The right to the city and multilevel governance in Latin America (original) (raw)
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Municipal neoliberalism and municipal socialism: urban political economy in Latin America
International Journal of Urban and …, 2009
The following article identifies two different urban policy regimes in Latin Americaneoliberal and socialist -and traces their origins to the distinct interests and capacities of local elites and activists in the region's cities in the mid-to-late twentieth century. While agricultural and commercial interests paid a high price for the growth of import-substituting industrialization, and therefore deployed free trade zones (and similar institutions) in traditional export centers in the 1960s and 1970s, their industrial rivals bore the brunt of austerity and adjustment in the free market era, and therefore adopted compensatory measures designed to increase the 'social wage' in the 1980s and 1990s. Examples are drawn from municipalities in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela, and call the conventional portrait of impotent Latin American cities -and omnipotent central governments -into question.i jur_834 443..462 'revanchist cities '. Susan Christopherson (1994) identifies and illuminates 'fortress cities'. And a host of scholars have discussed the 'post-Fordist city' (see, e.g., .
This dissertation offers some preliminary answers to the question of what scholars and practitioners interested in democratization and urban change in the developing world can learn from the profound changes Mexico City has gone through in the last three decades. It does so by developing an argument at two levels: (1) at the city level, I take Mexico City as an extreme case (Gerring 2007) of late democratization in Latin America (Myers 2002; Davis and Alvarado 2004) as well as a negative case for citizen participation engaging the state when compared with São Paulo, the other most important global and mega-city in the region (Houtzager et al 2005); (2) and at the neighborhood level I take the two oldest and most iconic sections of the central part of Mexico City called Ciudad Central as local cases. One is the relatively poor and previously neglected historic center or Centro Histórico, and the other is the upper-middle class and partially gentrified area of Roma Condesa. Ciudad Central is a subsection of Mexico City that comprises its four central subdivisions and essentially corresponds to what the city used to be up until the 1950s. At the level of the city, I argue that Mexico City has been transitioning from a corporatist urban regime (Stone 1989) - similar to the national corporatist regime in place since the 1930s to the 1990s - to what I call a “pragmatic” urban regime - which began to form with the election of leftist party Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of Democratic Revolution or PRD) in 1997 and combines strong pro-poor and pro-capital tendencies. In the latter, PRD administrations have been putting in place a progressive social and urban agenda to guarantee poor residents’ collective consumption (Castells 1979) consonant with municipal socialism (Schrank and Goldfrank 2009), while also extensively collaborating with national and international capital as entrepreneurial or neoliberal urban regimes (Harvey 1989). At the level of the local cases, an interesting paradox emerges: Centro Histórico is advancing more rapidly than Roma Condesa in its urban renovation efforts and an increasing number of residents are participating in defining and implementing those efforts while the opposite is true in Roma Condesa. The presence of a state institution that serves as facilitator of consensus and multiplier of resources in Centro Histórico has been the key difference between the two cases. Even though the starting point for Centro Histórico is much lower than it is for Roma Condesa (as infrastructure and services in the latter are of higher quality and have been better preserved), the pace of change is markedly faster in the former. These findings suggest that the (local) state continues to be a crucial actor for overcoming fragmentation and solving public problems in urban contexts. In this case, state “institutional catalysts” (Bhatta 2006) or multipliers such as the one I studied in the historic center, the Fideicomiso del Centro Histórico (the Fiduciary Fund for Mexico City’s Historic Center) are needed to break the impasse represented by limited resources, political apathy and/or a history of unsuccessful attempts at engaging the state. More generally, the dissertation contributes to the literature on citizen participation, urban development, and institutions by analyzing the limits and potential of “invited” or induced participation (Cornwall and Coelho 2007; Roque and Shankland 2007) in Mexico City. The dissertation argues for taking inclusive urban policies in developing countries seriously even when they have moderate levels of success. Not all cities can become the new Porto Alegre but we can still learn from the achievements and errors their governments and residents make.
V. 12, n. 02, 2020
This essay discusses, based on a critical reading of the argumentative lines of the Urban growth and Access to opportunities: a challenge for Latin America Report. In the first place, the technical logics of the treatment of urban issues in Latin America, whose emphasis in quantitative variables ignores the socio-spatial contradictions derived from the existing intense class conflicts over the region. In the second place, it highlights that the discourse of development fostered by the ADC aims at generating efficient institutional arrangements, that is why the attention is directed to create “sustainable urban governance schemes” and not to generate political and economic strategies intended to unequal distribution of wealth in the region. In the third place, it is suggested in this comment, that under the protection of contemporary dynamics of capital, new instruments of public policies which promote financing the market of ground and housing are legitimized, while the need to integrate urban communities in the decision–making process is preached.
The Geopolitics of Cities. Old challenges, new issues
This book occupies a critical space at the local, national and international scales debate about the ongoing process of construction of the “New Urban Agenda”. Concurrently, this book shows the profiles of a new geopolitics involving cities and nation states debating at the same time in contradictory and combined way the new directions of global urbanization. This book is presented as a continuation of the various efforts made by the Ipea in preparing Brazil to Habitat III and the wording of the Brazilian Report to the UN conference. The many efforts include the elaborating on: regional and national seminars, virtual platforms for social participation, other books, publications and reports, surveys, interviews, data bases, monitoring processes, negotiations in government and civil society, television programs, video documentaries etc. This rich and innovative route involved more than 2,500 people and, according to comparisons made with 34 other countries and as presented here in one of the chapters of this publication, qualifies as the most thorough participatory process of the New Urban Agenda development. The organization of this book, as well as the invitation of several experts and scholars contributing to this debate, are directly related to the National Seminar Habitat III “Participa Brasil,” conducted by Ipea and partners in Brasilia in early 2015. Due to the complexities involved several topics addressed at that time could not be considered by the Brazilian Report for Habitat III. Most of which are due to the intersectionality of analysis necessary for understanding, escaping or surpassing the manner of an official government report to the UN is shaped. Thus, important issues such as geopolitics between states and cities, technological innovation and its impact on international networks and deepening of democracy, as well as many other pending critical issues, justify the collaboration between scholars concerned to generate these innovative ideas and to explain the current process of urbanization. The goal was to make them accessible to a broader audience. Similarly, the search for new contributions could focus precisely on issues that require deeper analyses and references.
State-led gentrification in three Latin American cities
Journal of Urban Affairs, 2021
Many authors agree that gentrification in Latin America depends on the intervention of the state. However, for the renovation of large urban areas that have long lacked public attention, state intervention is a pivotal driver. This comparative analysis involved fieldwork analysis and short ethnographies in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. Results show variations and some common threads, namely land valorization policies, schemes designed to promote the creation of economic opportunities for upper-income investors and developers, the establishment of creative or cultural industrial hubs, investment in new transport and cultural infrastructure, city rebranding, and the use of iconic architecture. Displacement policies have been implemented in Brazil, although with limited success. In Brazil and Mexico, attempts have been made to control social behaviors within particular spaces, often in a racialized manner. We arrive at a narrative that differs from that of the Global North, which considers state-led gentrification to constitute the privatization of social housing under the hegemonic imposition of discourses of "social mixing." The concept of state and its trajectory differ considerably in each hemisphere.
Introduction: The Right to the City in Latin America
City & Society, 2021
This article provides an introduction to the theoretical and substantive issues raised by the four articles collected here and places them in the context of the evolving debates over the right to the city in Latin America. We assess some of the commonalities and differences between the articles with regard to the right to the city as both a language of struggle and a theoretical framework. We also consider the possibilities for future research and action in light of the rapidly changing context of the right to the city in and beyond the Latin American region.