Sapucaí Street: Entertainment Hub and Commercial Gentrification in Belo Horizonte (original) (raw)
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Cities and Gentrification in Contemporary Brazil
Current Urban Studies, 2015
This article provides an analysis of heritage policies in Brazil, focusing in particular on the emergence of gentrification processes, which have transformed cultural heritage into a cultural commodity, adapting historic cities to the new market logic. The private sector's increasing involvement in heritage policy management has led to a complex alteration in the concept of heritage from a "symbolic asset" to a "cultural commodity". This process entails recognizing forms of interaction based on consumption and presumes forms of heritage conservation based on market demands. The aim here is to discuss the impacts of these processes on the shaping of public sociabilities and ideas in relation to the use of city spaces.
Gentrifying the Brazilian city? Convergences and divergences in urban studies
plaNext - next generation planning
There is a growing number of processes in Brazilian cities that have been identified as gentrification. However, the classic definition of gentrification as a process of transformation of existing urban housing stocks by new homeowners with a higher socio-economic profile poses challenges to understand recent empirical data coming from Brazil and the Global South more generally. Instead of dismissing them as deviant cases, this paper challenges the Northern empirical foundations of gentrification theory and calls for a new methodological approach to both classic and new cases that take into consideration its contextualization. This new framework for gentrification research is based on necessary dimensions that identify the production of gentrifiable space as the initial condition to the process of socioeconomic change with displacement in which built-environment upgrades constitute one of its most visible feature. These dimensions are present in each and every case, bounding the con...
Through the study of the deindustrialization process and of the restructuring proccess currently occurring in a fragmented portion of the metropolis of São Paulo, the research seeks to understand aspects pertaining to the reproduction of urbanization in our days. This fragment, located to the north portion of the Santo Amaro district, is part of the large industrialization occurred in the 50's, 60's and 70's, as an industrial area and a housing locale for the worker class. Industry was the main inductor of urbanization in that place, organizing its social life, constituted in its main reference, producing a fragmented everyday life (private life, work life and leisure time). However, we checked that there is a relatively short period of time regarding the establishment of industry there, for already at the end of the 80's the beginning of the industrial decline within that fragment is seen, a process that is intensified during the 90's and accentuated even further during our days. Thus, there is a breaking of the integration chain of the fragment due to the exiting or shutting down of industries, given that, consequently, bars close, worker housing complexes are unoccupied and demolished, and many buildings and industrial real estate are left abandoned. At the same time, due to this deindustrialization space having a privileged localization in relation to areas already consolidated as business centers, it starts to take in undertakings linked to "modern" logics of the Southwest business axis. We identify today, as an initial time of transformation for the fragment, processes that indicate the breeze by of an industrial area to an area oriented toward new tertiary activities, which is evidenced by the settling in of large event space undertakings, concert/show arenas and new residential condominiums of average standard buildings. As a tendency, this deindustrialization space may one day become a valued area if it is deemed an extension of the business centers that, in the metropolis of São Paulo, historically move and expand southwest bound (Historical Center-Paulista Avenue-Faria Lima-Berrini). This expansion of the business axis in the metropolis is configured as a process widely subsidized by ideologies spread throughout society (backed up by corporate speeches that are encamped by the State)-relating to social development, as if the incorporation of areas to the circuit of "modern" activities and valorization activities would bring benefits to society as a whole. As the core hypothesis of the paper, we verified that this process decisively contributes toward a further deepening of the fragmentation of the everyday life of those who live there, for the new relations that are imposed within the fragment, breaking bonds of past relations (the already fragmented industry's social-space practice), create differentiations in the use of the space, producing new separations, segregating peoples who live there. Thus, there is further deepening of the everyday life fragmentation due to the transformations endured by the fragment, for they create a new social-space practice in which the use of the space is ever more mediated by the logic behind trade value. That is, with the advancement of tertiary activities oriented toward average-to-high standards, with its characteristic spatiality, move onward with new relations that imply profound changes in the lives of people who inhabit that fragment, bringing uncertainty as to the possibility of those people remaining there. Thus, the research seeks to contemplate two conflicting logics in the urban setting-the logic of the fragment transformation into an economic frontier, with the expansion of the business centers (due to real estate availability and privileged localization) and the logic of the place as means of housing and living space for many people.
Rethinking house - rethinking city. São Paulo. Brazil
2005
The text analyzes a proposal of collective habitation in the historical center of the city of São Paulo, designed for low-income inhabitants living in risk areas. The project, awarded with honorable mention in an important recent national competition, has as its main objective to rethink the social interests of collective habitation in the central regions of the great cities. The proposal looks to be an alternative to the traditional policies which are grounded in modernist principles and have been fulfilled in the city through the construction of "mega" housing settlements implanted in the distant peripheries. This solution caused a series of social and infrastructural problems in the city, which are difficult to resolve. The deformity of the center of this metropolis becomes a homogeneous model. However, if the objective is to intensify diversity, the differences must be articulated. This is not meant to add new dissonances, or to try to harmonize elements of conflicting genesis. The proposal looks to articulate the chaos and the generic, from the possibilities of experiences that a metropolis such as São Paulo allows. In the program, 160 habitations of different sizes form the building properly, and it reproduces the functional varieties and space dynamics in the implantation (and in the diversity of the occupation of the surroundings). Its volumes associate the necessities of the implantation, already assigned, the necessities of the units (insulation, ventilation, circulation, etc), and constructive rationality. The openings, ampler than usual ones in buildings of social habitation, are dimensioned in order to provide luminosity and ventilation beyond the visual and space relations with the external environment. The analysis looks to emphasize the innovative aspects of the implantation and the reorganization of the surrounding public space; they represent a new possibility for the transformation of the deteriorated centers of 266 Medrano, Recaman Brazilian cities. The urban renewal of these degraded areas must be opposed to the current trends that promote the gentrification of the central areas and the deepening of social divisions promoted by neo-liberal reforms.
Confronting the Favela Chic: Gentrification of Informal Settlements in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
This thesis takes aim at a fast-moving target. At the time of this writing, several forces shaping the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil-among these, accelerating investment in urban property markets; state-sponsored urban reforms; cultural globalization; and (nominally) improved socio-economic equality-conspire to create conditions in certain of the city's informal settlements (known as favelas) that resemble a process of gentrification. Rises in speculative capital; "social integration" initiatives for favelas; and global interest in Rio's favela culture are now manifest in the economic, social, and cultural indicators of gentrification, albeit a kind of gentrification specific to conditions of informality. This study approaches the issue of favela gentrification from the perspective of non-Brazilian in-migrants, a group regarded by observers as the early vanguard of this particular species of gentrification. Using mainly ethnographic methods in two gentrifying favelas popular with this group, along with other available data, each favela was assessed qualitatively for its progress toward full gentrification in economic, social, and cultural terms. A theoretical foundation for describing gentrification in informal settlements and a typology of foreign newcomers is presented. Within this typology, I describe a range of attitudes, dispositions, and ideologies that shape foreign newcomers' influence on these communities with a view toward their likely role in the process of neighborhood change as it continues to play out.
For a long time urban research used an Euro-/Anglocentric perspective to analyse and explain gentrification processes in the ‘Global South’, for example in Latin America. But these socio-spatial transformations include specific characteristics which are not yet considered sufficient in modern research. For this reason the following research project concentrates on decentering the perspective on common gentrification concepts by examining the socio-spatial transformation processes in the historical neighbourhood of San Telmo in Buenos Aires. This case study contains with the influence of urban tourism, the connection between cultural capital and patrimonio cultural and tourists as new actors some interesting particularities. In times of neoliberalism urban tourism is an upcoming economic factor for cities worldwide and has a huge effect on the urban fabric and its population. To be more attractive to these visitors the city governments compete among each other using their cultural capital as local advantages, for example in San Telmo. So cultural capital is transformed into economic capital, a well studied transformation in common gentrification researches. But the so called patrimonio cultural is a new aspect which has a huge influence on the processes in the case study. The third particularity is the role of the tourists as so called temporary gentrifiers or mobile gentry within the gentrification processes in San Telmo creating a whole range of new demands. Public spaces, residential and commercial structures are more and more orientated to these extra-local demands and by this causing direct or indirect displacement and intensify the displacement pressure on the local population of San Telmo. The objective of this paper is to improve existing concepts of gentrification by considering these named particularities, get them more accurate and as a result add scientific value in the international debate.
Urbanities. Journal of Urban Ethnography, 2018
The present article analyses, from ethnographic and visual perspectives, the transformation of the historic neighbourhood of Orzán, in the city of A Coruña (Spain). We propose that this scenario of social, economic and symbolic change, masks its intensive commercial gentrification. Therefore, we suggest that factors such as the substitution of traditional shops for alternative shops, the regeneration of its 'brand image' and the consumption and leisure preferences of the so-called creative classes, as well as the impact of global gentrification help to explain the current stage of reinvestment. We contextualise this commercial restructuring by placing it within the general framework of a macro-project of regeneration of the city's seafront that seeks, among other objectives, to promote tourism in the historic centre for which Orzán plays a key role for nightlife and 'creative' consumption.