Popular mega-ventures: new agents, strategies and restructuring of space in contemporary São Paulo

• Grant number: 20/15267-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: May 01, 2021
• End date: April 19, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Urban and Regional Planning - Fundamentals of Urban and Regional Planning
• Principal Investigator: Maria Beatriz Cruz Rufino
• Grantee: Isadora Fernandes Borges de Oliveira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 23/10069-0 - Real estate financialization and the State: from local policies to financial instruments, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

At the beginning of the 21st century, several studies revealed changes in the capitalist accumulation process under the domain of finances and their overlapping with housing policy, production of space, and housing in Brazil. The profound transformation the agents of the sector underwent, as well as their production strategies, resulted in an important dynamic of capital centralization in large developers, their geographical performance expansion, and valuation processes. The political-economic crisis in the Country, from 2014, led to significant changes. Thus, this research is guided by the following question: What are the consequences of this fact in the face of the housing financing process? It was hypothesized that the crisis context gave new meaning to the housing commodification processes previously generated, verifying in the current period the diversification of capital centralization dynamics, which are concretized by the intensification of investments in large government real estate complexes in the largest city of Brazil, implying new processes of metropolitan restructuring, which is supported by sophisticated financial instruments and urban stimuli, making possible new levels of accumulation that intensify socio-spatial inequalities and resulting in new contradictions. For its development, three major popular ventures, carried out by different economic groups (developers, investment funds, and industrial group), are adopted as case studies explored from three analytical axes focused on the reorganization of real estate production agents, their strategies and financial and spatial mechanisms, being the latter one addressed from a perspective of urban space restructuring processes, which drive the metropolization process. (AU)