Brussels Studies Institute (BSI)

The challenges of urban governance in the context of a developing megalopolis: São Paulo, Brazil.

In the context of d´un, a country with a late economic development, the governance of d´une a city of 12 million inhabitants, located in a metropolitan region with a population of 22 million, faces several challenges: a gigantic social and spatial inequality; a very low capacity for State action in a country that has never known the equivalent of the welfare state; the constant influence of multiple social actors, ranging from political actors to parallel authorities, with little involvement in republican issues in public policies. All this establishes a situation of emergences to respond to, occupying almost all the energy and resources of governance, and making it very laborious to formulate the necessary long-term policies, while making participatory dynamics extremely difficult, despite their indispensable nature.

An important question today is: to what extent does a certain global homogenization of the economy, especially in terms of d´inégalités, as well as a weakening of the role of the welfare state in countries where it is historically more structured, suggest similar governance difficulties within the so-called “developed” economies?