The Brazilian Experience of Financialization Through Urban Redevelopment Metropolitics (original) (raw)
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Reinforcing uneven development: The financialisation of Brazilian urban redevelopment projects
Urban Studies, 2019
The entrepreneurial city discourse has been adopted around the globe by policymakers, with the urban redevelopment project as one of its most representative symbols. The predominantly favourable discourse revolving around this new political economy of urban space is supported by claims that newly regenerated areas bring multiple benefits to the city and its citizens. These narratives have been used in Brazil to justify increasing reliance on an urban planning tool known as Urban Operations. This planning tool, developed in the 1990s, seeks to facilitate cooperation between public and private actors in the production of new urban spaces. While projected by some as a ‘magic formula’ that enables major urban redevelopment projects without public expenditure, the outcomes of Urban Operations often differ significantly from expectations. The cases of Água Espraiada (São Paulo) and Porto Maravilha (Rio de Janeiro) are used to demonstrate that regenerated areas, as preferred spaces for the...
Reinforcing uneven development: the financialization of Brazilian urban redevelopment projects
Urban Studies, 2019
The entrepreneurial city discourse has been adopted around the globe by policy-makers, with the urban redevelopment project as one of its most representative symbols. The predominantly favorable discourse revolving around this new political economy of urban space is supported by claims that newly regenerated areas bring multiple benefits to the city and its citizens. These narratives have been used in Brazil to justify increasing reliance on an urban planning tool known as Urban Operations. This planning tool, developed in the 1990s, seeks to facilitate cooperation between public and private actors in the production of new urban spaces. While projected by some as a "magic formula" that enables major urban redevelopment projects without public expenditure, the outcomes of Urban Operations often differ significantly from expectations. The cases of Água Espraiada (São Paulo) and Porto Maravilha (Rio de Janeiro) are used to demonstrate that regenerated areas, as preferred spaces for the penetration of financialized practices into the built environment, have brought forward new dynamics that are serving to reinforce pre-existing social inequalities and to exacerbate uneven development in Brazil's main cities.
The financialization of real estate and urban re/development is an increasing trend, not only in the Global North but also in the Global South. This paper presents how urban redevelopment has entered a financialized phase in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The local government aspires to redevelop the area surrounding the city’s port through a project named Porto Maravilha (“Wonderful Port”). Not only is a federal policy scheme, named “Urban Operation”, utilized to foster this redevelopment project; federal land, and federal investments are also mobilized to enable this massive intervention. Furthermore, additional development rights are traded as a pure financial asset, contributing to the financialization of urban redevelopment. The leading actor in the project, FGTS, is a federal agency that owns the additional development rights, and whose involvement in the project is regulated by a privately-run city agency, CDURP, that operates in a space of exception (outside of normal democratic control mechanisms). In the end, land ownership and development, urban redevelopment and planning, finance, and various arms of the local and federal state have become entangled in a speculative logic. This logic preys on but also furthers uneven development in the Rio metropolitan area, resulting in displacement and selectively channeling investments into areas designated for commercial/office activities as well as into residential areas for the rich. The case of Porto Maravilha shows how land and development is no longer treated only metaphorically as a financial asset (à la Harvey), but also that land development rights are literally treated as just another financial asset. KEY WORDS: Urban Operation, Urban redevelopment, Financialization, Public-Private Partnerships, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The Financialization of Brazilian State Spaces
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Geoforum, 2024
This paper discusses the disappointing outreach of Brazilian urban reform by analyzing the underlying tensions and contradictions of its key principle, that is, the social, function of property (SFP), from a perspective of contemporary theoretical debates on the double nature of rent (i.e., related to monopoly positions and emerging from market, circulation). The SFP principle is grounded in anti-rentier, agrarian reform thinking, which stressed that individual monopoly landowners should not be allowed to retain their property for speculative purposes and use it productively to increase food supplies. In contemporary dense cities, however, using property “productively” implies redevelopment, that is, transformation of existing structures of the built environment, into alternative ones. This has two implications, one related to the essence of the SFP, (its being), the other regarding what it means having a SFP in an urban setting. In relation to the former, despite its anti-rentier stance, in cities the SFP triggers a redevelopment-rent nexus due to the circulation of rents in non-competitive markets. Regarding the latter implication, having a SFP in cities requires complex, open-ended and utilitarian negotiations between state and non-state actors aimed at the appropriation of rents to articulate the conflicting interests of individual property owners with the collective good. The theoretical argument of the paper is illustrated with a short, heuristic case on redevelopment in the city of S˜ao Paulo, while its conclusion provides elements for a research agenda on the limits of market-based, reformist versus right- based planning beyond this specific context.
Three Models of Urbanization in Brazil: RETROurbanism
International Journal of Development Research, 2020
In this article we will demonstrate the process observed in contemporary Brazilian cities, from the perspective of the implementation of the Urban Agenda and the political processes that culminate in an unfinished agenda.We also strives to understand the influence of the real estate and financial markets on the city's production. In this context, we will identify the form of action of public, private and social movements in the production of the contemporary city, analyzing it from the point of view of its urbanization scales, in order to understand its role as a business and the role of neoliberalism in the urbanization processes in the cities of the global south, specifically in Brazil.We will conclude this text defining the three models or urbanization observed in the contemporary Brazilian cities. Copyright © 2020, Guilherme Augusto Soares da Motta. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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The complete process of housing production is an important element in defining patterns of inequality. This paper aims to identify and characterise changes and continuities in the real estate wealth, with a focus on the residential segment. In doing so, we observed several two-way interactions, situating them in the long duration of the constitution of highly unequal structures in Brazil. In particular, we describe the reconstitution of the credit system by the Workers' Party government, in the 2000s, as a moment when interactions with the theme of inequality became more complex. The reorganisation of the regulatory framework and the expansion of housing credit in the 2000s generated a substantial increase in real estate activity and created a housing boom. In the text, we present three rounds of IPOs from real estate developers and discuss the most significant (2006-2008). While this round originated in the increase in real estate credit, its sustainability only occurred thanks to a housing policy that mobilised billions of reais (BRL) in subsidies for the construction of millions of houses. The amount was unprecedented and allowed the policy to reach social strata that had not had access to formal housing before – in this sense, it responded to a social and political demand. On the other hand, this volume of public funds was also significant for the financial real estate circuit. This increase in scale gave more power to homebuilders that decisively influenced the design of the housing programme. Some effects of this conflictive and multidimensional process on the struggle for the right to the city are discussed throughout the text.
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