Urban renewal projects, financialization and regulatory changes in Brazilian cities

Abstract

This internship research project aims to study the connections between inner city renewal policies and the process of financialization of the world economy. The proposed internship program will be developed in association with a collective research, based at the University of Leuven/KU Leuven (Belgium), which has as its object the study of relations between the state, finance and the real estate sector from a comparative perspective, analyzing the way how their articulation occurs in different national contexts. The theoretical issues and the objects of empirical investigation comprehended in this research have several aspects in common with the theme researched by the candidate in his PhD project, which addresses the distributive conflicts and regulatory changes associated with inner city renewal projects in major Brazilian cities.The project intends to analyze the influence of the macroeconomic reforms of the late twentieth century on patterns of state intervention in the field of urban policy, evaluating changes observed in urban law in this context. It seeks to identify the consequences of the hegemony of neoliberal ideas in the spheres of urban planning and urban regulation, assessing how the rationale behind this paradigm is expressed in the models of urban development, institutional arrangements and regulatory instruments related to interventions in urban centers. It is argued that the spread of urban renewal experiences in major cities is a fundamental aspect of the current strategies of urban development, characterized by the territorial focalization of governmental actions, the shortening of the time span of public and private investments and the predominance of an entrepreneurial and speculative rationality, which privileges urban interventions capable of providing high profitability and rapid return to investors at the expense of long-term redistributive territorial development goals. Departing from similar assumptions to those of the collective research mentioned above, it is argued that the deepening of the connections between the financial sphere and the real estate properties is one of the determining factors of the current strategies of urban development. Emphasizing the role of the state, this proposal addresses specifically the forms of interaction between public and private sectors in urban renewal projects and the regulatory instruments that enable the intensification of connections between finance and activities related to the production of space, evaluating the dynamics of implementation of instruments like the securitization of property-backed bonds, urban operations, urban concessions and others. The main hypothesis is that urban renewal projects, more than mere effects of wider processes of change, assume an active role in accelerating economic transformations in late-developing countries, acting as incubators of new forms of articulation between financial and productive spheres and between public and private sectors.The project involves identifying the particular patterns of the financialization process in Brazil, evaluating to which extent this phenomenon has followed similar paths to that of other countries, and what are the features that can be regarded as characteristic of the national experience. It also includes a comparison of regulatory frameworks, funding mechanisms and distributional conflicts associated to urban renewal policies in Brazil with experiences of other countries, trying to identify their similarities and differences, and assessing how these interventions were influenced by models developed in other contexts. (AU)