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The Politics of Incremental Progressivism


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I am indebted to the editors of the IJURR SUSC book series, Jennifer Robinson and especially Walter Nicholls, as well as several anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. Their particularly important observations and criticisms helped to bring focus, clarity and precision to the book.

      Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques

      Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques

A photograph of a dense housing in a town

      Chensiyuan, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1_aerial_photo_sao_paulo_brazil.JPG. CC BY SA‐4.0,3.0,2.5,2.0,1.0

      As Ugalde and Le Galès (2017) discuss at length, large cities have usually been considered ungovernable, or almost, even in cases known for their robust policies and excellent average urban conditions, such as New York (Yates 1977), Boston and San Francisco (Ferman 1985), London (Gordon and Travers 2010) and European metropolises (Lefebvre 2010). Authors have highlighted deficits in the political authority and coordination capacity of city governments, advocating institutional reforms that could provide them with stronger powers. Interestingly enough, the excessive power of mayors was at the heart of political machine critiques in the United States. Transferring their power to councils and managers was the goal of urban reform in the early 1900s (Stewart 1950).

      In large metropolises of poor and middle‐income countries, the theme of ungovernability is not cyclical nor framed as a question of institutional reform, but prevalent and generalized. Ungovernability in these cases is supposedly due to their excessive sizes, inequalities, urban precarity, fragile political institutions, incapable bureaucracies, and corrupt and clientelist politicians, leading to precarious services, lack of planning, weak governments, policy failures and low policy innovation (Gilbert and Gugler 1982; Reddy and Rao 1985; Auyero 2000; Keefer 2005; Zunino 2006; Gilbert 2013; Oliveros 2016; Novaes 2018). For some, these challenges could be resolved through decentralization (Faguet and Pöschl 2015), increased participation (Goldfrank 2011), accepting these cities' informalities (Roy and Al Sayyad 2004), applying policy solutions produced elsewhere (Campbell 1997), or changing voting behaviors or political elites themselves (Gilbert 2013).

      However, regardless of the many challenges faced by large‐scale metropolises such as São Paulo, they are governed day‐to‐day, and their governments deliver policies regularly, albeit with quite different qualities, periodicities, and coverage. Additionally, governments very often do not only govern but also produce and change policies in directions that help reduce inequalities, as well as increase government capacities, even if through conflictual, slow, and incremental trajectories. These involve not only State actors, but also several others who – simultaneously – govern the city through policy‐specific governance patterns (Le Galès 2011).

      This has been the case of São Paulo since the country's return to democracy in the mid‐1980s. The consideration of a broad set of urban policies and their programs over almost four decades shows a slow but incremental process of policy change that has allowed a reduction in inequality and a building of State capacity, although with different rhythms by policy area, despite the city's many urban, political and institutional challenges. This path of change becomes even more impressive when we consider that it happened in a relatively politically conservative city.

      The list of policies studied omits some critical State actions usually performed by local governments such as education and healthcare, as well as by state governments such as policing. We took this decision for two reasons. First, we decided to focus on policies in which local governments exert ample discretion, leaving aside policies that are intensely regulated by the federal government through federal policy systems in Brazil as we will see later in this introduction, even if with essential municipal participation. Additionally, we decided to center the book on the policies directly associated with the production of the urban fabric itself, to be able to explore better the relationships between politics and policies on the one hand, and space on the other. As a result, we analyze through the book the main State activities developed worldwide for the construction and operation of cities.

      These policies form a heterogeneous group that varies substantially in terms of its general features (regulatory frameworks, service provision and space production), financing (budget, fees, and fares), relations with urban land (creating demand for land or not) and formats of provision (directly implemented, through contracts, concessions,