Planejamento Urbano

Os orçamentos participativos, instrumento de gestão urbana com referenciais balizados em preceitos das democracias participativa e deliberativa com enfoque no debate popular acerca do orçamento público, surgiu no Brasil e teve, nos últimos 30 anos, massiva expansão global, ganhando especial destaque em Portugal, hoje um dos principais estudos de caso mundial. O objetivo desta pesquisa foi analisar essa disseminação interna no país e quais suas consequências territoriais e na gestão urbana do país. Para tal, articulou-se coleta de dados quantitativos e qualitativos em escala nacional, de forma a englobar todos os processos locais já realizadas (e ainda ocorrendo) em território lusitano, sendo que estes foram tabulados e espacializados se utilizando de ferramentas SIG. Aos dados foram somados o debate teórico e conceitual envolvendo as condições institucionais para participação de qualidade, com especial enfoque em uma abordagem territorial, utilizando-se do referencial da ciência geográfica, o que permitiu a composição do conceito de impacto territorial. A coleta empírica, em conjunto com as discussões realizadas na comparação com os achados da literatura científica especializada, resultou na identificação de que a maior parte dos OPs em curso (e também finalizados) em Portugal pouco servem como instrumentos de gestão urbana, relegados ao papel de “laboratório de participação”, interferindo minimamente nas relações de poder pré-estabelecidas nas cidades lusitanas. Com a exceção parcial da experiência de Cascais (em constante evolução e ainda com muitas potencialidades), os orçamentos participativos portugueses são instáveis institucionalmente, geram baixa mobilização popular e discutem valores orçamentários irrisórios, estando à margem das principais decisões políticas (apesar do intenso marketing, que tenta mostrar o contrário) e do binômio gestão-planejamento urbano do país lusitano.

O presente trabalho foi realizado com o objetivo de cruzar informações entre o planejamento urbano e a gestão de desastres naturais, tendo como objeto de estudo o município de Rio do Sul/SC. Foram interpoladas, através de Sistema de Informação Geográfica, camadas vetoriais de variadas inundações ocorridas na cidade e sua relação com o zoneamento do Plano Diretor Participativo de 2006. Através destas análises foi possível visualizar os danos e interpretar as consequências espaciais desta dinâmica. Utilizando-se do conceito de território como arcabouço teórico, discutiu-se as relações de poder envolvidas no contexto geográfico trabalhado e os efeitos observados na morfologia urbana local. Buscou-se trazer uma contribuição para análises técnicas e críticas do planejamento urbano e da gestão de desastres naturais, necessárias para casos de várias outras cidades na realidade brasileira e catarinense, e cabe a Geografia compreender e ordenar estes processos.

O processo de urbanização nos países desenvolvidos, acarreta problemas. Uma grande parte dos moradores dos centros urbanos desses países vivem na pobreza, em assentamentos degradados em condições extremas de insalubridade. Surgem desta forma as chamadas favelas, estas começam a fazer parte do ambiente urbano da cidade, e representam a solução para a população de baixa renda como forma de sobrevivência. Estas, são caracterizadas por ser um ambiente insalubre, com vários tipos de necessidades, particularmente o acesso a serviços básicos.

Este fenómeno das cidades é um problema não só para as cidades, como para a saúde, mas também representam uma ameaça para o meio ambiente.

Ao longo do século assistimos a diferentes políticas voltadas para este fenómeno, uma delas a erradicação, que se mostrou ineficiente. Actualmente a solução passa por urbanizar estes espaços, garantindo serviços básicos de infra estrutura e mantendo a comunidade no seu local de origem de forma a preservar os laços de sociabilidade. É urgente urbanizar.

Esta dissertação propõe um programa geral de intervenção em assentamentos precários, tendo como base uma metodologia com premissas da sustentabilidade, procurando assim urbanizar contribuindo para a melhoria desses assentamentos a nível urbano, económico e social. Durante a elaboração da metodologia foi tida em atenção aspectos sociais e económicos para a aplicação dessas premissas sustentáveis a curto e longo prazo, de modo a haver uma maior aceitação por parte dos moradores. Foram também definidas directrizes para a educação ambiental do moradores, como processo fundamental na recuperação e contribuindo assim para uma sustentabilidade da área urbanizada.

Após desenvolvimento dessa metodologia , esta é aplicada um caso de estudo concreto, a Comunidade do Caranguejo.

In the mid-1990s, urban planning officials in Belo Horizonte, Brazil's third largest city, approved an innovative slum-upgrading program that included -- for the first time in Brazilian urban planning history -- the construction of hundreds of public housing structures within favelas (slums). Vila Viva -- Brazil's longest running and most extensive slum-upgrading program -- relocates families from areas predisposed to landslides and flooding to four-story public housing structures. Through this urban renewal project, favela residents can exchange their self-built houses for two-bedroom apartments in public housing buildings and acquire land titles. Based on fourteen continuous months of ethnographic fieldwork in one of Belo Horizonte's oldest favelas (October 2007-November 2008), this dissertation examines how public housing reconfigures residents' subjectivities, social roles and sense of place. Through participant-observation and in-depth interviews with urban renewal experts (city architects, engineers and social workers) and public housing residents (both before and after they moved to their new homes), my ethnographic study provides one of the first glimpses of the way public housing transform what it means to live in favela settings. My findings suggest that the insertion of housing types previously found exclusively in middle-class neighborhoods disrupts long-standing dichotomies between favelas and state-recognized neighborhoods, prompting favela residents to question their place within the city. When favela residents are relocated from self-built houses to public housing buildings, they begin to think of their new homes as places separate and distinct from the favela -- a highly stigmatized place. Although public housing residents continue to live in the same location alongside the same people they interacted with before relocation (family, old friends and neighbors), their new homes allow them to leave the favela -- without actually leaving its geographic boundaries. Instead of living in the favela, residents are now living in "city buildings" or "closed condominiums" -- gated spaces with an entirely different set of rules, obligations and expectations. For them, the favela is a space they left behind. The urban renewal of favelas provides a unique window to observe, step-by-step, how informal settlements are integrated into the socio-geographic maps of cities through architectural and infrastructural interventions. By focusing on the ways urban renewal experts and favela residents negotiate and resolve often-conflicting notions of aesthetics, habitation and citizenship, this dissertation promises to shed light on how local governments and residents can work more effectively with each other to improve informal settlements. In so doing, this project hopes to contribute to anthropological studies of the state, space, informal settlements, and development.

This dissertation focuses on the theory and praxis of Solidarity Economy (SE) in Brazil and incorporates an intersectional analysis of racialized economies, Black geographies, and diverse community economies led by women of color in majority Black favelas in Rio de Janeiro. The concept of Solidarity Economy in Brazil is diverse, but organizations and practitioners of SE generally use the term to describe various forms of non-capitalist, worker-driven and community-based ways of organizing economic activities according to the principles of autonomy, equality and sustainability. Specifically I employ collaborative research methods with community organizations of favela City of God to map and analyze the multi-faceted aspects of struggles against forced displacement and community organizing for the right to the favela within an anti-Black urban context. This work highlights the role of black women residents in City of God in planning and enacting community economies around a community childcare, a youth educational center and housing projects. I argue that such socio-spatial praxis represents contemporary forms of afro-feminist urban marronage in the face of anti-Black urban projects.

I also examine the institutionalization of the Movement of Solidarity Economy shedding light on racialized power-knowledge and spatial inequalities hierarchies reproduced within the movement’s organizational practices. I draw on diverse economies, post-development, and urban geography studies, and I bring these bodies of literature into conversation with critical race debates in Brazil, Afro-pessimism debates, and decolonial pedagogical approaches.

My thesis examines the process of gentrification of low-income residents in Vidigal, a favela located on a hill adjacent to the most touristy and desirable area in Rio de Janeiro. Favela is the Portuguese term to refer to slums in Brazil. Recently, those favelas adjacent to the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods have become attractive locations for tourists, foreigners and young middle-class Brazilians due to their geographical location, and their majestic views of the city and ocean. The sudden attractiveness of Rio’s favelas emerged in the context of the city’s economic growth, and the local government’s plans to brand it as a global metropolis and tourist destination catalyzed by the preparation for the 2016 Olympic Games.

As in many other cities around the world, Vidigal has been experiencing the first signs of gentrification: new middle-class Brazilians and foreign residents recently have been opening high-end businesses, leading to rapid rise in housing prices and, consequently, displacement of its original low-income residents. Through mixed-research methods combining official data, participant observation, and in-depth interviews, I investigate the extent to which global factors that enable gentrification in different localities around the world manifest themselves in Vidigal as well as the role of local factors in this particular case. Emphasizing the particularities of this case can enrich further research on gentrification as it becomes a global phenomenon.

Since the turn of the 21st century, favela communities have faced new and unprecedented challenges in the light of renewed eviction threats and displacement connected to real estate development and speculation. The right to remain has become ever more complex as favela communities wrestle with and against dispossession and the political contexts which underpin its making. Yet, favela grassroots resistance has also grown in complexity and capacity. This dissertation focuses on the various motivations, processes, and spatiopolitical dynamics through which grassroots housing resistance have been mobilized in response to the threat of dispossession. Through participant observation, informal conversations, and interviews, I utilize an ethnographic approach to advance three inter-related arguments. First, I argue while dispossession operates as a technique of subjection for the preservation of differentiated treatment towards favela residents, it simultaneously motivates residents to exercise unique forms of agency that reflect the situated politics of their impending dispossession. In the nexus of subjection and agency, dispossession is not only opposed and negotiated, but it is also embodied and performed as a form of resistance unto itself. Second, I argue that such acts of agency have taken flight through the coming together of wider network relationships between favela residents and differently-scaled supporters to address both on-the-ground, localized struggles and to advance a broader politics of insurgency around favela housing rights in the city. Third, I argue that a broader politics of insurgent mobilization has been made possible through the enrollment of grassroots favela resistance into the digital. Digital mobilizations serve not only as the basis for physical actualizations of on-the-ground resistance, but it is also a means to foster broader imaginations of alternative ways to remain in the city. Collectively, this dissertation highlights the diverse spatiopolitical dynamics of dispossession and the ways it serves to underpin the dynamic and creative formation of subaltern, grassroots housing resistance in Rio de Janeiro.

The lack of housing is a worldwide problem. According to United Nations’ data, 900 million people live in informal settlements and this number is estimated to double by 2025. In Brazil it is estimated that six percent of the national population (11 million people) live in informal settlements, called favelas. In cities like Rio de Janeiro this number can go up to 20% (1.3 million people) (United Nations, 2015, IBGE 2010).

The spontaneous occupation of land within the limits of the city of Rio de Janeiro by favelas creates a dense settlement model guided by an economy of resources. On the one hand, these characteristics of favelas create a unique case of urban occupation that deserves to be analyzed. On the other hand, favelas do present problems, the most notorious being the lack of basic urban infrastructure and proper public places.

The goal of this research is to develop a shape grammar-based approach to the planning of affordable housing settlements, based on the model of favelas, developing rules to replicate their positive characteristics but avoid their flaws. Santa Marta, an iconic favela in Rio, is used as a case study. The research encompasses the following steps: literature review; data collection and modeling of the case study; generating the grammar-based analytical computational model; assessing the case study; revising the analytical model to propose a synthetic computational model to generate favela-like settlements; and validating this model.

Results from this research include the development of a shape grammar to explain the settlement process of favelas in steep terrains and a set of rules to illustrate how favela-like settlements could be planned. In addition, the study contributes for the theory of shape grammars by extending Knight’s theory of grammatical transformations to create the synthetic grammar from the analytical one.

After the severe landslides that affected Rio de Janeiro in April 2010, causing 67 deaths, the city authorities implemented what they called “a paradigm shift” in responding to disasters. This new approach, which echoes international discourses on urban resilience, builds on the government of urban uncertainties through risk technologies. Such technologies have underpinned a biopolitics of favelas removals. From 2009 to 2016, approximately 21,000 families were expelled from their homes due to ‘disaster risk prevention’, now one of the core repertoires of urban policy in Rio. This research aims to understand how risk and resilience are mobilised to govern marginalised areas and groups, how this is grounded in a long history of state-led precarization of favelas and how favela dwellers have responded to and resisted attempts to remove their right to stay in place.

The study builds on the results of a multi-sited case study in Rio by analysing five favelas over a total of 10 months between 2016 and 2017, involving archival research, politically engaged participant observation, semi-structured and in-depth interviews with key participants. The approach to data analysis draws on a hybrid thematic analysis driven by a feminist and postcolonial conceptual framework, moving between concepts of biopolitics, precarity, vulnerability and resistance.

Analysed through the concepts of (urban) biopolitics and precarity, this new mode of risk-based urban governance appears as a depoliticised and de-historicised form of risk management in favelas, producing precarity and displacement rather than ‘resilience’. Along these lines, the thesis presents three key findings. First, the characterization of favelas as ‘high-risk areas’ through the governmental technologies of risk assessment serves to justify displacements, undermine favelados' agency and obscure the historical process of governmental precarization. Second, state-led precarization has been the key driver of favelas and favelados’ vulnerability, while simultaneously exposing both displaced and those left behind to further risks. Third, by articulating an interpretation of vulnerability as both a deliberate exposure to power and an essence of political resistance, this research shows how 4 favelados have successfully mobilized their shared and produced vulnerability to resist disaster risk displacements through epistemic, temporal, affective and material forms of contestation.