Planejamento Urbano

In the history of the cities, specially in the 20th century, a powerful web, unseen and silent is present: urban legality, that is, the collection of urban-related and building-related laws, decrees and rules regulating the production of the city's spaces. More than defining permitted or forbidden ways of apportioning space, more than actually regulating the city's development, urban laws act as demarcation signs defining frontiers of power. The law organizes, classifies and collects urban territories, conferring meanings and legitimacy to the way of life and family micro-policies of the groups most involved in the law's formulation. On the other hand, urban legality discriminates against forms of spatial and social organizations different from the pattern sanctioned by the law. Therefore, urban legality acts as a strong cultural paradigm, even when they fail to determine its final configuration. Urban legislation also has a great impact on the formation of a segmented real estate market in the city. The definition of spatial configurations related to specific areas, distinguishes markets reserved for certain social groups. Nevertheless, if urban legality has this economic power, the existence of vast non-regulated portions of the city reinforces even more the discriminatory and divisory role of the law. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the law: apparently it operates as a kind of mold for the ideal or desirable city. However, in the case of Sao Paulo and probably in the majority of Latin-American cities, it determines only the smallest part of the built-up space, since the product--the city--is not a result of the inert application of the model contained in the law; but of the relation that it establishes with the concrete form of real estate development in the city. Nevertheless, when defining the permitted and forbidden forms of producing spaces, it defines territories within and outside the law, that is, it defines full citizenship and limited citizenship regions. This is the theme of the thesis--to retrieve the history of urban legislation in the city of Sao Paulo (and of its non-regulated spaces) from the time of its first systematic formulation--the first Code of Ordinances of 1886, as a means of penetrating the city's history and clarifying its political, economic and cultural roles throughout this history.

This study investigates the processes that underlie the rise of technology-intensive agglomerations in Brazil and their relevance to the country's ability to develop advanced technologies and internationally competitive products. My hypothesis is that the key to regional specialization in high-technology industries lies fundamentally on the political mobilization of local groups, which actively promote and take advantage of government-sponsored research for industrial applications. Collective technological learning in the industrial district thus emerges from the convergence of place-based politics and institutional strategies that foster a synergistic relationship between scientific research and the production system. The effective coordination of mutual learning through cooperation and shared resources increases the efficiency of technology search procedures by individual agents. These interactions shape the characteristics of the local production structure, reinforcing the concentration of specialized technical knowledge. The convergence of interconnected initiatives by the public and private sector thus becomes a collective regional asset. This study of 92 firms in three regions (Campinas, Sao Carlos and Sao Jose dos Campos, in Sao Paulo State) indicates that different configurations of these processes have been essential for their development. In Sao Carlos, the agglomeration is fundamentally a product of local efforts to direct university-industry cooperation toward a common developmental goal. In the other two regions, particularly in Sao Jose dos Campos, local technology-intensive industrialization stems primarily from "top-down" initiatives by the federal government, which has promoted domestic self-reliance on selected technologies through publicly-sponsored research and procurement. In all cases, there is only a partial conformance to the most dynamic models of innovative industrial complexes. The intense linkages between research and industry in these regions constitute a powerful ingredient of technology-intensive industrialization. Yet, these agglomerations remain essentially collections of isolated firms. They still lack strong inter-firm linkages and the collective organizational flexibility that arises from an efficient coordination of competitive and cooperative relationships between specialized suppliers and producers. In short, local politics have not yet been able to construct substitute mechanisms to overcome the limitations of an unstable macro-economic environment.

Environmentalists, both academics and practitioners, tend to deal with intergenerational problems of a global and rural nature, often neglecting the immediate environmental conditions that especially affect the current generation of urban poor. Much of the writings and actions of urbanists focus on the economic and political dynamics of cities, with little attention to the environmental dimension of urban development. Thus, the terrain at the nexus of environmental management and urban development has not been fully explored. In order to intellectually provision an expedition into this territory, several guiding themes were derived from the fields of economic development, ecology, governance, and sustainable development. These themes were used to design a methodology for rapid urban environmental assessment, and a research expedition was mounted to cities in developing countries on four continents: Accra (Ghana), Jakarta (Indonesia), Katowice (Poland), and Sao Paulo (Brazil). A wealth of comparative information was developed from environmental indicator questionnaires, urban environmental profiles, and environmental town meetings to answer the following research question: how can strategies be formulated for managing urban environmental problems to enhance the economic productivity, health and ecology of Third World cities? Conclusions stemming from analysis of this information were that: (1) enhanced public awareness, consultation and participation can improve environmental management; (2) solutions that are not heavily dependent on institutional performance may be necessary in the short run; (3) urban environmental strategies should have an explicit focus on the problems of the poor; (4) city-specific strategies should be guided by the configuration of key economic variables; and (5) careful attention must be paid to the selection of problem areas, their spatial scale, and institutional capacity when designing interventions. Criteria for assessing and designing effective approaches to urban environmental management were developed, combining theoretical themes with these research findings. No existing modus operandi for addressing Third World urban environmental problems fulfill the criteria. To remedy this, an initial process for urban environmental management is proposed, consisting of rapid urban environmental assessment, a city-based environmental management strategy, and an urban environmental action plan.In the last few decades, the debate over appropriate conservation tactics in the moist tropical realm has been highly contentious. In particular, issues surrounding the inclusion or exclusion of local people in protected areas have become pronounced in the academic discourse over biodiversity and environmental protection. Strategies applied throughout the New World tropics display a mosaic of different levels of protection and public participation. But with only seven percent of Brazil's Atlantic Forest remaining, and the Serra do Mar region harboring its largest fragments of forest, highly restrictive reserves have been advanced as the most appropriate conservation strategy to ensure the protection of this biologically important biome. However, there are fundamental problems with the “on the ground” realities of restrictive protected areas and their arbitrarily superimposed boundaries that both include people and paradoxically criminalize their existence. By means of a case study in Vila Picinguaba, São Paulo, this thesis explores the existing “grey areas” of strict environmental protection, that is, where intermediate spaces in protected areas have profound impacts on the livelihoods of local people.

Across the world traditional forms of urban management are affected by economic restructuring and neoliberalization processes. These processes alter the government role in the provision of social services, give rise to multi-sector partnerships for social service provision by public, private and non-profit actors, and stimulate the creation of alternative approaches to social service provision. In this dissertation I discuss the impact of these changes on social housing provision in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. I provide a historically-grounded account of political-economic restructuring in Brazil that has emerged through neoliberalization, document how these policy shifts affect social service responsibilities and the fiscal capacities of local and state governments, and show how these transformations increased social housing needs but at the same time decreased overall capacity to deliver housing to the very poor. I also discuss the new proposals that attempt to replace the state's withdrawal from several types of social service provision. Specifically I study partnerships among the public sector, private sector, and civil society, describe the emergence, structure, and functions of these partnerships in Brazil, and implicitly compare how these partnership approaches are used in northern nations such as the United States and United Kingdom. Finally, I look inside social housing organizations to examine alternative housing strategies that have emerged, and highlight the problems with these alternative strategies and suggest reasons for their failings. The arguments of this dissertation are developed from ethnographic research conducted in the Ribeirão Preto region of Brazil.

Due to increased urbanization in the global south during the later half of the 20th century, a severe lack of suitable housing and related infrastructure in low-income communities has developed. In order to address housing deficit issues, particularly in large metropolitan areas, national and local governments have implemented various policies and programs intended to improve housing conditions of residents living in poverty-stricken communities. To determine what types of programs provide housing for low-income residents, this thesis will examine select housing programs implemented in the South American cities of Caracas, Venezuela, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and São Paulo. Brazil from the 1990s through the early 21st century. This study will provide an overview of urban housing in Latin America during the 20th century, including housing policies that contributed to the growth of housing settlements for low-income residents. The impact of the proliferation of low-income housing in urban areas will be discussed. This study will then present a narrative on select urban housing improvement and upgrading programs implemented in the low-income neighborhoods in the study cities. Data and other pertinent information regarding these initiatives were obtained from urban housing policy reports and briefs and program evaluations. The overarching goal of this assessment is to establish if programmatic outcomes were successful and to examine the impacts of such programs in the social and economic realms.

In this thesis, I study how urban social movements’ resistance to displacement generates new conceptions of citizenship, influencing state’s policy and legislation. Specifically, I explore the case of the organized squatters’ movements (OSMs) of the center of São Paulo, Brazil, a social movement that fights for housing opportunities in the city center by occupying long-time vacant properties in the area. I find that OSMs have furthered the agenda of low-income housing in downtown by engaging in a citizenship practice that defies and demands from the state. On the one hand, the state incentivizes displacement processes by allowing land speculation and excluding the voices of grassroots movements in the planning process. On the other, the state is the ally that can stop eviction processes by negotiating with property owners, halting urban interventions, creating laws and implementing policies that benefit OSM groups.

The dissertation deals with problems of planning and governmental organization in metropolitan areas. It concentrates on the conditions in developing countries by studying a case of urban policy implementation in Brazil, where metropolitan administrations were established in nine regions. Questions related to planning policies and to organizational arrangements for metropolitan governance are discussed, characterizing a joint disciplinary approach of urban planning and public administration. Different strategies of governmental organization are analyzed in relation to Brazilian conditions, in view of which a specific arrangement is proposed, consisting of a regional council backed by one or more technical agencies to carry out regional programs. This is treated a macro-organizational level of analysis in metropolitan affairs. The micro-organizational level deals with the design and management of regional agencies; contingency theory in organizational analysis provides the basis for a model of structural design of such agencies, in which the external activities to be performed are associated to different internal organizational designs. This model is used in the evaluation of the performance of three Brazilian metropolitan agencies: Sao Paulo's EMPLASA, Rio de Janeiro's FUNDREM, and Porto Alegre's METROPLAN. Both their implementation processes and the outcomes of their activities are assessed in these case studies. The evaluation helps underline the key variables in the institutionalization of public agencies, a process found to be critically dependent on the capacity of these agencies to adapt to changes in their institutional environment. A comparative analysis of the outcomes of the metropolitan agencies' programs, by sectors of activity, is included to provide a perspective on issues in the planning agenda and on the effects of different policies and strategies pursued by the Brazilian agencies. The study concludes with recommendations on how to improve the performance of metropolitan institutions as well as on means for implementing urban planning policies in Brazil, which can be applied in other developing countries with similar conditions.

Differential growth among countries and, within countries, among regions, is a universal yet not thoroughly understood phenomenon. Assuming that uneven regional development is inherent to capitalist accumulation, this study analyses the effects of industrialization on regional development in Brazil. The analysis emphasizes the last decades, after the dominant industrial system of production and mass consumption (called Fordism) expanded beyond the boundaries of the industrialized world, taking the form that is called peripheral Fordism.The study indicates that differences between regions in Brazil result not only from unequal original endowments but also and moreso from the historical evolution of dependent development, mediated by the dominant relations of production. The basic hypothesis states that there are three different types of manufacturing regions in the country: Region I, the industrial center, joins the states of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro; Region II, the area of subsidiary manufacturing, includes the states of Pernambuco, Bahia, Minas Gerais, Parana, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul; Region III, the area with low industrialization, encompasses the remaining states in the country. The analysis follows the genesis of economic concentration in the Brazilian core region and the ensuing multiplication of regional inequalities that have lasted for many decades. The study also identifies the consequences of the newly establishing peripheral Fordism upon the regional structure of wages and professional qualification in Brazil. In spite of the fact that regional differences in investment, production, and workers' pay have slightly decreased in recent years, the main economic activities, the best remunerated functions and the best paying industries remain largely concentrated in the core, thus suggesting uneven regional development will continue in Brazil.

Latin American and Caribbean countries are aging rapidly. The pace of this process along with the institutional and economic contexts varies across countries, but there are common regional norms. Across the region, the family unit continues to bear significant responsibility for the well-being of older adults and within the family, there are gender differentiated expectations for the provision and receipt of support. The stability of the family and the gender roles therein, with regard to support for older adults, takes on more significance in countries where mobility among younger adults is commonplace and fertility continues to decline. Using data from the 2000 Survey of Health Well-Being and Aging of Older Adults in Latin America and the Caribbean (SABE), this study provides a comparative assessment of intergenerational residential proximity and transfers of financial and functional support in the region among 9,259 older adults. It assesses the extent to which upward flows of support are conditioned by the prevailing economic and institutional contexts of aging as well as the gender systems of household organization in seven cities across the region. The findings reveal that patterns of residential proximity and support transfers in these cities generally differ according to the respective stage of demographic transition and the strength of social welfare systems in countries. Older adults in Montevideo are more likely to live further away from their children and to receive less support compared to those in Mexico City. Whereas older adults in Montevideo, Uruguay and Bridgetown, Barbados are less likely to receive financial support from children at further distances, older adults in Havana are not. Regarding gender, in all cities, except Buenos Aires, older women are more likely than men to receive support. Regional gender norms of sons being primarily responsible for economic support were not consistent across the cities. Altogether, findings reveal geographic proximity, gender systems, and macro level socioeconomic contexts shape intergenerational support.