the urban in this case is not merely a matter of scale, although it also encompasses elements of scale. Cities are both agglomerations and administrative jurisdictions (Post 2019) but incorporate actions and processes from other scales of governments (Le Galès 2020) whenever relevant.
However, most of the policies analyzed in this book are the responsibility of the municipal government of São Paulo. They are also, however, influenced by actions at other levels of the country's federal structure. The Brazilian Constitution recognizes municipalities as the third level of government, giving them specific policy responsibilities such as urban planning, licensing for buildings and settlements, intraurban transportation, local parks and sanitation (mostly conceded to state‐level public companies). Metropolitan railways, subways, and environmental control are state‐level policies, and there are no metropolitan‐level government structures. Policing is divided between the states and the federal government, while in housing, education, health, and social assistance, all levels of government contribute in some form. This shows the importance of federalism in Brazil, especially considering the policy systems created since the 1990s, combining centralization and decentralization (Arretche 2012). In some policy sectors, institutionalized social participation has played an important role, although more rarely in urban policies (Gurza Lavalle 2018). Finally, municipalities follow one single institutional format, as will be detailed through a comparative analysis in Chapter 1. They are governed by mayors and municipal councils, directly elected for four‐year terms since the mid‐1980s.16 Municipalities have access to a reasonable proportion of the nation's public budget, although, as we shall see in Chapter 3, only a small portion is available for discretionary allocation.
In 2010, the metropolitan region of São Paulo was home to more than 20 million inhabitants. Like other Latin American metropolises, the city was expanded by the large‐scale migration of poor people from less developed regions of the country during the decades of intense industrialization between the 1940s and the 1980s. Housing policies were fragile and selective, and in fact, the State did not provide even primary urbanization conditions for this population, who had to develop several types of precarious housing solutions to settle in the city. Between 1964 and 1985, the country was under authoritarian military rule with various regressive social effects. The redemocratization process was completed only in 1988 with the promulgation of a new, democratic constitution.
São Paulo's resulting urban structure was characterized until the 1980s by a well‐equipped central region, where the elites lived and circulated and where opportunities were concentrated, and increasingly precarious peripheries, where most of the population lived, typically in self‐built houses located in precarious settlements with a meager presence of State policies and equipment. The local literature (Kowarick 1979) analyzed classically these trajectories that became known internationally as informal housing and peripheral urbanization (Caldeira 2016). Migration processes and urban growth have both substantially reduced since the 1980s and essential political and economic transformations have been changing these spaces in the last decades. Formal housing market agents have expanded their production to these spaces (Hoyler 2016), made viable by the reduction in inequality occurring until 2015 (Arretche 2018), while wealthy residential enclaves were produced in these same peripheral areas (Caldeira 2000). The resulting segregation patterns, albeit transformed, still clearly present the durable superposition of class and racial inequalities in space (França 2016). Finally, the State became increasingly present in peripheries, providing infrastructure, services and policies, although usually of lower quality (Marques 2016a). A substantial part of these transformations was caused by the policies analyzed in the chapters of this book.
The Book
This book is organized in 3 parts and 11 chapters, plus this introduction and the conclusion. The first part discusses urban politics, with a chapter on the executive, a second on the council and a third on the municipal budget. Parts II and III discuss urban policies and the governance of each policy area, considering various actors, capacity building, policy instruments and institutions. Part II is devoted to urban services, while Part III investigates housing and land policies. In the end, the conclusion compares the findings and discusses theoretical lessons. The chapters are summarized below.
Chapter 1 by Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques and Telma Hoyler introduces the political background of the period by discussing and comparing municipal governments, mayors and administrations. The period was marked by substantial swings in local government, with three governments of the left, two of the center‐right and another three of the right. The chapter summarizes the political environments and the characteristics of each government since the mid‐1980s.
In the second chapter, Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques and Telma Hoyer complement the background history through a discussion of government formation, the council and executive‐legislative relations. Electoral results specify the formation of support coalitions under the influence of Brazilian multipartyism and coalition presidentialism. Locally, this leads to the formation of government and opposition blocks in which mayors started with just plurality support but in almost all cases created comfortable coalitions on the council. Coalition formation, however, came at the cost of pork‐barrel expenditures, changing policies for special interests and primarily appointing political brokers to government positions. On the other hand, local councilors were key political mobilizers for mayors through their territorialized political machines, during elections but also throughout government mandates.
Chapter 3, written by Ursula Peres, studies the political economy of the public budget that frames policy production. The chapter highlights the key elements of its governance, including formal and informal rules, relevant actors, decision levels and institutions, especially after recent changes in federal rules. The chapter situates Brazilian local public finances comparatively and analyses the São Paulo budget from the early 2000s to 2015. The results show a highly rigid budget with a stable spatial distribution that crystallizes past social struggles and incentivizes incrementalism as a policy change strategy, at the same time as it reduces the discretionary decisions for redistributive policies. Regardless of the budget's size, this rigidity creates conflicts, as well as incentives to search for less constrained resources, such as those provided by large projects, as will be seen in Chapters 10 and 11.
The second part of the book focuses on the primary urban services delivered through contracts or concessions with private companies such as mobility and waste management. For historical reasons, mobility policies in São Paulo are divided among several agencies, both municipal (buses and traffic control) and state‐owned (a public subway company), while successive municipal institutions managed waste collection.
In Chapter 4, Carolina Requena studies traffic control policies since the 1970s. She argues that the insulation of the municipal traffic agency during its foundation period allowed it to establish and maintain an automobile priority paradigm that negatively impacted the performance of collective road transportation, run by a historically under‐empowered bureaucracy. This paradigm was consistent with mayoral priorities during the military period but became increasingly outdated under democracy. Recent administrations have confronted the highly regressive automobile paradigm and induced the traffic and bus control bureaucracies to interact and change, but not without intense intra‐ and inter‐organizational conflicts, giving rise to redistributive mobility policies that benefited mainly the poor, the majority of users of public transportation.
Bus services are the subject of Chapter 5 by Marcos Campos.
