introduced in Brazil: the Law of Fiscal Responsibility or LFR (2000) and the City Statute (2001). While each law has been celebrated, this article argues that a perversion of their intentions is emerging in practice. The scale and scope of municipal budget composition and allocations in the period studied (1995–2010) give reason to question how these landmark laws are being locally interpreted. Evidence details a disproportionate rise in current expenditures in all state capitals in Brazil since the introduction of the LFR. Further, among state capitals with the largest number of ‘sub-normal agglomerations’, a few key cities show a peculiarly stagnant proportion of expenditures directed towards housing and urbanisation. A case study of São Paulo is presented to explore explanations for these trends and understand what they mean for the direction and control over upgrading investments in that city.

This paper presents an innovative comparison that works creatively with the entangled spatialities of policy mobilities, drawing on a city-to-city cooperation between São Paulo (Brazil) and eThekwini (South Africa) municipalities for the exchange of slum upgrading expertise. The proposed comparative tactic entails tracing the establishment of this connection in order to disassemble the constituent flows and localities merged within it. Subsequently, by posing questions to one another, a relational comparison of the trajectory of slum upgrading policy in each locality is composed, unearthing the political and institutional conditions that preceded the existence of the connection per se. In that sense, both eThekwini and São Paulo are considered equivalent starting points from which local actors engaged in circulating ideas and mobilised slum upgrading policies. This paper not only brings a fresh approach to comparative methods – incorporating political contexts and their extensive overlapping networks of relations alongside a focus on particular policy trajectories – but also contributes to furthering global urban studies in two other ways. First, it provides insight into the processes by which policies are put on the move and localised (or not). Second, it demonstrates how repeated instances of urban practice may be unravelled by allowing each context of policy formation, with its distinctive trajectory of slum upgrading, to speak to one another. In this regard, the comparative analysis identified how, in both São Paulo and eThekwini, the consolidation of democracy was followed by the development of more technocratic approaches to the detriment of earlier slum upgrading initiatives focussed on community empowerment.

In Rio de Janeiro, immobility or the share of people with no journeys on any given day is very high (46%). Immobility has a marked geographical dimension in what is a segregated city. But income has only limited explanatory power. The population structure, with high proportions of people who are not in the labour force and who are unemployed, accounts for the high levels of immobility in the poor districts. Although population structure effects prevail, spatial factors such as the severance effect also account for differences between districts. Indeed, Rio de Janeiro features many different types of barriers that affect immobility in several districts and for several population groups. These barriers may be physical or symbolic and perceptive. This study proposes therefore to identify the scope of those barriers as they affect immobility.

Our findings from the latest household travel survey available for the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro (2003) illustrate the effects of the two types of barrier, physical or symbolic and perceptive, on immobility that more specifically mark out certain categories of individuals such as housewives, the elderly, the unemployed or poor workers. Conversely, the wealthier active population seems to be little affected by the two types of barriers under study. Lastly, our results show that social fragmentation does not lead to greater immobility of favela populations in the heart of rich districts, but on the contrary to increased mobility, especially for the working age population in employment or looking for employment.

The issue of urban vacancy is both a complex and a prevalent phenomenon in multiple contexts globally, providing an opening to address systemic issues of precarity. In this article, I explore the issue of urban vacancy in São Paulo, where the problem of vacant property has been highlighted for years alongside housing challenges and socio-spatial segregation. While São Paulo’s real estate market is often unreachable for the urban poor, a Brazilian constitutional directive on the social function of property – the obligation to use property to further the common good – enables municipalities to take punitive action against owners of vacant property through a triad of policy tools. Therefore, despite the often-exclusionary nature of vacancy, transformational possibilities may exist. Exploring the application of these tools, I view urban vacancy through a perspective on common property, untangling emergent contestations and opportunities for transformation.

Scholars have documented how financial capital has produced displacement driven by hypermodern urban spaces characterised by luxury and exclusivity. In this article we highlight how hypermodern public–private partnerships (PPPs) often re-write history, creating a futuristic global city image. Our case study of Porto Maravilha’s PPP reviews a dualistic narrative in the context of changes in Rio de Janeiro in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. Porto Maravilha aimed to position Rio de Janeiro as a centre of global competition and capital. However, this narrative re-framed the history of the transatlantic slave trade through discursive tactics that diluted and undermined the brutality of slavery in Rio’s port. Furthermore, this hypermodern PPP reinforced the post-abolition discriminatory urban planning policies that dislodged Africans and Afro-Brazilians from their places of residence, work and culture in the port district. The result is the erasure of the experiences of Black Brazilians in the port area for touristic consumption, selling the city on the world stage. Given this contradiction, we develop the concept of ‘legacy participation’ to secure the rights of Afro-Brazilians and their organisations to make decisions about their own territory.

This paper presents the Relational Urban Mobility Injustice framework for analysing urban accessibility and mobility, aiming to uncover critical, often overlooked injustices in the mobility system. Through reevaluating transport outcomes, we distinguish regimes of (im)mobility and expose the oppressive interdependence among them that mirrors and reinforces injustices across social groups. Using empirical data from public transport in São Paulo as a proof of concept, we show how transport conditions in terms of fare costs and crowding are shaped by social markers such as class and race. Areas predominantly inhabited by white residents feature lower crowding (below six passengers/m²) and reduced fares (under nine Brazilian reals), whereas zones primarily occupied by lower-class, black residents endure overcrowding and higher fares (over 18 Brazilian reals), inadvertently subsidising transportation for upper class and white areas. These dynamics demonstrate how deeply entwined conditions of precarity and privilege may be within a public transport system. Our argument and findings advocate for a paradigm shift in urban transport research, emphasising the oppression between social groups within the urban mobility systems.