Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques

São Paulo in the Twenty-First Century

Published in August 22, 2016 - FAPESP Newsagency. Prof. Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques, from the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences, at the Univeristy of São Paulo, presents information about the Center for Studies of the Metropolis, which has developed research since 2000 as one of Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers of FAPESP. As a result of research, Prof. Marques highlights the book on São Paulo in the 21st century, in two editions, one in Portuguese (UNESP) and another English (Routledge), with some differences between them, aimed at the international debate. The book deals with aspects such as urban areas, heterogeneities, social structure, segregation and population growth, with reference to contemporary comparative urbanism.

The politics of urban policies in comparative perspective

Published in February 13, 2019 - Agência FAPESP. Cities are central to our economies, societies and daily lives, but we know relatively little how city governments really work. This gap is caused by a mutual lack of interest in local political institutions by both political science, which considers them as miniatures of the national ones, and urban studies, which believes that important processes lay in society, outside of the State. To help bridge this gap, we have been developing at the Center for Metropolitan Studies a large comparative research on the governance patterns that shape urban policies and politics in São Paulo, Paris, London, Mexico City and Milan, in collaboration with colleagues from these cities. The project has been showing that urban policies and politics present several peculiarities due to their relations with the territories of the cities, influencing the strategies and actions of actors such as local politicians, local bureaucracies, private companies who profit directly from the city and urban social movements. The project intends to shed light on who governs what, and who governs what the govern does not govern in the different policy fields of cities, considering State and not State actors connected by formal and informal, legal and illegal ties and surrounded by specific and historically constructed institutions and urban spaces. By focusing on the basic elements, processes and actors forge governance patterns, the project contributes to more systematic and general comparisons of the policies and politics of large cities in both the Global South and North. Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques | FAPESP Week London.