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Embeddedness and cohesion: regimes of urban public goods distribution

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Abstract

Why do some urban governing regimes realize a more equal distribution of public goods than others? Local government interventions in São Paulo, Brazil, have produced surprisingly effective redistribution of residential public goods — housing and sanitation — between 1989 and 2016. I use original interviews and archival research for a comparative-historical analysis of variation across time in São Paulo’s governance of housing and sanitation. I argue that sequential configurations of a) “embeddedness” of the local state in civil society and b) the “cohesion” of the institutional sphere of the local state, explain why and when urban governing regimes generate the coordinating capacity to distribute public goods on a programmatic basis. I further illustrate how these configurations can explain variation in urban governing regimes across the world.

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Notes

  1. The Portuguese term for informal settlements.

  2. Race and class are closely correlated in settlement patterns and access to public goods in São Paulo (see França, 2015).

  3. A “São Paulo School” of urban sociology, which has gone untranslated in English, emerged in the 1970s as Brazilian researchers began to document dimensions of extreme segregation and differentiation in the city The titles of prominent works from this period tell the tale: “Critique of Dualist Reason” (de Oliveira, 1972), “São Paulo: Growth and Poverty” (Camargo et al., 1976) and “Urban Plunder” (Kowarick, 1980).

  4. Along with the city of Belém, these cities account for over 43.7% of all precarious housing in the country (Rocco et al., 2019)

  5. Between 10 and 15% of all households across the three censuses taken since South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994 (Stats SA).

  6. Interviews were conducted in Portuguese, audio recorded and transcribed.

  7. See the distinction that Shambayati (1994) made between tax-based and rentier regimes. Large urban infrastructure projects like roads can be thought of us as rent-generating projects, like Shambayati’s example of oil in Iran.

  8. Interview with the author, 27 June 2016.

  9. Interview with the author, 21 June 2016

  10. Interview with author, 24 May 2017

  11. Interview with the author, 11 July 2016. The reference to a “northeasterner” was clearly intended as pejorative descriptor. Brazil’s northeast is the country’s poorest region and, historically, the dominant source of migrants to cities in the country’s wealthier south, such as São Paulo.

  12. Interview with the author, 27 June 2016 and 6 July 2016.

  13. Interview with the author, 11 July 2016

  14. Interview with the author, 5 June 2017.

  15. Interview with the author, 12 June 2017. For more on the umbrella of the Popular Movements Front (CMP) see Earle, 2012.

  16. Municipal decree number 44.667, 26 April 2004.

  17. Interview with the author, 6 July 2016.

  18. Interview with author, 29 September 2017

  19. Interview with author, 5 June 2017

  20. Interview with the author, 4 May 2017

  21. Interviews with author, 4 July 2016 and 17 October 2017

  22. Interview with the author, 4 July 2016.

  23. Interview with the author, 8 May 2017.

  24. Interview with the author, 12 June 2017. I made multiple visits to two different MTST occupations and spoke with local leaders of these occupations.

  25. Interview with the author, 5 June 2017

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Acknowledgments

For their comments on drafts of this manuscript, I thank Anindita Adhikari, Nitsan Chorev, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Peter Evans, Patrick Heller, Ali Kadivar, Fenna Krienen, John Logan and Quinton Mayne. I benefited greatly from comments received at presentations of earlier versions of this work at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the University of São Paulo, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory and the Public Affairs Research Institute at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and meetings of the American Sociological Association, Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, and the American Political Science Association. I am indebted to those in São Paulo who took time to speak with me, share their experiences, and share documents for this research. All errors are mine.

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I am grateful for peer-reviewed financial support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant #1802543), the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the Brazilian Studies Association, and intramural grants from Brown University’s Graduate Program in Development at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, and the Office of Graduate Education.

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    Benjamin H. Bradlow

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Bradlow, B.H. Embeddedness and cohesion: regimes of urban public goods distribution. Theor Soc 51, 117–144 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09456-y

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