Ruptures and continuities in practices of the consolidating of old peripheries

The urbanization processes in Brazilian cities is still marked by the reproduction of inadequate housing and land irregularities, yet we have witnessed different dynamics in the past thirty years. Since the 1980s, there has been a decrease in the growth rate of peripheral areas, accompanied by the growth of slums in urbanized areas. In face of the complexification of the forms of urban irregularities, terms such as “slum” and “irregular settlement” start to become insufficient, being substituted by the general denomination of “squatter settlements”. On the other hand, there have been significant achievements in terms of legislation and public policies toward social justice in cities.

This paper seeks to examine and compare public policies intended to the urbanization and regularization of irregular settlements in the periphery that took place between the 1950s and 1970s, and those aimed to squatter settlements during the 1990s and 2000s. In the first part, we will analyze the institutional changes within the public administration after the advent of new institutional frameworks and tools for urban planning, in the wake of the approval of Federal Constitution (1988) and the City Statute (2001).

Then, based on the confrontation of empirical cases from those two periods, in São Paulo metropolis, we shall present the hypothesis that upgrading and regularization of squatter settlements, when not accompanied by instruments of regulation and control of land use, despite some advances, tends to produce similar outcomes. The effectiveness of the policies in the reduction of urban inequalities and the integration of such areas in the city, are then compromised. Finally, we underline the importance of these reflections in face to increasing investments in squatter settlements upgrading and regularization policies, in the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) in Brazil.