Municipal Neoliberalism and Municipal Socialism: Urban Political Economy in Latin America

Abstract

The following article identifies two different urban policy regimes in Latin Americaneoliberal and socialist -and traces their origins to the distinct interests and capacities of local elites and activists in the region's cities in the mid-to-late twentieth century. While agricultural and commercial interests paid a high price for the growth of import-substituting industrialization, and therefore deployed free trade zones (and similar institutions) in traditional export centers in the 1960s and 1970s, their industrial rivals bore the brunt of austerity and adjustment in the free

Ten years of the City Statute in Brazil: from the struggle for urban reform to the World Cup cities

“…These experiences were essential to the new opposition parties that emerged at that time to assemble different interests present in the popular sector through the creation and consolidation of an identity based on active citizenship (Goldfrank & Schrank 2009). At the same time, in many cases, participatory decision-making processes were truly inclusionary strategies; several studies have shown the connections between participatory processes and redistributive effects, for example Maureen Donaghy (no date) shows that the existence of housing councils in some cities is associated with the adoption of housing programmes focused on low-income families, while Boulding and Wampler (2010) and Wampler (2011) discovered that the adoption of municipal participatory budgeting was associated with a reduction in the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty.…”

“…As a result, unemployment increased and there was a weakening of the outreach and range of the distributive policies that existed or was claimed by workers. Subsidies for public taxes and for housing credit, for instance, were cut in the context of high inflation rates and a deterioration of workers wages' purchasing power (Goldfrank & Schrank 2009). The crisis contributed to enlarging the base of the movement for urban reform.…”

Reasons of Power: Explaining Non‐cooptation in Participatory Budgeting

“… Goldfrank and Schrank () list Rosario as a city governed by a socialist party, and discuss the meaning and political importance of municipal socialism as an alternative to neoliberalism in the region. …”

Insurgent Planning and Its Interlocutors

“…The paradox, then, is this: Los Platanitos and the dozen or so other such informal communities in Santo Domingo Norte exist in spite of planning, not because of it. But while Los Platanitos is excluded from the neoliberal planning vision of Santo Domingo Norte (Goldfrank and Schrank 2009), it is nevertheless closely This reactive, clientelist form of governance is constituted by silent accommodation to the silent encroachments of the everyday, coupled with carefully structured forms of engagement that provide stages for authorities' performances of threats, promises, education, displays of largesse, and other strategic speaking-to residents. Instead of the forced slum removal strategies of the past (Santana 2004), authorities tacitly accept the quiet encroachments in illegal spaces: water is provided twice a week through the PVC tubes that residents tapped into the water mains; electricity is provided a few hours daily through the wires residents spliced into the main electricity lines.…”