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THE POLITICS OF INCREMENTAL PROGRESSIVISM 'Ungovernable neoliberal post politics assemblage metropolis from the South? No. This book shows innovative redistributive policies, regulation, and social participation recently in São Paulo, although gradually, slowly, and contentiously, and despite failures and inequalities. This great one-city-many-policies comparison departs from high quality empirically grounded research to show that collective action and public policies are back in town. In São Paulo, they have made a difference.' Patrick Le Galès, Sciences Po CNRS research Professor, Dean Sciences Po Urban School, France 'For anyone interested in urban governance, The Politics of Incremental Progressivism is a must-read. Nowhere in the world have cities faced greater challenges yet been more innovative in tackling the problems of urban poverty and exclusion than in Brazil. One could not ask for a more incisive, detailed and groundbreaking set of studies on urban transformation and the politics of change.' Patrick Heller, Lyn Cross Professor of Social Sciences, Brown University, USA Large metropolises of the Global South are usually portrayed as ungovernable. The Politics of Incremental Progressivism analyzes urban policies in São Paulo - one of the biggest and most complex Southern cities - not only challenging those views, but showing the recent occurrence of progressive change. This book develops the first detailed and systematic account of the policies and politics that construct, maintain and operate a large Southern metropolis. The chapters cover the policies of bus and subway transportation, traffic control, waste collection, development licensing, public housing and large urban projects, additionally to budgeting, electoral results and government formation and dynamics. This important book contributes to the understanding of how the city is governed, what kinds of policies its governments construct and deliver and, more importantly, under what conditions it produces redistributive change in the direction of policies that reduce its striking social and urban inequalities.
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Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Notes on Contributors
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Urban Politics and Policies in Urban Studies and Political Science
City Studies, International Comparisons, and Urban Theories
Explaining Urban Policy Change and Capacity Building in São Paulo
Governance and Political Actors Governing São Paulo
The City and Local Brazilian Institutions
The Book
References
PART I: Urban Politics and Political Institutions
1 Governments, Mayors and Policies
Brazilian Institutions and Municipalities in International Perspective
Electoral Results and the Mayors of São Paulo
Municipal Administrations
References
2 The Politics of Executive‐Legislative Relations
The Production of Governability
Mayors, Political Strategies and Executive‐Legislative Relations
What Else Do Councilors Do? Territories, Governability and Policy Implementation
9
Conclusion
References
3 The Politics of Municipal Budgets
Analytic Dimensions of Public Budget Governance
Budget Governance in São Paulo Municipality
Final Considerations and Perspectives for a Research Agenda
References
PART II: Governing Urban Services
4 Struggling to Replace the Car Paradigm
Institutionalization, Insulation, and Capacitation of the Traffic Sector
The CET: Insulated and Capacitated
The Car Flow Paradigm
Attempts to Deconstruct the Paradigm
Analysis of Changes
Final Considerations
References
5 Increasingly Governing Bus Services Through Policy Instruments
The Recent Trajectory of Bus Transportation
Governing Opacities in the Transportation Data
Conclusion: Progressive Incrementalism in the Bus Services
References
6 Technocratic Decisions and Financial Arrangements in Subway Services
Line 1‐Blue and the Formation of the São Paulo Subway
Decisions on Line 3‐Red and the Change in the Political Paradigm
The Funding Crisis and Line 2‐Green: Return to the Wealthiest Regions of the City
Line 4‐Yellow and the Entrance of International Actors
The Expansion of Line 5‐Lilac and the Return to the Periphery
Conclusion
References
7 The Incremental Politics of Waste Management Regulation
Waste Collection in São Paulo's History
The Waste Management Model in São Paulo
Private Companies for Policy Implementation
Conclusions
References
PART III: Governing Land and Housing
8 Continuities and Changes in the Diversification of Public Housing
Brazilian Housing Policies Between Local and Federal
Housing Policy in São Paulo
Conclusion
References
9 Developers and Politicians in the Institutionalizing of Development Regulation
Definitions and Analytical Framework
Real Estate Interests, Bureaucracies, and the Recent Regulation
Project Trajectories, Bureaucratic Practices, and Regulatory Artifacts
Conclusion
References
10 Conflicts and Incremental Change in Urban Renewal Instruments
The Beginning of an Urban Regeneration Policy in São Paulo: The Interlinked Operations
The Urban Operations Consortia
Final Considerations
References
11 Circulation of Institutional Formats in Urban Regeneration
A Trajectory of Regeneration Projects around Rio's Port
Topics for Comparison: A Historical‐Institutional Approach to the Large Urban Regeneration Projects
Final Considerations
References
Conclusion The Political Production of Incremental Progressivism
Multilayer Politics and the Local
The Role of Urban Politics in Policies
State Capacities, Instruments and Policy Processes
Policy Formats and Private Companies
Index
End User License Agreement
Chapter 0
TABLE I.1 Trajectories of redistributive policy changes.
TABLE I.2 Selected information on redistributive programs/policies.
Chapter 1
TABLE 1.1 Electoral results of the leading candidates for mayor of São Paulo....
Chapter 2
TABLE 2.1 Legislative and executive success rate, São Paulo, 1991–2016.
TABLE 2.2 Councilors by party, legislatures and coalition, São Paulo, 1986–20...
Chapter 8
TABLE 8.1 Summary of housing policies, 1989–2016.
Chapter 3
FIGURE 3.1 Multilevel organizational structure of the budget of the municipa...
FIGURE 3.2 Allocation of budget resources of the municipality of São Paulo (...
FIGURE 3.3 Evolution of the primary sources of revenue of the municipality o...
FIGURE 3.4 Evolution of the expenditure of the MSP by economic category – 20...
Chapter 4
FIGURE 4.1 Flowchart of the Municipal Department of Transport.6
Chapter 6
FIGURE 6.1 The subway lines over a thematic map of average income in 2010....
Chapter 10
FIGURE 10.1 Main landmarks since 1985.
FIGURE 10.2 Urban Operations in São Paulo.
Chapter 11
FIGURE 11.1 Porto Maravilha institutional arrangement.
Cover Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Notes on Contributors
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgments
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Index
Wiley End User License Agreement
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The Politics of Incremental Progressivism: Governments, Governances and Urban Policy Changes in São PauloEduardo Cesar Leão Marques (ed.)
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Post‐Fordism Ash Amin (ed.)
The Resources of Poverty: Women and Survival in a Mexican City*Mercedes Gonzal de la Rocha
Free Markets and Food RiotsJohn Walton and David Seddon
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Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader*Enzo Mingione
*out of print
Edited by
EDUARDO CESAR LEÃO MARQUES
This edition first published 2021© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Marques, Eduardo Cesar, editor.Title: The politics of incremental progressivism : governments, governancesand urban policy changes in São Paulo / edited by Eduardo Cesar LeãoMarques, University of São Paulo.Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, [2021] | Series: IJURR studies in urban and social change book series | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.Identifiers: LCCN 2020037892 (print) | LCCN 2020037893 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119647812 (epub) | ISBN 9781119647829 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119647904 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119647874 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119647829 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119647874 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119647904 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119647812 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Urban policy–Brazil–São Paulo. | São Paulo (Brazil)–Politics and government. | São Paulo (Brazil)–Social conditions. | Equality–Brazil–São Paulo.Classification: LCC HN290.S324 (ebook) | LCC HN290.S324 P65 2021 (print) | DDC 307.760981/61–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037892LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037893
Cover Design: WileyCover Images (from left to right): © Shutterstock/Thiago Leite, © Pexels/Jadson Thomas, © Shutterstock/SNEHIT PHOTO
Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques is full professor at the Department of Political Science (DCP) and director of the Centre for Metropolitan Studies (CEM), both at the University of São Paulo. He holds a PhD in social sciences (Unicamp) and was a visiting researcher at Sciences Po Paris, University College London and University of California Berkeley. Eduardo has published extensively on urban policies, politics and inequalities, being the author of São Paulo in the Twenty‐First Century Spaces, Heterogeneities, Inequalities (Routledge 2016) and Opportunities and Deprivation in the Global South: Poverty, Segregation and Social Networks in São Paulo (Ashgate 2012), among others.
Telma Hoyler is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of São Paulo (DCP/USP) with a research period at Sciences Po Paris, as well as holding a master’s degree from the University of São Paulo and an undergraduate degree in public administration (FGV/SP). Between 2014 and 2016, Telma worked in the São Paulo Municipality in the Comptroller General’s Office and the Planning Secretariat. As a junior researcher at CEM, she studies the regulation of the real estate sector through bureaucratic practices and material artefacts within the State, as well as executive‐legislative relations and local political mobilization in São Paulo.
Ursula Dias Peres is an associate professor at the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities at the University of São Paulo (EACH/USP) and researcher at CEM. She has a PhD in economics (FGV/SP) and was a visiting researcher at King's College London. She worked as an advisor at the Finance and Budget Committee, as Director‐General of the Municipal Budget, as a consultant for the Municipal Secretariat of Education and as Assistant Secretary of Planning, Budgeting and Management, all at the Municipality of São Paulo. Ursula studies the politics of public budgeting in comparative perspective.
Carolina Requena holds a PhD and a master’s degree in political science at the University of São Paulo (DCP/USP), with a research period at Sciences Po, Paris, as well as undergraduate studies in social sciences and social communication. Since 2012, Carolina has been a junior researcher at CEM, and between 2014 and 2016 she worked as a special advisor and chief‐of‐staff at the Secretariat of International and Federative affairs of the Municipality of São Paulo. She is interested in the research agendas of government and the State, with a focus on urban governance and urban politics.
Daniela Costanzo is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of São Paulo (DCP/USP), and holds a master’s and an undergraduate degree from the same university. She is a researcher at the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (Cebrap). Her fields of interest are urban policies and public‐private partnerships.
Marcos Lopes Campos is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Social and Political Studies at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and holds a master's degree in political science at the Department of Political Science of the University of São Paulo (DCP/USP), and an undergraduate degree from the same university. He studies transportation policies, urban capital, policy instruments, social networks, everyday bureaucratic practices and the materiality of governance and the State.
Samuel Ralize de Godoy is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science at University of São Paulo (DCP/USP), as well as holding a master’s and undergraduate degrees from the same university. Besides being a junior researcher at CEM, he serves at the Municipality of São Paulo as a public policy analyst, currently allocated to the Secretariat of Innovation and Technology. His fields of interest include public policies, urban politics, bureaucracies, teaching and learning processes, research methods and techniques in political science.
Magaly Marques Pulhez is an associate professor at the Institute of Cities of the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp). She holds a PhD in Theory and History of Architecture and Urbanism and a master’s degree from the same program (FAU/USP) and a post‐doctorate at CEM. She studies processes of production of urban and housing space, housing policies and projects and the professional practice of architects, as well as developing housing plans and slum upgrading projects.
Betina Sarue is a PhD candidate in political science at University of São Paulo (DCP/USP), with a research period at King’s College London, holding a master’s degree from the same program and undergraduate degrees in social sciences (USP) and journalism (PUC/SP). She is currently undertaking comparative research on the governance of large urban projects in Brazil and England, and is a junior researcher at CEM. Betina has worked as a program manager in a non‐governmental organization, at the British Council office in Brazil and the development agency of the Municipality of São Paulo.
Stefano Pagin holds a master's degree in political science from the University of São Paulo (DCP‐USP) and an undergraduate degree in public administration from the State University of São Paulo (Unesp). He serves as Director of Planning at the Secretariat of Urban Policy of the Municipality of Belo Horizonte. He develops research on public policy instruments, institutional changes, housing, and urban renewal policies.
AMLURB
Autoridade Municipal de Limpeza Urbana
CDHU
Companhia de Desenvolvimento Habitacional e Urbano
CDURP
Companhia de Desenvolvimento Urbano da Região do Porto
CEPAC
Certificado de Potencial Adicional de Construção,
CET
Companhia de Engenharia de Tráfego
CMTC
Companhia Municipal de Transportes Coletivos
COHAB
Companhia Metropolitana de Habitação de São Paulo
CPTM
Companhia Paulista de Trens Metropolitanos
CVM
Comissão de Valores Mobiliários
DSV
Departamento do Sistema Viário
FIIPM
Fundo de Investimento Imobiliário Porto Maravilha
FIIRP
Fundo de Investimento Imobiliário da Região do Porto
ICMS
Imposto sobre Circulação de Mercadorias e Serviços
IPTU
Imposto Predial e Territorial Urbano
ISS
Imposto sobre Serviços
LIMPURB
Departamento de Limpeza Urbana
MCMV
Minha Casa Minha Vida
MRSP
Metropolitan region of São Paulo
MSP
Município de São Paulo
OUC
Operações Urbanas Consorciadas
PAC
Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento
SEHAB
Secretaria Municipal de Habitação
SEL
Secretaria Especial de Licenciamento
SMT
Secretaria Municipal de Transportes
USP
University of São Paulo
ZEIS
Zonas Especiais de Interesse Social
The IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change Book Series shares IJURR’s commitments to critical, global, and politically relevant analyses of our urban worlds. Books in this series bring forward innovative theoretical approaches and present rigorous empirical work, deepening understandings of urbanization processes, but also advancing critical insights in support of political action and change. The Book Series Editors appreciate the theoretically eclectic nature of the field of urban studies. It is a strength that we embrace and encourage. The Editors are particularly interested in the following issues:
Comparative urbanism
Diversity, difference and neighborhood change
Environmental sustainability
Financialization and gentrification
Governance and politics
International migration
Inequalities
Urban and environmental movements
The series is explicitly interdisciplinary; the Editors judge books by their contribution to the field of critical urban studies rather than according to disciplinary origin. We are committed to publishing studies with themes and formats that reflect the many different voices and practices in the field of urban studies. Proposals may be submitted to Editor in Chief, Walter Nicholls ([email protected]), and further information about the series can be found at www.ijurr.org.
Walter Nicholls
Manuel Aalbers
Talja Blokland
Dorothee Brantz
Patrick Le Galès
Jenny Robinson
This book is a product of the environments of the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM) and the Department of Political Science (DCP) of the University of São Paulo. My first acknowledgment, therefore, goes to the colleagues of both institutions who have made this research venture possible. I thank especially Renata Bichir, Marta Arretche, Gabriel Feltran and Adrián Gurza Lavalle, not only for many concrete suggestions and comments, but above all for producing and maintaining an open, positive, and substantive academic environment. I also thank the young researchers who have not been included in the project of this volume, but who participated in the broader research project – “Política do urbano” – and contributed to its discussions, including especially Guilherme Minarelli, Marília Lessa, Mariana Silveira, Gabriela Almeida, Vinícius Pinto. We are also thankful to Alex Fisberg and Marília Paduan, who kindly allowed the use of some of their photographs to illustrate the book.
A second but equally important recognition goes to the São Paulo Research Foundation – Fapesp. Its generous funding has been present through several phases of the book, from supporting CEM itself to the research period at the University of California Berkeley when the final writing of this volume was completed. This book would have been impossible outside CEM's interdisciplinary environment and without Fapesp's crucial support.
In 2018, I wrote a significantly different version of this book in Portuguese, published by Editora Unesp in association with CEM. That publication pursued quite different goals associated with the local, Brazilian research agenda. The book that the reader is now holding represents a wholly reorganized and rewritten version, targeted to international debates from both political science and urban studies. The production of this analytic dislocation was made possible by a sabbatical at the University of California Berkeley in 2019 with Fapesp support. The environments of the Department of Political Science and of Berkeley's libraries and research centers were essential to producing this volume. Personally, I thank Professors Chris Ansell and Alison Post who not only made my academic sojourn possible but also made generous and precise comments to draft versions of the book. I also thank other colleagues, especially Ruth Collier and the participants of the Latin American Cities' group, with whom I interacted during that stay and who commented or contributed to the book.
Central parts of the book were also discussed during 2019 in seminars at Brown University, the Bay Area Comparative Urban Politics Workshop, the Comparative Politics Seminar at Berkeley, and the Bartlett School of Planning at University College London. I especially thank Professor Patrick Heller, the organizers of the IJURR Public Lecture in London and of the other events for the invitations, debates, and suggestions that have enriched the book.
This book is part of a broader comparative effort about the governance and governments of large metropolises in both the Global South and North including Paris, London, Mexico City, Milan, and São Paulo. On several occasions, I have discussed the arguments of the book and its chapters with other members of this comparative network. A great and sincere acknowledgment, therefore, goes to colleagues and friends from this network, including Patrick Le Galès, Claire Colomb, Alberta Andreotti, Mike Raco, Vicente Ugalde, Tommaso Vitalle, and Charlotte Halpern. Parts of the book and its arguments were matured in discussions promoted by the network in meetings of the Research Committee 21 of the International Sociological Association (RC21 – ISA) in Urbino, Mexico City, Leeds, Toronto, and Delhi, as well as at CEM in São Paulo and at Sciences Po in Paris under Patrick Le Galès' leadership. Additionally, Claire Colomb made invaluable suggestions during a research visit to São Paulo. This book would have been impossible to write or much weaker intellectually, were it not for our profitable (and fun) partnership and dialogue.
Finally, I am indebted to the editors of the IJURR SUSC book series, Jennifer Robinson and especially Walter Nicholls, as well as several anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. Their particularly important observations and criticisms helped to bring focus, clarity and precision to the book.
Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques
Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques
Chensiyuan, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1_aerial_photo_sao_paulo_brazil.JPG. CC BY SA‐4.0,3.0,2.5,2.0,1.0
This book analyses government and public policies in São Paulo, one of the largest and most complex cities in the world. We are interested in understanding how this city is governed, what kinds of policies and services its governments construct and deliver, and, more importantly, under what conditions they produce policies to reduce its striking social and urban inequalities. In more general terms, what explains the emergence and production of redistributive change in a vast Southern metropolis like São Paulo?
As Ugalde and Le Galès (2017) discuss at length, large cities have usually been considered ungovernable, or almost, even in cases known for their robust policies and excellent average urban conditions, such as New York (Yates 1977), Boston and San Francisco (Ferman 1985), London (Gordon and Travers 2010) and European metropolises (Lefebvre 2010). Authors have highlighted deficits in the political authority and coordination capacity of city governments, advocating institutional reforms that could provide them with stronger powers. Interestingly enough, the excessive power of mayors was at the heart of political machine critiques in the United States. Transferring their power to councils and managers was the goal of urban reform in the early 1900s (Stewart 1950).
In large metropolises of poor and middle‐income countries, the theme of ungovernability is not cyclical nor framed as a question of institutional reform, but prevalent and generalized. Ungovernability in these cases is supposedly due to their excessive sizes, inequalities, urban precarity, fragile political institutions, incapable bureaucracies, and corrupt and clientelist politicians, leading to precarious services, lack of planning, weak governments, policy failures and low policy innovation (Gilbert and Gugler 1982; Reddy and Rao 1985; Auyero 2000; Keefer 2005; Zunino 2006; Gilbert 2013; Oliveros 2016; Novaes 2018). For some, these challenges could be resolved through decentralization (Faguet and Pöschl 2015), increased participation (Goldfrank 2011), accepting these cities' informalities (Roy and Al Sayyad 2004), applying policy solutions produced elsewhere (Campbell 1997), or changing voting behaviors or political elites themselves (Gilbert 2013).
Indeed, the challenges of governing a city such as São Paulo are not small. In 2019, it had a population of 11.8 million inhabitants in a metropolitan region of 39 municipalities with just over 21 million inhabitants (about 10% of the country), roughly the size of metropolitan Mexico City or New York. Although it is the biggest and most important in the country, it has never been Brazil's national capital and was of little importance until the 1930s. Its urban inequalities are striking, with more than 3 million people living in favelas and irregular settlements, as well as extended peripheries with inadequate quality services and terrible accessibility conditions (Caldeira 2016; Marques 2016a; IBGE 2020). A similar scale is present in the daily tasks of policy provision: 20 100 tons of solid waste to collect, 7000 km of streets to sweep, 9.4 million bus journeys to provide (in almost 15 000 buses), around 110 km of traffic jams every afternoon and 2.9 million children to teach (in around 2700 public schools).1
In order to face these challenges, the city maintains a sizable administrative machine, which in 2018 amounted to approximately 122,600 active employees, most of them undertrained and underpaid. In fact, although its municipal budget is the largest of all Brazilian cities (corresponding to US$ 14 billion in 2020), this represents 17% of New York City's expenditure (US$ 82 billion in 2017) or 45% of what the London boroughs receive (US$ 30 billion in 2016) for much smaller populations of around 8.5 million inhabitants each.2 Institutional responsibilities indeed vary, but municipal responsibilities in Brazil are higher than in the United Kingdom or the United States due to its decentralized federalism. Additionally, political coordination is difficult considering the three tiers of government, as well as the horizontal negotiations between the 39 municipalities of the metropolitan region of São Paulo, not to mention the highly fragmented party system that amounted to no less than 17 political parties on the São Paulo municipal council in 2020.3
However, regardless of the many challenges faced by large‐scale metropolises such as São Paulo, they are governed day‐to‐day, and their governments deliver policies regularly, albeit with quite different qualities, periodicities, and coverage. Additionally, governments very often do not only govern but also produce and change policies in directions that help reduce inequalities, as well as increase government capacities, even if through conflictual, slow, and incremental trajectories. These involve not only State actors, but also several others who – simultaneously – govern the city through policy‐specific governance patterns (Le Galès 2011).
This has been the case of São Paulo since the country's return to democracy in the mid‐1980s. The consideration of a broad set of urban policies and their programs over almost four decades shows a slow but incremental process of policy change that has allowed a reduction in inequality and a building of State capacity, although with different rhythms by policy area, despite the city's many urban, political and institutional challenges. This path of change becomes even more impressive when we consider that it happened in a relatively politically conservative city.
This book aims to understand these trajectories of change, as well as the processes and actors that produced them. To investigate this, we provide a broad account of the policies and politics that construct, maintain and operate a massive Southern metropolis, covering bus and subway transportation, traffic control, waste collection, development licensing, public housing and large urban projects, in addition to the topics of budgeting, electoral results and government formation. These policies are mainly developed by the municipality of São Paulo, except for the subway, presently developed by a state‐level public company. We also examine the large‐scale regeneration project Porto Maravilha in Rio de Janeiro. We included former policy among the ones examined here due to its importance to the construction of São Paulo's urban structure, while the latter comprises Brazil's most significant urban renovation project, developed mainly on instruments created in São Paulo (and discussed in a separate chapter). These two cases allow us to understand better the effects of the variation of political and institutional conditions in the municipality of São Paulo.
The list of policies studied omits some critical State actions usually performed by local governments such as education and healthcare, as well as by state governments such as policing. We took this decision for two reasons. First, we decided to focus on policies in which local governments exert ample discretion, leaving aside policies that are intensely regulated by the federal government through federal policy systems in Brazil as we will see later in this introduction, even if with essential municipal participation. Additionally, we decided to center the book on the policies directly associated with the production of the urban fabric itself, to be able to explore better the relationships between politics and policies on the one hand, and space on the other. As a result, we analyze through the book the main State activities developed worldwide for the construction and operation of cities.
These policies form a heterogeneous group that varies substantially in terms of its general features (regulatory frameworks, service provision and space production), financing (budget, fees, and fares), relations with urban land (creating demand for land or not) and formats of provision (directly implemented, through contracts, concessions, among others). These policies vary considering the actors, institutions and governance patterns that produce them, as well as the legacies that have shaped them. Irrespective of these differences, however, they all share the specificity of being embedded in urban spaces through locations, contiguities, and distances, embedding them in historically constructed spatial configurations. These spatial elements specify urban policies and politics concerning the national level, but also other scales of subnational politics (Le Galès 2020) since they interact with spatialized interests forged by the city's segregation patterns in path‐dependent ways. In the case of urban politics, Harold Lasswell's 1936 formulation of politics as the process that defines “who gets what when and how” needs to be complemented with a “where” (Marques 2017). Studying this broad set of policies allows us to investigate their general trajectory in a large metropolis and the effects of their variation simultaneously.
In the following pages of this introduction, we establish the book's main points of departure and discuss its findings in dialogue with existing debates, as well as summarize its chapters. As we shall see, the book represents an interdisciplinary exercise that faces the challenge of connecting arguments and concepts of political science with urban studies. In so doing, we run the risk of being too basic for some readers and utterly alien for others, but this seems a small price to pay for inciting this necessary dialogue.
The task of developing a grounded analysis of urban policies is relatively challenging because of the lack of dialogue between political science and urban studies until recently (Judd 2005; Sapotichne et al. 2007) and also because of the emphasis on normative interpretations in the recent comparative literature.
Cities were at the origin of some of the key controversies in political science during the 1950s, including the so‐called community power debate, involving Floyd Hunter, Robert Dahl and Charles W. Mills. However, the discipline lost this attention to the urban, and until recently considered cities unimportant, relying on the migration of models for the study of national and international politics to the urban, stretching theory excessively (Giraudy et al. 2019). Urban studies, on the other hand, largely disregarded the political institutions of cities, privileging the study of power in society, outside political institutions, with very few recent exceptions (Bhan 2012). This emphasis stretches a long way back from the Chicago school, passing through the French Marxist sociology of the 1970s, critical geography, Lefebvrian or Foucauldian studies, and the more contemporary Deleuzian and postcolonial approaches. Even urban political economy studies devoted to urban politics – growth machine (Molotch 1976) and urban regime (Stone 1993) theories, for example – incorporated urban political institutions and policy production timidly.
Comparative politics debates on Southern cities in the 1990s and 2000s failed to solve the problem either, since they were polarized between pessimistic accounts of clientelism, patronage and government failures, and optimistic interpretations of decentralization and participation, especially in Latin America.4 By different routes, both views have tried to make sense of the unsolved problems of the quality (Diamond and Morlino 2004) of the “third wave” of democracies (Huntington 1991). However, although the analyzed processes are real, the broader consequence of these emphases is a theoretical dichotomization, as if the processes behind the politics and policies of Southern cities (not to mention their heterogeneity) were intrinsically different from those found elsewhere. This involves at least two opposite interpretations of local political mobilizations.
On the one hand, this literature has frequently treated clientelism imprecisely, including any kind of contact between politicians and citizens, individually or in groups, and concerning any State policy, service or public good. In its better versions, an effort has been made to separate: (i) policy representativeness (when the representative follows her constituency position), (ii) service representativeness (when she ensures benefits to it), (iii) allocation responsiveness (when she provides particularized benefits), and (iv) symbolic responsiveness, or public gestures that create trust and support (Elau and Karps 1977). Kitschelt and Wilkinson (2007) and Stokes et al. (2013) added further conceptual clarity to the field, differentiating pork barrel – when public or club goods are delivered to a constituency without individualization or monitoring – from clientelism – when individualized, or club goods are delivered in politically contingent exchanges with the monitoring of voters by brokers. Weitz‐Shapiro (2014) added another dimension by exploring variations at the local level in the same country (Argentina) and arguing that it is the combination of intense political competition with large middle classes (reduced poverty) in some places that leads politicians to drop clientelist relations, rather than each element in isolation, as usually considered by the literature.
Despite the significant contributions of this literature, though, by directly associating ground‐level political mobilization with distributive electoral politics, it became blind to processes between elections, as well as inside governments. Additionally, the usual normative point of departure of clientelism makes it challenging to distinguish from constituency services, also widely present in Europe and the United States (Dropp and Peskowitz 2012), with very few exceptions (Bussell 2019), as well as to incorporate the role of organizations (Holland and Palmer‐Rubin 2015). Above all, definitions of clientelism tainted by normativity have a particular difficulty in understanding the subtle and dubious strategies found within the relations and political networks that connect political parties with daily urban life in places like Latin America and India (Auyero 2000; Rivadulla 2012; Auerbach 2016; Bussell 2019). We shall return to these processes in Chapter 2 while discussing the role of councilors in territorial political mobilization.
Interestingly enough, other widely disseminated views sustain that these same cities are arenas of decentralization, participation, and activism (Lopez 1996; Chaves and Goldfrank 2004; Holston 2009; Goldfrank 2011; Carrión and Ponce 2015), as well as innovative producers of institutionalized social participation (Cleary 2007; Baiocchi et al. 2011; Carmona 2012). As we shall see later, at least in Brazil's case, decentralization and the construction of participatory institutions have indeed been among the main features of policy reform since redemocratization (Arretche 2012), although mainly in social policies (education, health, social assistance) and much more rarely in urban policies due to the presence of federal incentives for the former (Gurza Lavalle 2018).
Brazil indeed experienced significant reforms in urban policies after redemocratization. These were produced from the bottom up, starting with local government innovations entangled with actors from the urban reform movement (Marques 2019) at the municipal level in the 1990s, and became national with the creation of the City Statute in 2001 and the Ministry of Cities in 2003 (Rolnik 2009; Klintowitz 2015). Reforms included new policy solutions with enlarged social participation, although more rarely than in social policies. The wide dissemination of analyses on Participatory Budgeting experiences led the international literature to consider these as a predominant and encompassing format of urban policy deliberation in Brazilian cities. However, while policy solutions spread in the country, these participatory arenas were rarer and less effective in budget allocation and policy formulation than considered by the first glance of the literature.
Only recently a new generation of studies in political science has been “bringing the city back in” to urban political institutions (Post 2019), departing both from a comparative ontology and from empirically grounded perspectives remote from normative premises. These include studies on the historical convergence of reform and political machine strategies in the United States (Trounstine 2009b), the diversification of machine politics in competitive environments in Bogotá, Naples and Chicago (Pasotti 2010b), differences in sanitation policy reforms in light of bureaucratic insulation and participation in Mexico (Herrera 2017) or the different local embeddedness of private providers in Argentina (Post 2014), the redistributive activism of judicial agents in São Paulo policies (Coslowsky 2016), the regressive effects of the judiciary in evictions in India (Bhan 2012), the role of local networks in the access to housing policies in Africa (Paller 2015) or in rooting party mobilization and policy production in India (Auerbach 2016, 2017). Even closer to the approach taken by this book, recent studies have focused on the governance of several policies in Mexico City (Ugalde and Le Galès 2017), Paris (Le Galès 2020) and Milan (Andreotti 2019).
Therefore, a fortunate contemporary convergence is identifiable, potentially enhancing our understanding of how city politics and policies work worldwide. While urban studies were expanding their comparativism (Robinson 2011), comparative political science has been rediscovering subnational politics (Giraudy et al. 2019). This book intends to contribute to this ongoing debate while constructing bridges between these fields at the same time as emphasizing the specificity of city politics and policies within subnational politics.
This book is a city monograph with nested comparisons between policy sectors mainly within this city. However, it departs from a comparative ontology and forms part of a broader international comparison between Paris, London, Mexico City, Milan, and São Paulo.5 The production of city comparisons has moved to the forefront of contemporary international debates (Robinson 2011), attaining general acceptance among urban scholars. Essential agreements were also reached about the importance of avoiding the imposition of theoretical models produced solely from cases in the Global North (Scott 2012). The consequences of comparisons for theory production, however, remain contested, leading to polarized debates between generalizations in urban theory (Scott and Storper 2015) and about postcolonial ontologies (Roy 2016).
In an unusual convergence, political science has also been revitalizing its approach to comparisons. Nation‐state comparisons are a classic subject of studies in comparative politics (Evans et al. 1985; Levitsky and Roberts 2011) and methods (Tilly 1992; Ragin 1987). The field has also compared cities for a long time (Ruchelman 1969; Ferman 1985), as well as subnational variations more recently (Weitz‐Shapiro 2014). Lately, however, comparisons between multi‐scales in different countries (Pasotti 2010b; Holland 2018a) have also been incorporated in what Giraudy et al. (2019) call subnational research (SNR) and Sellers (2019) transnational comparisons. In this case, variations in national features may be simultaneously analyzed with local processes and with the connections between national and subnational politics (Sellers and Kwak 2010), renovating our models about political processes and avoiding theory stretching (Giraudy et al. 2019).
Reviewing the positions of these debates lies way beyond the scope of this introduction, but it is important to state our substantive point of departure vis‐à‐vis comparisons and theory building, to make clear our claims of generalization from São Paulo.
This book adopts a one city‐many‐policies design, studying one of the most important megacities in the world with democratic institutions recently consolidated within a federalist and highly unequal late‐industrialized country. In this sense, although all these features are present in many other places, their combination is unique. Consequently, we by no means consider São Paulo representative of Southern cities or metropolises, nor its political institutions as examples of local governments. However, our subject – urban politics and policies – mainly involves the same types of actors and processes present everywhere, even if produced by different historical processes and embedded in diverse contexts. As in any large metropolis, State and non‐State actors such as politicians, political parties, bureaucracies, private companies and community organizations interact strategically to make their interests prevail and to influence policies. Since these actors occupy homologous positions in political relations worldwide, it is reasonable to deduce that their interests have the same natures. Similarly, institutions (and policies themselves) frame politics and influence behavior as in any other city. These commonalities could lead us to search for a universalizing logic of theory building, or at least a variation‐finding one (Tilly 1992), moving toward the production of one single generalizable theory of urban politics.
On the other hand, it is also true that these actors, institutions and processes have quite different features and appear in varying combinations due to the specific historical processes that produced their States, societies and cities. Radicalizing the argument, for example, large cities of the North are studied with a focus on planning, technical capacities and substantive agendas of strong political parties. At the same time, Southern metropolises are usually characterized by the literature in terms of corruption in State contracts, the prevalence of clientelism, the absence of party ideology, or, contradictorily, by vivid civil society dynamics. These differences could persuade us to accept the presence of ontological differences, making knowledge produced from the South substantively different from the kinds produced elsewhere. This would mean that theories have merely regional validity, or, in a more radical version, that theorization is impossible.
We believe that both these epistemological positions are partly right (and wrong). There are commonalities in processes and actors, but also particularities that must be considered. Many features of Southern cities indeed challenge traditional interpretations, but it is also true that what happens in the former has the same nature of what happens anywhere. This implies that such differences are not ontological. At least for urban politics and policies, the incorporation of Southern cities as ‘normal’ cases – that is, capable of being understood by mobilizing the same elements as other cities – brings into consideration the full variation of the phenomenon in question (local institutions), thus contributing to substantially broader theories, but not substantively different ones.
This book sets out, then, from the understanding that comparisons will not lead to a theory of general validity, but to elements and processes that explain specific classes of cases through their (historically constructed) combination. In this case, the search for generalization is based not only on multiple conjunctural causations (Ragin 1987) in which several causal mechanisms operate together but especially on plural causality (Pickvance 2001) in which groups of causal mechanisms operate differently in different subclasses of subjects. The challenge becomes how to explain not only variation (considering general claims) but more particularly the variation in the causal mechanisms themselves between groups of cases.
This task calls not just for comparisons in general but for detailed comparisons of widely different settings, such as between Southern and Northern metropolises. Similarly, this comparative goal can only be achieved from detailed knowledge of the processes and actors involved, as well as their order and combination, which requires dense case study designs (Ragin 1987). By combining these features, our analysis intends not only to explain the trajectory of urban policies in São Paulo – and especially the construction of redistributive policies – but also to elaborate an analytical framework with actors, processes and governance patterns that can be used, tested and expanded in other large metropolises worldwide.
When we mention policy changes, the reader may call to mind the need for cities to have creative and innovative policy (and technical) solutions, such as light railways, cable cars, advanced public lighting, computerized traffic control, dedicated corridors, among others. The idea that technological developments are the key to resolving city problems is widely diffused. However, public policy studies have already demonstrated that while good solutions are essential, public policies are in fact about the production and delivery of services, goods and actions. From this point of view, great ideas for policy designs and solutions are only effective if they reach their users, which depends on the local configurations of actors and resources, as well as on the processes that produce policies. This is not to say that inventive policy solutions are not necessary, both in terms of policy products and concerning delivery structures and strategies. Therefore, solutions tend to travel badly and must be both appropriate, in the sense of fitting the situations at hand, and appropriated by the processes and actors involved. Policy change, in this sense, does not equal new policy solutions, although it may include them, as was the case of many policies in São Paulo. In all situations, however, they were accompanied by and/or embedded in public policy programs and delivered through policy processes. Unfortunately, these are much more difficult to produce and deliver than merely technical solutions and depend on the government and the coordination of multiple processes and actors.
Against the expectations of many, this book shows that São Paulo has indeed been governed since the return to democracy in Brazil, regardless of all its problems. More importantly, our cases show a slow trajectory of conflictual but incremental expansion of services and policies, along with an increase in their quality and government capacities over time, even though deep and durable inequalities remain. This incrementalism was punctuated several times by political decisions and conflicts that changed rhythms and directions of policy, and, more rarely, produced some reversals. Furthermore, different policies followed different paces, determined by their sectoral dynamics and actors, as well as their centralities within political agendas. Despite localized setbacks, however, the general pattern has been toward the creation of innovative redistributive policies with more and better services and regulation, as well as broader social participation. This is not to say that policies in the city are now accessible and of good quality to all citizens, but they have changed in positive directions across a broad set of policy fields. This outcome is especially intriguing since São Paulo is far from being a progressive city, whether measured by its electorate or by its political elites. In fact, since the return to democracy, mayoral elections have been won three times by the right, three times by the center‐right and three times by the left, while council elections have always tended to favor right and center‐right parties. Center‐right or right‐wing candidates also prevailed in the city in the most recent national elections.
A combination of political competition and policy production processes explain São Paulo's incremental trajectory of policy change. Each of these processes alone would probably lead to very different results. The comparative literature suggests that political competition alone may lead to a race to the bottom of clientelist practices (Herrera 2017), while, despite the hopes of many authors, civil society activism alone may produce visible mobilizations but rarely produces policy change without the necessary embeddedness in policy processes (Banaszak 2010; Abers 2019; Gurza Lavalle et al. 2019). On the other hand, the authoritarian experiences in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s confirm that strong and insulated State actors by themselves may imply technocratic reasoning and bureaucratic capture. It was the combination of these features that led policies in São Paulo toward incremental progressivism.
Political competition triggered two combined mechanisms that explain the actions and strategies of mayors and other local elite political actors: namely, partisan politics (Hubber and Stephens 2013) and median voter (Meltzer and Richard 1981) mechanisms. However, policies were produced and delivered in processes that involved local agencies, bureaucrats, private contractors and activists in different combinations according to policy. This foregrounds processes and feedback mechanisms not foreseen by traditional policy theories (Kingdom 1984; Sabatier and Jenkins‐Smith 1993) to explain different policy rhythms and resilience. It is worth detailing each of these mechanisms before discussing the actors and processes involved in them in the next section.
Partisan politics theory suggests that increases in redistributive policies and State capacities under democracies usually occur during left‐wing governments due to their ideology (Levitsky and Roberts 2011; Hubber and Stephens 2013). This would explain the development of social and redistributive policies and the decline in inequality in Latin America during the so‐called “pink tide” in the 2000s. Similar results were found for urban policies in the United States by Hajnal and Trounstine (2017) and Einstein and Glick (2018) and road infrastructure policies in São Paulo by Marques (2003).
We define redistributive urban policies as those that reduce inequalities in access to services and amenities, improve service quality, and enhance the wellbeing of the poor. Obviously, financial and contributory (or not) features of policies influence their degrees of redistribution, but these go far beyond economic factors alone. Therefore, it is the overall design and functioning of policies that define their redistributive features. In mobility policies, for example, bus fare prices are essential, but the existence of smart cards is even more central since these allow multiple journeys with just a single fare or fares, irrespective of the traveled distance. Likewise, dedicated bus lanes or corridors can reduce the otherwise absurd travel times to segregated poor peripheries. Sometimes expanding services and improving quality are indissociable, but in other cases, these may advance separately or even at the expense of each other.
The presence of redistributive policies under specific governments clearly challenges classic public choice interpretations (Peterson 1982), which maintained that mayors would systematically seek to promote growth and avoid redistributive policies, in a fortunate convergence with political economy growth machine predictions (Molotch 1976). The lack of choices in local politics, however, has already been confronted by the urban regime and governance typologies that anticipated the existence of several types of regime, including redistributive (Stone 1993; Pierre 2011), depending on the composition of the electorate, local bureaucracies, and political conjunctures.
The policies we analyze here confirm the relevance of local politics, showing that redistributive policy changes, especially the more conflictive ones, mainly occurred under left‐wing administrations. Also in line with this theory, center governments produced a much lower but intermediary number of redistributive programs, while right‐wing administrations an almost negligible amount. Additionally, to be able to produce and implement these policies, left‐wing governments enlarged State capacities, creating reinforcement mechanisms in favor of these policies, as we discuss later.
On the other hand, median voter theory predicts that in democratic countries where most of the population is poor, or, put more technically, where median voter income is below the average income, all politicians will try to please poor voters, since they constitute the majority (Meltzer and Richard 1981). Both left and right‐wing administrations would converge, therefore, on producing redistributive policies, improving their quality, or at least avoiding policies that could harm these voters.6 Obviously, this convergence represents a tendency, and social mobilization and political pressure from above or below can reduce or intensify this tendency (Fairfield and Garay 2017), at the same time that institutional and economic constraints may reinforce this convergence independently of political ideology (Pasotti 2010a), such as balancing the budget or providing poor relief policies during periods of profound economic and social crisis, respectively.
In São Paulo, politicians and parties of different ideologies7 fiercely competed in majoritarian elections over an electorate mostly composed of low and mid‐low income voters, not to mention the pressures applied by social movements, especially those targeting housing and transportation. Consistently with median voter predictions, therefore, all governments tended to maintain policies that reduce urban inequalities (although still with higher intensity among the left), especially in less conflictive policy areas, such as expanding infrastructure to peripheral spaces, mostly inhabited by the poor due to urban segregation.
Some redistributive policy changes were more resilient, however, and survived under right‐wing administrations, while others were discontinued or severely reduced. The policies that became a permanent item on the agenda include, for example, public transportation innovations and slum upgrading, while discontinued policies include mainly those initiatives that impact land values, such as active planning, redistributive land use, and social housing for rent. These different trajectories are explained not only by the actors involved but also by the distinct policy processes that produced them.
However, before discussing the policies themselves, it is useful to begin with the distinction between easy and hard redistribution made by Holland and Schneider (2017). This concept sought to explain the limits of the “pink tide” in Latin America in the 2000s, distinguishing widely expanded non‐contributory social benefits (easy) from much rarer labor decommodification policies (hard). In urban contexts, it is reasonable to consider hard redistribution policies as those that influence land values (and thus the wealth of land and homeowners, as well as developers), create zero‐sum games with the wellbeing of elites and the rich, or actively interfere in the interests of private service providers. Easy redistribution involves policies that improve the quality of life of the poor and their access to services but without impacting the wealth of the rich. The case of São Paulo suggests that easy distribution policies may be implemented under any government (although they are usually also first developed under left‐wing administrations), while hard distribution only happens during left‐wing governments.8
With this distinction in mind, we can return to policy production processes. Once decisions are made, policies must be produced and delivered, which brings bureaucrats, private contractors and policy community actors to center‐stage. These actors interact with politicians within policy‐specific governance patterns (Le Galès 2011) and are involved in the production and operation of all policies, irrespective of producing easy or hard redistribution.
Concerning median voter mechanisms, once easy redistribution policies are in place, they tend to continue regardless of changes to who controls the executive.9 The production of hard redistributive policies, however, shows a different trajectory. These policies are interrupted or sharply reduced during right‐wing administrations, but they do not die completely, showing different degrees of resilience. Instead, they enter a kind of latency period and may be reanimated later, after the next government swing. This process is not entirely compatible with current agenda‐setting theories, which are produced by advocacy coalitions (Sabatier and Jenkins‐Smith 1993) or by combinations of politics, problems and solution streams aligned by political leaders (Kingdom 1984). It is true that, as these theories predict, São Paulo's policies involved several political actors and groups strategically defending their interests and ideas, surrounded by institutions and historical legacies, as well as dealing with socially constructed problems and mobilizing existing solutions. However, traditional agenda theories suggest that policies that enter the agenda have “won” and tend to stay (like easy redistribution initiatives). In contrast, our cases show that many others (hard redistribution) follow a winding trajectory, shrinking or being discontinued, entering latency and being reanimated in the next friendly government.
These latencies and latter reanimations were made possible because the memory and organizational/operational capacities of these policies remained within the policy community, migrating inside and outside the State in the hands of bureaucrats, but also activists, academics and professionals who entered and left government. By policy communities, we mean the relational and issue‐based fields in which the actors of a policy sector interact (Marques 2003) beyond State and societal borders (Sellers 2010), not cohesive and unified actors amalgamated through collective action. In many cases, it is difficult to draw a hard line between State and society since actors circulate between many roles within these communities (Banaszak 2010; Abers 2019
