Brazil´s megacities and urban development policies

In this text urban researcher Prof. Dr. Maria da Silveira Lobo compiles some of the key facts about Megacity formation in Brasil, and reflects on event architecture and the spectacularisation of the City as well as on the role of NGOs. In November 2007 Ina Zwerger and Armin Medosch went to interview Maria for the forthcoming radio programme Brazil: Laboratory of the Future. Maria was so friendly to compile this text as a primer for our research. We thought that this text is an excellent resource, which should be made available to the public online.

Among the emerging BRIC, Brazil is the youngest country and perhaps the most creative, indeed. With privatization and globalization, the franchising of architectural projects and the competition between local and foreign architecture firms became a reality that emerging countries are forced to face. In Rio, two recent examples of event-architecture are illustrative of the wide repercussion and of the ambiguity of the response to this fact: the Guggenheim-Rio (+ Wien´s Kunsthistorisch Museum) project ( 2001) by Jean Nouvel for the regeneration of the port area and the City of Music (Cidade da Música – 2003 -2008) by Christian de Portzamparc, at the new neighborhood of Barra da Tijuca. While the former was not approved by the Aldermen because it would compromise in dollars future municipal administrations´ revenues, the later is under construction. I have no budgetary figures of these 2 projects, but I doubt that the difference is too big. The key to understand this ambiguity is related to the competition between cities for the tourism & entertainment, creative & cultural industries´ profits. On the one hand, real estate developers, banks and insurance companies, and more and more mayors insist that globally branded companies – Sony, Disney, Nike, McDonalds, Hyatt, Cinemark – as well museums – Guggenheim – have to “anchor” the new entertainment and/or cultural projects. On the other hand, themed entertainment industry must strive to create a ‘marketplace identity’ based on local culture, history and identity. Thus, the Carioca City Hall reacted to the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization with a “glocal project”: instead of the Gugg-Rio, the start of the port redevelopment plan was the City of Samba (Cidade do Samba) projected by a Brazilian architect, Victor Wanderley, not too far from the Sambódromo, the building for the carnival parades projected by Oscar Niemeyer in 1986, and close to the Maritime Passengers Station. Smart sinergy.

Touristic development City of Samba

Nevertheless, the extent of the creativity of this solution is doubtfull, as its nickname reveals: the Disney of Carnival. The sophisticated deconstructivist Cidade da Música, in its turn, is located close to the audio-visual pole of production at Barra da Tijuca and not too far from Projac, the Rede Globo studios which occupy an area of 4 million m2 at Jacarepaguá. There is a joke that says that Rio is a Portuguese village which was transformed into a French capital that has grown into an American metropolis …

Between planning and chaos

It is important to have in mind that today 82 % of the Brasilian population is urban whereas only a century ago only 10 % was. Discrepancies between plan and reality in new cities, built in few years upon “tabula-rasas” like Belo Horizonte (1897), Goiás (1933), Brasília (1961) and Palmas (1989) are certainly related to unstable macroeconomic scenarios of huge external debts which demand creativity and boldness. And the fact that when they inaugurated there were already invasions and precarious settlements of poor citizens inside and outside their planned areas is illustrative of the disjunction between nation, economy and society, inherent to the country´s historical condition of periphery of the capitalist expansion. For example, in modern Brasilia the optimism characteristic of the late 50´s was insufflated by governors, administrators and planners who underestimated the alert of sociologists and demographers about migration flows. They expected that 1/3 of migrants from the north, northeast and central states would go back to their hometowns, 1/3 would be absorbed by local service and commerce, and especially by the construction sector, and that 1/3 would work at the farm-belt around the new capital´s pilot plan. It happened that the establishment of the farm-belt was postponed and the migrants did not want to return to their miserable homelands. This error resulted in invasions of the pilot plan and in unplanned satellite cities even before the saturation of the south aisle of Brasilia. In its turn, post-modernist open plan of Palmas, at the new state of Tocantins, had foreseen 1,2 million inhabitants and today it has only 150 thousand while Palmas Sul, an area given by politicians to poor migrants in order to block invasions in the planned area, has already 270 thousand inhabitants…

Megacities

Nowadays, Brasil has 2 megacities (demographic criterion) : São Paulo with 20.300,000 inhabitants and Rio de Janeiro with 11,080,000. They occupy the 7th and the 19th places in the ranking of the 25 world megacities agglomerations.

According to the global cities ranking, though (cities that have a direct and tangible effect on global affairs through socioeconomic, cultural, and/or political means, as defined by World Cities Study Group & Network (GaWC)), Brasil has 1 global city or beta world city (São Paulo) and 1 in formation (Rio de Janeiro)

Brasil has 29 metropolitan regions : 3 in the North ( Macapa at Amapá, Manau at Amazonas, Belém at Pará), 8 in the Northeast (Maceió at Alagoas, Salvador at Bahia, Fortaleza at Ceará, São Luís at Maranhão, João Pessoa at Paraíba, Recife at Pernambuco, Natal at Rio Grande do Norte and Aracajú at Sergipe), 1 in the Central East (Goiânia at Goiás), 7 in the Southeast ( Grande Vitória at Espírito Santo, Belo Horizonte and Vale do Aço at Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro at Rio de Janeiro, Baixada Santista, Campinas and São Paulo at São Paulo), and 10 in the South ( Curitiba, Londrina and Maringá at Paraná; Porto Alegre at Rio Grande do Sul, Criciúma, Florianópolis, Foz do Rio Itajaí, North/Northeast Catarinense, Vale do Rio Itajaí and Tubarão at the state of Santa Catarina ). These metropolitan regions include 415 municipalities among the 5.562 municipalities of the 26 states of the Brazilian federation.

Considering that São Paulo and Rio are global metropolises, Belém, Manaus and Recife are regional metropolises, and Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, Salvador and Fortaleza are national metropolises. Demetropolization (diminishing of migration flows towards the metropolises related to deconcentration of industrial production) has been putting less pressure over São Paulo and Rio and more over the medium and small size municipalities of São Paulo´s interior and of the country´s south and northeast regions, particularly over Curitiba, Fortaleza, Brasília and Manaus. Nevertheless, the process of metropolization is advancing in Brasil and some metropolitan agglomerations grow more than 3% yearly, causing social-territorial segmentation and the aggravation of violence. The Ministry of Cities estimates that 6,6 million Brazilian families are homeless, that 11% of urban houses have no access to drinking water and that almost 50% are not linked to the sewage system. Slums are multiplying themselves in municipalities of every size. 57,8 million Brazilians live below the poverty line, that is, have an income of less than R$ 175,00, and 32,7 million are ‘socially unprotected’, that is, have no social assistance protection. They are men from 16 to 24 years old that have an income of 2 minimum wages ( R$ 380,00 x 2 = R$ 760 or US$ 580,78 (290,39 x 2) or E$ 294,92 (147,46 x 2) ), they live in the North and Northeast regions and work in informal jobs in the construction industry, or in the commerce or service sectors.1

Having been a colony during 4 centuries (1500 to 1822) and having gone through long dictatorship periods (1937-1945 / 1964-1988), Brasil has a strong tradition of centralization but has no political-administrative institutions for the planning and management of its metropolitan regions. This makes the partaking of infra-structure and social inclusive policies even more complex. The Ministry of Cities was created in January 2003 to coordinate the urban development policies and the policies for housing, sanitation, urban transport and traffic. But the municipalities are responsible for the urban and metropolitan planning and management which include land property and real estate policies (zoning, property regulation and construction code), the regeneration of central areas and environmental degraded areas as well as the prevention of natural disasters. In October 2006, all municipalities with more than 20.000 inhabitants had to propose a Plano Diretor (Master Plan) to be approved by the Câmaras dos Vereadores (Chambers of Aldermen) and the mayors.

Global financial hegemony

The already mentioned disjunction between nation, economy and society has been accelerated by the subordination of Brasil to the financial capital hegemony of globalization, which revalorizes local advantages for its mobility. It is known that the world system of cities based on finance seems to be organized independently of national or world regional boundaries: the global cities and core metropolises dominating the peripheral metropolises of South America and the national metropolises being key intermediaries with international metropolises, but having few links among themselves. 2

This fact had and has tremendous impacts in Brasil´s inter and intra metropolitan disparities. The agglomeration of Rio, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte is the home of 22% of the Brazilian population and of 60% of the country´s industrial production, although it covers only 0,5% of the national territory. Therefore, the deconcentration promoted by the fourth Kondratieff technology wave (marriage of information and electricity, jet engine, computer and copy machine, radio, television, audio-visual recording, the internet and the high speed train ) as pointed by the urbanist Peter Hall in his analysis of megacities, has not yet reached Brazil in full. There are no speed trains connecting the metropolitan regions, not even between São Paulo and Rio. Indeed, the highway network from the 60´s industrial boom has turned obsolete the railway network, which was finally privatized in the 90´s but still has not risen to the challenges of the XXIst century. These facts explain, to some extent, why the international airport of Rio is being used under its capacity, despite of its expensive renewal and expansion. And also why the port of Rio has been losing its competitiveness in relation to the port of Santos and tend to receive less investments since the opening of the Itaguaí port for dirty cargo, at the fringe of Rio´s metropolitan area, close to the Rio-Santos highway and Mangaratiba railway branch. In brief, Observatório da Metrópole is right when it considers that the 3 main challenges for Brazil today are the development of the nation, the overcoming of social-spatial inequalities and the democratic governance.3

The metropolitan region of São Paulo is composed of 39 municipalities, representing 3,4 % of the state territory in an area of 8.051 km2 and concentrating 48 % of the state´s population. The metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro is composed of 17 municipalities in an area of 6.464 km2 (Rio de Janeiro, Belford Roxo, Duque de Caxias, Guapimirim, Itaboraí, Japeri, Magé, Nilópolis, Niterói, Nova Iguaçu, Paracambi, Queimados, São Gonçalo, São João de Meriti, Seropédica, Mesquita e Tanguá). It concentrates 74% of the population of the state of Rio de Janeiro, according to Census 2000.

Sao Paulo takes it all

As Norman Gaal, from the Instituto Fernand Braudel for World Economics in São Paulo, has observed “Building upon its existing industrial base [ from the 50´s] São Paulo has since expanded its range of specialized and creative strengths to become South America’s leading center of corporate management, engineering, legal and financial services, trading and logistics, marketing, publishing, design, advertising, and software production. The worldwide ethanol boom is adding to the city’s winnings, enlarging its role as the entrepreneurial hub of a vast hinterland of agribusinesses—producing sugar, soybeans, oranges, corn, cotton, cattle, and other ­commodities—­that makes Brazil the world leader in ethanol development. São Paulo serves as South American headquarters for most ­blue-­chip U.S. and European multinationals and as the ­decision-­making center for 40 percent of the 500 biggest Brazilian companies, as well as most of Brazil’s largest banks. São Paulo’s stock exchange, the Bovespa, once derided as a casino for insiders, has cleaned up its act and now attracts huge volumes of foreign money. Share prices have quadrupled since 2002, corrected for inflation, rising twice as fast as those of the Shanghai stock exchange.” http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=286559 " href="#footnote4_ifem04z">4

On the other hand, the crisis in Rio began before the globalization era, when during the 40´s it began to lose its poleposition to São Paulo and its city-port, Santos, and was aggravated by the transfer of the capital to Brasilia, in 1960. The Juscelino Kubitschek developmentist plan of this period has transformed São Paulo into the siege of the national industrial park. Since then, Rio has been losing attractiveness for the location of corporate and public headquarters. But during the 90´s, it also lost attractiveness for the financial sector culminating with the closing of its stock market in 2001. Bovespa now reigns absolutely in Latin America, having just opened the capital of its holding. Also, Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais, has risen as another competitive industrial and service pole.

Resilient Rio

City of Music Project

Nevertheless, Rio still has 1.104 banks agencies and it is the siege of 60 headquarters of the top 500 enterprises in Brasil. Among the biggest metropolises, Rio has experienced a negative migration rate. Its employment structure is relatively similar to São Paulo and Belo Horizonte ( Census 2000) : decision-makers ( 1,2%), top professionals ( 8,7%), small employers (2,4%), medium occupations ( 27,7%), workers of the secondary sector (20,2%), specialized workers of the tertiary sector (21,4%); non-specialized workers of the tertiary sector (18,0%), agriculturists (0,6%). From 1992 to 2001, it was verified a loss of 27.5% of employments in the industry of transformation and a growth of 23 % of employments in the construction sector, commerce and services in the capital of Rio de Janeiro. In the rest of the metropolis, though, the industrial and service employment rates were stable. But it was verified a reduction of 2.6% formal employment and the growth of 20,4% of informal employments and 33,6% of autonomous jobs. (Observatório da Metrópole). In 2000, the unemployment rate was 17,2% in the metropolitan region, but in 2003 it had already descended to 13, 8% 5
“São Paulo´s official unemployment rate is 11 percent. As an indicator of the improvement in human welfare, the infant mortality rate in São Paulo has plunged from 51 per 1,000 live births in 1980 to 12 today. Since the late 1970s, the share of population served by piped water has expanded from 50 percent to 99 percent, while the sewage network has grown to reach 88 percent of homes, against only 39 percent in 1978. Nearly all families now have refrigerators and televisions, and more than 60 percent of homes have washing machines, compared with 46 percent in ­1992.” 6

Regarding the indicators of poverty of Rio´s metropolitan region: the percentage of poor residences has grown from 12,8% in 2001 to 14,2% in 2005, the houses with per capita income below the poverty line represent 3.9 %. The percentage of the poor houses with the responsible person having less than 8 years of education is 43,0%. 73% of the poor homes are owned and 11% are rented. The majority (46%) of the poor houses are occupied by 4 to 5 residents, 95% have refrigerators, 97% have stoves, 94% colour TV; 92% radio; around ¼ have fixed telephone but 54% have mobile phones. 95% of the poor residences in the metropolitan region of Rio have potable water supply, 82% are connected to sewage system and 94% count upon waste collecting service. 7

The homicide rate in the whole world has grown 30% between 1980 and 2000, going from 2.300 to 3.000 per 100.000 persons (UN-Habitat). After Washington DC, Latin America and the Caribean and the Subsaarian Africa have the highest homicide rates, whereas the European Union and the Arab States have the lowest. In the same period, Rio has moved from the 1st place in the classification of homicides in Brasil, with a coefficient of 50,8 per 100.000 persons to the 5th place with a coefficient of 122,4. São Paulo, in its turn, has moved from 2nd place with a coefficient of 34,1 to the 4th place with a coefficient of 130,5.

From mid 80´s on, the mineral extractive industry (Petrobrás) has expanded in the north part of the state of Rio de Janeiro and around Volta Redonda´s metallurgies ( Barra Mansa e Rezende) there was an industrial expansion (Wolkswagen etc). Therefore, from 1996 to 2003, the petrol participation in the state GIP has risen from 3,5% to 16,9 %. The Paraíba Valley participation in the state GIP in 2003 rated 26%. The metropolitan region grows in the direction of the axis Rio/São Paulo, Rio/Região Serrana and Rio/Região dos Lagos, following the highways network. It has a high level of density (1.899 inhabitants per km2) and a high level of integration between its municipalities. 8

In the origin/destiny research of 2005 done by the government of the state of Rio de Janeiro, it was verified the predominance of collective transport. Among the motorized trips, 74% are made by collective transport and 26% by individual transport. There are 6.167 intermunicipal busses. Dislocation by walking represents 30% of the total circulation. This is due to the high costs of transport tariffs. Although the metropolis has an extensive railroad network and many stations, many of them created during the XIXth century, only 7% of the trips by collective transport is done by train or subway. Trains which were responsible for the suburban expansion, nowadays transport only 373 passengers daily through 684 kms of railways serving 15 municipalities. The 2 subway lines (35.8 km) date from the late1970´s only. 9

About creativity in urban management is worth mentioning Porto Alegre´s participatory planning (1989-1993), which earned the UN-Habitat Prize, and Rio City Hall´s programs of Favela-Bairro and Novas Alternativas. Favela-Bairro received EU´s support in the mid 90´s and was the first program not to eradicate favelas but to urbanize them, by bringing sanitation and building public spaces inside the slums so that the favelados would be integrated to the formal neighborhoods as citizens. Nova Alternativas is a program of revitalization of ruined houses and shop-houses of the XIXth century in the central areas for residential use to low and mid-income citizens. Its financial engineering with the support of the public bank Caixa Econômica Federal being very creative and successful. Hopefully, speculation and gentrification will not follow this social-housing program.

Besides these official initiatives, it is necessary to put in relief the remarkable work of some NGOs in the cultural and educational area : Ação da Cidadania contra Fome, a Miséria e pela Vida with committees all around Brazil; the project Axé at Bahia, and the Spectaculu & Kabum !; the Galpão Aplauso/Talentos da Vez and the Franciscans´ Projeto de Humanização do Bairro at Rio´s port zone.

Lastly, the perspectives in terms of infra-structure, sanitation and social housing are good for Brazil, in case the investments of R$ 503,9 billions of the Program of Growth Acceleration for 2007-2010 of the Ministry of Planning are successful. Plus, the government is thinking about creating a fund to administrate a part of the international reserves (more than 160 billions). This fund might also be used to buy external debts of Brazilian companies or to provide resources for the National Bank of Development at low interest rates. 10


Prof. Dr.Maria da Silveira Lobo - researcher of the program of
post-graduate studies in urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture
and Urbanism of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

• 1. PNAD – National Research by Residential Sampling) 2006 cit in O Globo 29/10/2007
• 2. David R. Meyer (1986) 'The world system of cities: relations between international financial metropolises and South American cities' in Social Forces.
• 3. Como andam as metrópolis , Relatório Final -21/12/2005 - Observatório das Metrópolis.
• 4. Norman Gaal - Mending Brazil's Megacity – Instituto Fernand Braudel for World Economics - http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=286559
• 5. PNAD/IBGE - Desenvolvimento_da_Regiao_Metropolitana_do_Rio_de_Janeiro.pdf – Instituto de Estudos do Trabalho e Sociedade
• 6. Normaan Gaal – idem
• 7. PNAD 2005
• 8. Observatório da Metrópole – Como andam as metrópolis – Rio de Janeiro, Relatório Final -21/12/2005).
• 9. Observatório da Metrópole – idem and Setrans-RJ and SMT-RJ
• 10. see Mantega: Brasil vai criar fundo para gerir reservas – in http://oglobo.globo.com/economia/mat/2007/10/19/299141855.asp