EXCERPT: Ben Bradlow’s New Book Offers Insight into Urban Governance in Big Cities

Why are some cities more successful than others in reducing inequalities in areas such as housing, sanitation, and transportation? Ben Bradlow, assistant professor of sociology and international affairs, explores this topic in his debut book, “Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg(external link)” (Princeton University Press).

“My family lives in Johannesburg, and I had spent about five years working in South Africa as a journalist and researcher on urban development issues,” Bradlow said. “When I started this book as a doctoral student, I knew I wanted to compare Johannesburg to somewhere. I discovered that São Paulo — another highly unequal global megacity — had a lot of similarities, particularly in terms of the role of urban social movements in driving struggles for democracy and degrees of inequality in the built environment after democratization. I realized that this comparison could help me to understand one of the critical questions for building more equal cities in a warming world.”

The book, which will be published on October 22, will be celebrated at a launch event(external link) at Princeton on October 29.

“I’m absolutely thrilled to have this book out in the world,” Bradlow said. “I am particularly excited that Princeton will host a launch for the book one week after it is published, and to be in conversation with Craig Calhoun, [the Stanley Kelley, Jr., Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching of Sociology,] is a great honor.”

Below is an excerpt from “Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg.”

Theorizing Power, Public Goods, and the City

In 1996, Mariza Dutra Alves and her husband split up. Without her husband’s income, finding a place to live within the municipal limits of São Paulo, Brazil, one of the world’s largest and most unequal cities, suddenly felt out of reach. She moved in with her parents in Suzano, a municipality in the eastern part of the larger São Paulo metropolitan region, which is home to some twenty million people.

There, she found work as a domestic cleaner in Cidade Lider, a working-class district in the city’s sprawling eastern periphery. In a private car with no traffic, the drive from Suzano to Cidade Lider would take about an hour. By intermunicipal public bus, the journey was two times as long. For the wealthy residents who occupy the city’s core, a district like Cidade Lider, with its simple, low-rise shop fronts, winding roads, and informal shack settlements, feels like a world away.

But for Mariza, it was an entrée into the city’s economic opportunities. Basic necessities were her concern. “Because I was working so far from my children, I would return home extremely late,” she told me twenty-one years after the breakup. “Just to give you an idea, I left home at 4:30 in the morning, only to return at nine o’clock at night.”1

Mariza hoped to make enough money to one day get a place to live that she could call her own. She befriended someone who lived in an informal shack that was close to the houses she cleaned. Her new friend was a participant in a self-build housing project in São Paulo, known in Portuguese as a mutirão (pronounced “moo-chee-rau”). The project was organized through a cooperative formed under the umbrella of one of the oldest housing movements in the city, called the União dos Movimentos de Moradia.

When I interviewed her, Mariza remembered how she was apprehensive at first about attending one of the cooperative’s meetings. She told herself that she didn’t have the time, that she didn’t know what to do at a meeting, that she didn’t understand why there needed to be a movement in the first place.

“Why did people have to occupy land given that there was a right to housing in the constitution?” she recalled asking herself.

But by October 1998, Mariza had become convinced that it was time to join the movement. And she was ready to act. She began speaking with a group of people who were similarly desperate for a foothold in the city to plan a collective occupation in Mooca, a working-class district in the north and east of the municipality. The group hoped to use the occupation to force somebody—anybody—to act.

For twenty days, they slept under wood and tarps. Finally, the group was granted government land in the far eastern district of Itaim Paulista. There, members could begin to construct a neighborhood of their own, eventually totaling 420 homes in all.

Mariza had begun a life of occupying and organizing. This would become a life of forcing the hand of government to act and then working to ensure that action led to results on the ground.

The past half century has witnessed a great global migration to cities, particularly across poor and middle-income countries in the Global South. For the one out of every seven humans who lives in an urban slum today,2 cities are sites of struggle. The proliferation of slums—where the basics of city life are largely unavailable—as a dominant mode of urban life underscores how the creation of cities is inherently divided and unequal. Many of these areas lack decent shelter without a threat of eviction. A toilet. A way to move between work and home. The distribution of these goods characterizes the rationed inequalities of our urban world.

Now, in a warming world, slums are both the first refuge of climate migrants within the Global South and the zones of deepest vulnerability to climate impacts (Rigaud et al. 2018; Vince 2022). In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Fifth Assessment Report (2014). These reports are the authoritative synthesis of the global research consensus on interdisciplinary climate science. The Fifth Assessment Report was the first to have a stand-alone chapter on cities and urbanization.

Across the text of this Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, slums are frequently mentioned as sites of two core problems for governing climate resilience. First, inequalities in urban public goods define an urban built environment unable to cope with climate-induced migration and disaster risk. Of particular importance here are the defining inequalities in the distribution of housing, sanitation, and transportation. And second, the lack of responsive governing arrangements prevents resilient urban systems.

The people who manage the formal life of cities—primarily bureaucrats and politicians who work in local government—often cite the frustrating impotence of the bureaucracy associated with their work. They might say that formal hierarchies or interagency competition constrain their scope to act. But they also enjoy a profound sense of empowerment because the institutions they populate clearly matter for changing the lives of the people who live in their cities.

The people who live in the slums of cities experience different deficits of influence: to be heard, to get ahead, to live what Amartya Sen has famously described as “lives they value—and have reason to value” (1999, 8). Yet they have also discovered their own forms of power: in movements, organizations, and largely informal arrangements that make the contingencies of urban life bearable and meaningful.

Like Mariza, urban residents across the globe frequently take it upon themselves to develop housing and municipal services when their governments have been slow to act or have failed them completely. Usually, these actions are a form of resistance to the reproduction and spread of exclusion that characterizes contemporary patterns of urbanization. These actions sometimes concatenate into broader social movements.

And when these actions turn into movements, they sometimes generate a broader process—usually in local government—to include the most excluded parts of these cities in the array of public goods that make urban life livable and full of opportunity. This book is about the push and pull of grassroots activists like Mariza, the movements they form, and the politicians, bureaucrats, and private actors they encountered—and continue to encounter. It is the story of, on the one hand, those who have organized to gain the attention and will of government and, on the other, the process of working to make the government capable of delivering on that will. In other words, it is about what it takes to see the will to power for rights in the city realized in the built environment of cities: urban power.

To state the question that motivates this study: Why are some cities more effective than others at reducing inequality? This book will answer that question through an in-depth comparison of two global “megacities”: São Paulo in Brazil and Johannesburg in South Africa. In doing so, it will propose and test an argument about the governance of urban inequality that speaks to a wider range of cities across the globe, particularly—though not exclusively—in the rapidly urbanizing Global South.

“Excerpted from URBAN POWER: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg. Copyright © 2024 by Benjamin Bradlow. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.”