Planejamento Urbano

With about 12 million inhabitants, São Paulo, Brazil, is the largest city in South America. As in many other major southern hemisphere cities, this extreme concentration of people imposes a number of mobility and security challenges. The objective of this article was to investigate the space-time patterns of mobility and violent victimisation in São Paulo’s metro stations from a gender perspective. The methodology combines use of a Geographical Information System (GIS), statistical analysis through negative binomial regression modelling and hypothesis testing. Results indicate that mobility and the level of victimisation are gender dependent. Women are at higher risk of victimisation than men in São Paulo’s central metro station, while men run higher risk of violence at end stations – both notably during late night periods. The presence of employees reduces the risk of violence, except during the mornings. The article suggests that crime prevention initiatives need to be gender informed and sensitive to the particular spatial and temporal features of rapid transit environments.

The relationship between the state and informal land development in Global South metropolises has yet not received much attention in urban studies. Concerning that knowledge gap, this paper investigates how the state regulates and inspects irregular and clandestine land subdivisions in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte (MRBH). A mixed-methods approach, focused on the inner workings of the land development control policy led by the MRBH Agency between 2009 and 2018, provides new evidence of the relationships between inspectors, developers, and prosecutors, among other actors. By delving deep into the intricate nexus between a changing regulatory landscape and the bureaucratic, street-level, and everyday enforcement practices by officials, the paper reveals how land development control, directly and indirectly, shapes informal land development in the MRBH. Particularly, it sheds light on how land development control unrolls through a contradictory combination of overregulation on one side and tolerance on the other. In light of this, I argue that, as land development control evolves without effectively tackling the land question and the structural drivers of informality, the state becomes paradoxically entangled in the production of the same forms of informality it is expected to curb. Therefore, land development control is better understood as a fragile and ambivalent state compromise between the need to regulate urban expansion and market-driven informal urbanisation. By creating opportunities for rent extraction and capital accumulation which are explored by informal land developers, the state has been crucial for property-led informal urbanisation in metropolitan Brazil.

The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened existing inequities and injustices in Brazil, seen in the disproportionately detrimental impacts on favelas. State policy responses to the pandemic have disregarded favela residents’ experiences. Recommendations such as ‘shelter-in-place’ ignore the reality of over 11.4 million favela residents who cannot work from home or afford to stop working, nor practise physical distancing from others. This study investigates the discourse of community organisations in favelas as they respond to the threats of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state’s necropolitics. Community organisations in favelas have taken action to protect their residents from the virus, unemployment and hunger. I assess organisations’ (1) justification to act as a collective in their communities, and (2) stances about the government’s responses to the crisis. Through content analysis of social media, websites and media appearances of eight favela organisations and collectives in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, this study finds three main themes through which organisations justify their actions: vulnerability, neglect, and collectivity and care. More than survival strategies, the actions of favela organisations are counter-political acts as they oppose the decrepit necropolitics of the state by collectively enduring in the Brazilian context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding favela organisations’ actions in response to the pandemic is fundamental. It further illuminates the impact of public health emergencies in the lives of informal settlements’ residents and the governance of public health emergencies in these communities.

The literature on urban financialisation has prioritised the analysis of what finance does in the context of industrialised countries. This paper contributes to an understanding of what it is, and specifically how it emerges from the entanglements between the accumulation of intergovernmental debt, pricing and valuation practices – involving state and municipal utilities, regulatory agencies and consultancies – in the gradual transformation of shared into shareholder water governance in Brazilian metropolitan areas. Moreover, we provide a first illustration of how a more articulate approach between political economics and social studies of finance might contribute to an understanding of the making of urban financialisation, with a particular relevance for a context of less developed capital markets.

The Brazilian urban reform movement expanded citizen participation in decision-making processes through a policy environment motivated by a right to the city (RTC), a collective development strategy for political transformation. Yet recent events evidence that social exclusion and spatial segregation remain dominant features of the Brazilian city. These contradictions have led planning scholars and practitioners to grapple with misalignment between the reform movement’s paradigmatic goals and its paradoxical failures. We build upon this genre of thinking to assess critical areas of paradigm and paradox in Brazilian planning – insurgent urbanism, informality and knowledge – each of which is rooted in the lesser-understood concept of autogestão for improving the equity of land division through urban planning. Although not all inclusive of the issues faced by Brazilian cities, these three categories were selected for best representing how Brazil’s participatory turn established a range of paradigmatic and paradoxical conditions that can help us to understand cities in Brazil and beyond and might better leverage autogestão in the future.

The entrepreneurial city discourse has been adopted around the globe by policymakers, with the urban redevelopment project as one of its most representative symbols. The predominantly favourable discourse revolving around this new political economy of urban space is supported by claims that newly regenerated areas bring multiple benefits to the city and its citizens. These narratives have been used in Brazil to justify increasing reliance on an urban planning tool known as Urban Operations. This planning tool, developed in the 1990s, seeks to facilitate cooperation between public and private actors in the production of new urban spaces. While projected by some as a ‘magic formula’ that enables major urban redevelopment projects without public expenditure, the outcomes of Urban Operations often differ significantly from expectations. The cases of Água Espraiada (São Paulo) and Porto Maravilha (Rio de Janeiro) are used to demonstrate that regenerated areas, as preferred spaces for the penetration of financialised practices into the built environment, have brought forward new dynamics that are serving to reinforce pre-existing social inequalities and to exacerbate uneven development in Brazil’s main cities.

This essay critically engages with the book Urban Outcasts — A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality by Loïc Wacquant. In this book, studying poor neighborhoods in the United States and France in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wacquant argues that a new socio-economic configuration marked by dualization and polarization of the city and of the class structure has been formed in these metropolises as a result of structural shifts resulting from the breakdown of the Fordist regime and the recoiling of the welfare state. He calls ‘advanced marginality’ the new regime marked by a new form of urban poverty that makes part of the working classes ‘redundant’. This essay highlights the similarities between Wacquant's arguments and those of the theory of marginality of the 1960s and 1970s, which has been criticized and abandoned in Latin America. It also interrogates Wacquant's argument that advanced marginality is what will represent the future of metropolises everywhere, by introducing the case of Brazilian peripheries and asking questions about the increase of violence in poor neighborhoods.

Social Forums, modeled on the World Social Forums, are not social movements in the classic sense. They are not, and do not purport to be, the organizational form through which basic social change will be achieved, or can best be pursued. But they do bring together elements of many social movements, afford an opportunity for coalition-building among them, frequently around urban issues, and thus make a significant contribution to achieving such change. Conceivably they may be the foundation for an international social movement for change, but if so it is likely to coalesce about a specifically political program. Some concrete suggestions are made which might enhance their effectiveness.