The “Heliópolis Case” and the political urban dispute in Brazil (original) (raw)
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Urban Policy, Social Movements and the Right to the City in Brazil
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Brazilian urban social movements have played a key role in bringing about change in urban policy since the 1980s and in light of the widespread protests across the country in June 2013. This insurgency and the urban reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s exemplify waves of mobilization and demobilization, signaling positive change at the level of praxis. More recent events have highlighted challenges for Brazil’s political left.
Urban Studies
Since re-democratisation, Brazil has experienced a slow but continuous process of urban reform, with the introduction of legal and institutional developments that favour participatory democracy in urban policy. Legal innovations such as the City Statute have been celebrated for expanding the ‘right to the city’ to marginalised populations. While most studies examine the struggles of the urban poor, I focus on middle-class citizens, showing how such legal developments have unevenly affected the ways in which different social groups are able to impact the production of urban space. The two cases explored in this study concern residents’ struggles to preserve their middle-class neighbourhoods against change triggered by projects related to the hosting of the 2014 World Cup in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The first looks at the Musas Street residents’ fight against the construction of a luxury hotel in their neighbourhood, while the second examines the Pampulha residents’ struggle against th...
On urban studies in Brazil: The favela, uneven urbanisation and beyond
Urban Studies Journal, 2021
This essay discusses some key ideas and debates about urban studies in Brazil, considered historiographically, from the mid-1900s to the present. It presents the main components and particularities of what emerges as the Brazilian matrix of urban studies, interrogating the most influential work in the field with the country’s own experiences of industrialisation and urbanisation. It discusses some key urban debates of the 21st century, namely new planning models associated with globalisation, global mega-events, public–private partnerships, inner-city gentrification, housing and city financialisation, rising forms of urban warfare and social control in slums (favelas), and new activisms and urban insurgencies. Through this analysis, we point to contradictions and tensions in relation to European and North American urban theory, calling for the need to formulate new categories and hypotheses to better understand the unequal and extreme processes resulting from violent expansion of capitalist relations over the entire planet, and comment on the new practices and forms of social mobilisation emerging from turbulent contexts.
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The increasing complexity of urbanization requires a more careful look at the relationships that produce and reproduce the Brazilian cities, locus of life of more than 80% of citizens and places in fruition by world economic system. This paper aims to demonstrate that, even after the creation of the City Statute in 2001 (document born from the claims of popular movements in the country's democratization in the 1980s and which regulates all the urban planning process of the cities in Brazil), the relation between social agents that (re)produce the urban space generates unequal political scenarios. In turn causing socio-spatial segregation, diminishing urban mobility, increased violence, emergence of "urban plutocrats" and flexibilization of the current legislation. This occurs because at one extreme is a State that fails to ensure the right to the city, exposing more people to high social vulnerability processes. On the other side, social movements contesting, ensuring and promoting rights already conquered by the population (which alter the nature of this process), and many times fighting against other more conservative movements which are used for political privileges to be held by use of power. Thus highlighting the contradictions that the Cities Statute cannot resolve, since, theoretically it should serve as a democratic territorial management channel. In this light, new debates appears for the social sciences, especially regarding the empowerment of new social agents, according to the economic dynamics and dominant politics in recent decades, as well as the search for a new typifying, nature and interests involved in urban planning. We believe that the academic debate needs to show-and also be updated about-the state action before the socially interested agents discuss and (re)produce the urban space. Therefore setting its stance towards democratically established legal frameworks, consonant to the proposal here presented, which aims to contribute to the sociological debate about the Brazilian cities, filling gaps left in recent years within the academy.
The increasing complexity of urbanization requires a more careful look at the relationships that produce and reproduce the Brazilian cities, locus of life of more than 80% of citizens and places in fruition by world economic system. This paper aims to demonstrate that, even after the creation of the City Statute in 2001 (document born from the claims of popular movements in the country's democratization in the 1980s and which regulates all the urban planning process of the cities in Brazil), the relation between social agents that (re)produce the urban space generates unequal political scenarios. In turn causing socio-spatial segregation, diminishing urban mobility, increased violence, emergence of "urban plutocrats" and flexibilization of the current legislation. This occurs because at one extreme is a State that fails to ensure the right to the city, exposing more people to high social vulnerability processes. On the other side, social movements contesting, ensuring and promoting rights already conquered by the population (which alter the nature of this process), and many times fighting against other more conservative movements which are used for political privileges to be held by use of power. Thus highlighting the contradictions that the Cities Statute cannot resolve, since, theoretically it should serve as a democratic territorial management channel. In this light, new debates appears for the social sciences, especially regarding the empowerment of new social agents, according to the economic dynamics and dominant politics in recent decades, as well as the search for a new typifying, nature and interests involved in urban planning. We believe that the academic debate needs to show -and also be updated about -the state action before the socially interested agents discuss and (re)produce the urban space. Therefore setting its stance towards democratically established legal frameworks, consonant to the proposal here presented, which aims to contribute to the sociological debate about the Brazilian cities, filling gaps left in recent years within the academy.
Antipode, 2013
Despite regulatory and financial rollout of the state at a number of scales, and a strengthening of the institutional framework that guides territorial planning and management, Brazilian metropolitan governance continues to be characterized by fragmented and relatively competitive organizational structures. Likewise, the Brazilian metropolis is marked by economic dynamism and intense socio-spatial and environmental contradictions. Much of the mainstream literature on metropolitan governance has emphasized a natural "optimum" scale for planning and management in city-regions, articulated by public and private stakeholders aimed at the coordinated delivery of economic, social and environmental services. Combining the literature on new state spaces and critical Brazilian urban-regional studies, this paper provides an alternative framework to understand the impasse of Brazilian metropolitan areas, which is grounded within a geo-historic reading of the contradictory projects and strategies of the developmental state and the contested nature of metropolitan scale itself. Resumo: Apesar de um aumento da atuação do Estado, nas multiplas escalas, no campo da regulação e do financiamento, e também considerando o fortalecimento do arcabouço institutional que norteia o planejamento e gestão territorial, a governança metropolitana brasileira ainda se caracteriza pela presença de estruturas relativamente fragmentadas e competitivas. Da mesma forma, a metrópole brasileira é marcada pela confluência entre o dinamismo econômico e as contradições socioespaciais e ambientais. Grande parte da literatura hegemônica sobre governança metropolitana têm enfatizada a existência de uma escala natural, e "ótica", para nortear o planejamento e a gestão em cidades-regiões, que seria articulada por agentes públicos e privados em torno da provisão coordenada de uma serie de serviços econômicos, sociais e ambientais. Procurando estabelecer um diálogo entre a literatura sobre escalas e regimes de organização e atuação territorial do Estado e os estudos urbano-regionais brasileiros críticos, apresentamos um arcabouço teórico alternativo para compreender os impasses que cercam as áreas metropolitanas brasileiras. A perspectiva apresentada neste artigo é baseada numa leitura geográfica e histórica acerca dos projetos e das estratégias contraditórios do Estado desenvolvimentista, e da natureza contestada da própria escala metropolitana.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2011
The 1990s in Brazil were a time of institutional advances in the areas of housing and urban rights following the signing of the new constitution in 1988 that incorporated the principles of the social function of cities and property, recognition of the right to ownership of informal urban squatters and the direct participation of citizens in urban policy decision processes. These propositions are the pillars of the urban reform agenda which, since the creation of the Ministry of Cities by the Lula government, has come under the federal executive branch. This article evaluates the limitations and opportunities involved in implementing this agenda on the basis of two policies proposed by the ministry — the National Cities Council and the campaign for Participatory Master Plans — focusing the analysis on government organization in the area of urban development in its relationship with the political system and the characteristics of Brazilian democracy.Résumé Au Brésil, les années 1990 o...
State Institutions, Power, and Social Networks in Brazilian Urban Policies
Latin American Research Review, 2012
A large historiographic tradition has studied the Brazilian state, yet we know relatively little about its internal dynamics and particularities. The role of informal, personal, and unintentional ties has remained underexplored in most policy network studies, mainly because of the pluralist origin of that tradition. It is possible to use network analysis to expand this knowledge by developing mesolevel analysis of those processes. This article proposes an analytical framework for studying networks inside policy communities. This framework considers the stable and resilient patterns that characterize state institutions, especially in contexts of low institutionalization, particularly those found in Latin America and Brazil. The article builds on research on urban policies in Brazil to suggest that networks made of institutional and personal ties structure state organizations internally and insert them into broader political scenarios. These networks, which I call state fabric, frame politics, infl uence public policies, and introduce more stability and predictability than the majority of the literature usually considers. They also form a specifi c power resource-positional power, associated with the positions that political actors occupy-that infl uences politics inside and around the state.
Urban politics in Brazil and the US: state, economic actors and local development scenarios
Cadernos Metrópole, 2017
This paper analyses different patterns of articulation between market and state in subnational units in Brazil and the US, and forecasts scenarios that are more or less prone to enhancing development policies locally. Based on a state-centered perspective, the paper argues that institutional grammars such as clientelism and corporatism produce disincentives to the organization and civil engagement of economic actors in Brazil, in the subnational level. The paper stresses that the organizational atrophy of economic actors in Brazil, at the local level, limits the use of urban theories inspired by the North American political economy, such as urban regime and growth machine theories. Resumo O presente artigo explora modalidades diversas de articulação entre mercado e estado em unidades subnacionais no Brasil e nos EUA e infere daí os cenários mais ou menos favoráveis a políticas de desenvolvimento em âmbito local. Partindo de en-foque centrado no Estado, o artigo chama a aten-ção para os desincentivos à organização e ao en-gajamento cívico dos atores econômicos no Brasil, no plano subnacional, como efeito de determina-das gramáticas institucionais, como o clientelismo e o corporativismo. Chama a atenção para o fato de a atrofia organizacional dos atores econômicos no Brasil, em âmbito local, limitar a aplicação das teorias urbanas inspiradas pela economia política norte-americana, como a teoria dos regimes urba-nos e a teoria das máquinas de crescimento. Palavras-chave: Estado; economia; desenvolvi-mento local; teoria urbana.