Financialization of poverty and reconfigurations of the metropolitan periphery in São Paulo

• Grant number: 13/50210-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: November 01, 2013
• End date: February 28, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Fabio Betioli Contel
• Grantee: Marina Regitz Montenegro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In the current period, finance and information have been consolidating their predominant role in the organization of social life and of the territories, particularly in big cities (SANTOS, 1996; CHESNAIS, 1998). In the bulge of this process, new links are established between urbanization and financial phenomenon that comprise, today, also parcels of the impoverished population and the less valued areas of urban surface. In Brazil, the advance of urbanization, in recent years, has been accompanied by greater concentration on poverty in larger cities. On the other hand, this same impoverished population has also been participating, increasingly, in modem consumption and in financial links. The dynamisms of the poor economy in Brazilian metropolises are therefore increasingly complex; constituting a paradoxical scenario in which the expansion of the consumption and monetarization between the layers of low income mix with the concentration of poverty in the cities. Facing this context, the research proposed will analyze certain dynamisms of this new poverty in the metropolis of Sao Paulo, focusing specifically the process of monetarization and the transformations of the practices of consumption among the low income population, as well as the reconfiguration of the periphery recently inserted in the topology of the large commercial enterprises. In this way, we intend to extend the understanding of the current relationship between urbanization, poverty, and finance in a context in which the process of "oligopolization" advances not only in the market, but also in metropolitan territory. (AU)