Planejamento Urbano

Segregation has been one of the most persistent features of urban life and, accordingly, one of the main subjects of enquiry in urban studies. Stemming from a tradition that can be traced back to the Chicago School in the early twentieth century, social segregation has been seen as the natural consequence of the social division of space. Such naturalized understanding of segregation as ‘territorial segregation' takes space as a surrogate for social distance. We propose a shift in the focus from the static segregation of places—where social distance is assumed rather than fully explained—to how social segregation is reproduced through embodied urban trajectories. We aim to accomplish this by exploring the spatial behaviour of different social groups as networks of movement that constitute opportunities for co-presence. This alternative view recasts the original idea of segregation as ‘restrictions on interaction' by concentrating on the spatiality of segregation potentially active in the circumstances of social contact and encounters in the city. This approach to segregation as a subtle process that operates ultimately through trajectories of the body is illustrated by an empirical study in a Brazilian city.

Over the last two decades, numerous international conferences and organizations have espoused managing water as an economic good, involving participatory forums in systems of decentralized management at the river-basin level. In the 1990s, Brazil adopted such a model. More than a simple transfer of power from the national to the local level or from bureaucratic to deliberative decision-making, however, this process requires multi-directional power transfers among a variety of policy arenas and actors and among national, state, municipal and river-basin institutions, as well as a complex — and ongoing — negotiation over the meanings of both water pricing and participation. Focusing on the politics of reform legislation in the state of São Paulo and nationally, the article examines how political-institutional features of federalism and executive-legislative relations constrained the passage of reform legislation, and how pro-reform actors attempted to surmount such institutional limitations with networking strategies and by fostering incremental changes in practices on the ground.

After defaulting on their foreign-debt obligations in the 1980s, several Latin American countries had to restructure their economies to boost market-led growth. Some of the ensuing housing reforms promoted mortgage expansion and masshousing production. Mexico was among the first countries to follow this logic, and in aparticularly aggressive manner. Credit liberalization allowed a handful of real estate firms to experience massive expansions in their operations in the 2000s as they were able to build lower-middle-income housing at an accelerated rate by accessing public, pension and private equity funds. Brazil eventually appropriated some aspects of the Mexican housing model, but not others. In the late 2000s, Brazil began providing deep subsidies to low-income households to connect the private supply of housing with apublicly subsidized demand. This article discusses, challenges and moves beyond prior analyses of these processes by contrasting the two countries’ housing finance models and examining the more recent (2010s) evolution and normative shifts in their housing and urban development policy agendas. Despite the direct policy transfer between the two contexts, the South-South comparative analysis presented in the article highlights the fluctuating and unstable nature of financialization processes given the varied inclination of national governments to manage, promote or restrict them, or to contain or accentuate capitalist crises and their implications.

This article compares two cases of displacement suffered by informal workers and informal residents in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, both connected to the hosting of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. It asks the following question: considering that the right to work and the right to housing are both enshrined in the Brazilian Constitution, why do claims upon space based on those constitutional rights have different degrees of legitimacy? Two cases are analysed in detail. The first one concerns a group of informal workers displaced from their workspace for the modernization of the local stadium. The second one tells the story of an informal settlement where 90 families were displaced due to the construction of a flyover designed to improve access to the football stadium. This article engages with current postcolonial debates around urban informality, tackling two points that have been absent from these discussions. First, it compares two ways of informally occupying urban space—for work and for housing—revealing the distinct degrees of legitimacy embedded in such practices due to pre-existing institutional arrangements. Second, it emphasizes the connection between work and home through the life strategies and place-making practices of the urban poor.

One of the new challenges globalization raises to urban management is the increasing number of international migrants moving to cities of developing countries and their impact on urban governance. Although there is growing perception that urban cultural diversity is a desirable outcome of globalization, most international migrants add to the low-income population and are particularly affected by urban exclusion. Furthermore, local governments in developing countries are seldom prepared to cope with the ad hoc policies needed to integrate people with different cultural, social and religious traditions into the urban society. Such policies should aim to encourage mobility and temporary vs. permanent migration, strengthen civic identity, deal with the cultural differences and the resulting discriminatory reactions from local residents, promote participation and representation, and fight the social and economic exclusion that often expose migrants to illegal activities contributing to raising urban violence.

This paper reviews, using documentary evidence, the way in which gender equality and women’s empowerment was considered in the 2009 Global Report on Human Settlement (GRHS), Planning Sustainable Cities. Given the UN commitment to mainstreaming as a strategy and what we know about how planning impacts on women, expectations were high. The review concludes that gender failed to be effectively mainstreamed into the 2009 GRHS Planning Sustainable Cities. Since the decade of women in 1976e1985 it would seem that only limited progress has been made to improve the position of women relative to men when it comes to the pan global GRHS.

Since the early days of the self-help construction school that gave a definite switch to the urban housing debate in Latin America, the urban development discourse has shown some marked variations. Major multilateral agencies e especially the World Bank, UNCHS (UN-Habitat) and UNDP e played a key role in the evolution of this discourse. These institutions have also dominated the normative agendas that have brought about some definite shifts in urban policies and planning practices. Allowing for the differences between these international agencies' discourses, consensus was reached on the desired enabling roles of national and local governments. This article systematizes the switches in paradigms, central concepts, and planning approaches as witnessed by experience in the cities of Latin America over the past four decades.

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.