Incremental Housing and Material Flows in the Global South
This project aims to identify niches for sustainable transitions in the housing sector and new innovative practices related to the use of sustainable materials, reuse and recycling, and incremental construction and planning. By exploring incremental building practices, the project aims to understand socially-relevant, just, inclusive and realistic solutions for persistent housing shortages, particularly in the Global South. See an article in Environment & Urbanization on "Incremental housing as a node for intersecting flows of city-making" here and our CFP for papers on the topic here.. A matchmaking workshop for this project, "Building sustainable and inclusive urban futures: Incremental housing and material flows in the Global South," took place on February 21, 2019. See a report of the event here.
Land Value Capture in Comparative Perspective
I am broadly interested in the equity implications of planning tools, and specifically, on land value capture, comparing São Paulo and Toronto. LVC refers to the public sector’s recovery of part or all of the land value increments through taxes, fees, exactions or through improvements to benefit the community. While privately-held land often increases in value due to public investments in infrastructure, economic development, changes in land use or population growth, a justice-oriented rationale holds that such profit should belong to all city inhabitants. In São Paulo, I explore a tool called outorga onerosa do direito de construir (OODC), which allows developers to pay for development rights in exchange for social goods and local urban services. In Toronto, the tool known as Section 37 allows developers to trade development rights for cash or in-kind contributions.
Planning, Justice and the Right to the City in Brazil
In this project, I use a critical lens to explore Brazilian urban policy and planning and the right to the city. This focuses on the role of civil society in the planning of cities, the implementation of 'progressive' urban policies, and the future of Brazil's cities given the politico-economic crisis. This is an ongoing project that involved my dissertation research on the Statute of the City, as well as more recent work.
Sustainable Corridors? Exploring the Interface between Infrastructure Planning and Social Transformation
This project, funded by Utrecht University's research hub on Transforming Infrastructures for Sustainable Cities, focuses on the concept of “corridor” developed as a socio-technical system integrating territorial and economic growth with local community interests. Corridors are increasingly applied to regional and sustainable development planning in the global south as a government-led top-down planning approach. The project explores whether and how corridors emerge as a critical approach that integrates planned infrastructure with local environmental and social concerns, focused on transformative development through community participation at a metropolitan scale.
As part of this project, our symposium examined how corridors are conceptualized, developed, and lived in contemporary cities, with a focus on São Paulo, where a tradition of corridor planning is shaping contemporary metropolitan development. The event, held November 21–22, 2019 in São Paulo, examined if corridors are a planning boundary that can critically integrate planned infrastructure, environmental concerns, and social issues into a metropolitan scale. The event explored the relationship between the planning of infrastructure and its transformative impacts for sustainable outcomes in local communities.
The Statute of the Metropolis and Planning Reform in Brazil: Analyzing Land Use Planning Practices and Effective Institutional Changes
This research, funded by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, compares land use planning practices in metropolitan regions before and after the approval of the Statute of the Metropolis. This law regulates the constitution of regional and regional public policies across Brazil, providing a window of opportunity for both municipal and state governments as well as civil society entities to organize themselves to elaborate metropolitan plans. In some cases, such activities extend already-existing development of cities' local master plans, following the guidelines of an earlier law known as the Statute of the City, approved in 2001. The research aims to analyze the initial institutional effects of the Statute of the Metropolis to understand whether its adoption has changed planning practices in some regions of Brazil.
See the final Lincoln Institute Working Paper here, and an article here (in Portuguese) about this project from RMBH, the state development agency of the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte.