EMBEDDED COHESION SOCIAL BASES OF URBAN PUBLIC GOODS DISTRIBUTION - BENJAMIN H. BRADLOW PHD CANDIDATE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY, BROWN UNIVERSITY

Embedded cohesion
Social bases of urban public goods distribution

                 Benjamin H. Bradlow
                     PhD Candidate
        Department of Sociology, Brown University

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Abstract

Theories of urban political economy under contemporary globalization predict convergence
across cities: growing inequalities of income, wealth, and access to public goods, and the
political dominance of business elites in real estate and finance. Bucking these expectations, São
Paulo has achieved surprisingly effective redistribution of residential public goods — housing
and sanitation— since Brazil’s new democratic constitution of 1988. I rely on original interviews
and archival research conducted in São Paulo between 2016-2017, in order to explain why and
how São Paulo has achieved a distribution of public goods that does not fit the expectations of
existing theories in either urban sociology or the political sociology of development. If there are
limits to the convergence of inequalities and governance across cities, then we need tractable
concepts for comparative analysis of this variation. I deploy a comparative-historical analysis of
institutional changes in São Paulo associated with the distribution of public goods in the city
between 1989 and 2016. I argue that sequential configurations of a) “embeddedness” of the local
state in civil society and b) the “cohesion” of the institutional sphere of the local state, explain
why — and when — cities generate the coordinating capacity to distribute public goods.

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From a “new urban crisis” (Florida 2017) in the United States to a “planet of slums”

(Davis 2006) across the globe, unequal access to public goods is seen as a distinct correlate of

political extremism and impediment to human capabilities and social solidarity (Castells 1997;

Storper 2013). These inequalities are commonly ascribed to the “neoliberal restructuring” of

cities (Brenner and Theodor 2010), which occurs in a context of globalized trade liberalization

and integration. Three trends characterize this explanation: a turn in the structure of employment

in cities from manufacturing to services; declining fiscal, regulatory and planning authority of

local state institutions; increased domination of popular mobilization and politics by business

elites. Unequal patterns of urban settlement first noticed in “global cities” such as New York,

London, and Tokyo (Sassen 1991) are now pervasive. Increased global market integration

defines urban functions as opposed to the role of a given city in its national context. We

therefore expect to see converging dynamics of political economy between cities: growing

inequalities of income, wealth, and standards of living, and the political dominance of business

elites in real estate, construction, and finance.

        One alternative theoretical and methodological approach has focused on the singular and

unique characteristics of cities that do not fit the structural model (Robinson 2011). I propose a

middle-way between this particularist “comparative gesture” and the encompassing convergent

view of urban change. If there are limits to the convergence of inequalities and governance

across cities, we need tractable concepts for comparative analysis of the variation.

        São Paulo, Brazil, does not fit predictions of deepening exclusions from the distribution

of urban public goods. In particular, the material conditions of historically marginalized,

peripheral neighborhoods have undergone significant improvements in housing quality,

especially through access to sanitation services. The net effect is that public intervention by São

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Paulo’s local state has made unexpected improvements in the inclusion of poor, peripheral

neighborhoods in the infrastructures of life and opportunity in the city.

       I argue that configurations of “embeddedness” of the state in civil society and the

“cohesion” of the institutional sphere of the state explains why it becomes possible to generate a

more programmatic and inclusive distribution of public goods across multiple policy spheres.

“Embeddedness” is defined by the connections of state actors and institutions to associations and

movements in civil society. This produces the ideas, policies, and programs that local state

institutions end up pursuing. For city governments, coordinating across line agencies, across

scales of government (eg. federal, state, municipal), and across the geographical extent of the

city, is essential for achieving the delivery of public goods. “Cohesion” is therefore defined by

the coordinating capacity of local state institutions to implement these policies.

       Configurations of these two factors can vary across cities, and within cities they

inevitably change over time. Therefore, the empirical analysis in this paper focuses on specifying

the sequence of configurations of “embeddedness” and “cohesion” in São Paulo. I do so through

a historical analysis of the policy spheres of housing and sanitation. I focus on the period that

begins after Brazil’s transition to democracy in the 1980s. This transition was punctuated by a

new Federal Constitution in 1988 that decentralized governing authority to municipalities,

promoted fiscal transfers to the municipal scale, and included new rights to public goods like

housing and sanitation. These are goods that require significant degrees of social and institutional

coordination. Their extension to marginalized people and places is all the more striking given

São Paulo’s history of clientelistic, fragmented and effectively rationed modes of delivery of

urban services (Holston 2008). The study ends in 2016, when Brazil entered a new political cycle

after the impeachment of its president, Dilma Rousseff, and subsequent municipal elections.

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My central claim about the São Paulo case is that when that the municipal state has been

embedded in a social sphere of social movements for housing, it has generated countervailing

political power in multiple policy arenas to that of real estate elites in the city. In short, business

elites are not the only game in town. In fact, in order to achieve what they want, they have had to

navigate institutional arrangements that relativize the right to private property and ensure a

distribution of public goods that does not exclusively uphold the market prices of private

property. The “embeddedness” of the local state in housing movements has generated the

political will to deliver both housing and residential services such as sanitation in the city’s poor

peripheries that was previously unavailable. In turn, this “embeddedness” has produced

coordinating capacity in the local state — “cohesion” — to actually implement its plans.

Alternative explanations

       Multiple literatures in sociology, from urban sociology to the sociology of development,

all suggest hypotheses that São Paulo should fit a pattern of convergence towards increased

inequalities of public goods distribution (see figure 1). Though the conceptual horizon for

comparative analysis in the literature on urban neoliberalism emphasizes that politics and

institutions matter (Brenner and Theodor 2002), it limits their contingent effects to increased

inequalities of material distribution and political power. Even if we take as settled the contention

that cities are central to the coordination of neoliberal strategies of accumulation, this does not

preclude political and institutional arrangements in cities outside of the neoliberal mold.

       “Growth machine” theory (Logan and Molotch 1987) focuses on local coalitions between

business and political elites to maximize economic growth as the decisive relationship in urban

political economy. The connection between material inequalities, policy objectives and political

power, underscores the centrality of understanding mechanisms of institutional change to explain

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such inequalities. The collective capacities of a “regime” in “urban regime theory” are defined

by the interaction between the configuration of the actors that comprise the regime with the

capability to act and the policies that are the object of institutional action (Stone 1989).

       The tools of “growth machine” and “regime” theorists are useful for identifying both the

importance of local institutional configurations, and the varieties of conflict between growth-

oriented and redistributive policy goals. Stone (1993) theorized the possibility of two types of

redistribution-oriented regimes, which he describes as “middle class progressive” and “lower

class opportunity expansion”. However, he saw these categories as “largely hypothetical”. In this

sense, the outcomes that regime theorists observe are not necessarily less prone to predictions of

convergence than those of “global cities” / urban neoliberalism theorists: increasingly unequal

access to opportunity and quality of life across urban space.

       Because much of the literature on urban political economy tends towards the convergent

view, we need to turn elsewhere to explain why and under what conditions we should expect

alternative distributive outcomes in cities. Most comparative accounts of the social bases of

development, in which empirical variation of outcomes has been much more of a central

concern, have analyzed national state institutions. The emphasis has been on variations of class

coalitions aligned to programmatic political parties as enabling or disabling policies for

economic development and/or redistribution. (see Pzeworski 1985; Esping-Andersen 1990). In

particular, the role of democracy has been seen as critical for redistributive outcomes (see

Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens 1995). The role of left political parties in Latin America

(Huber and Stephens 2012) and alliances between working class organizations in civil society

and a left political party in the Indian state of Kerala (Heller 1999) have been found to drive

gains in both human development and economic growth.

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These findings are more or less commensurate with the Brazilian case at the national

level, where the PT, a left political party aligned to a social movement unionist alliance of

unions, social movements and intellectuals, is credited with programmatic redistributive policies

in sectors such as labor, social security, education, and health (Gibson 2018). However, they do

not fit the case of São Paulo and its experience of redistributive policies at the city scale after

Brazil’s new democratic constitution of 1988. This is primarily because the PT has never had

successive terms in office. Furthermore, trade unions have not been the unique or even primary

civil society actor associated with programmatic delivery of public goods in the city. This

suggests that the role of a political party is insufficient, on its own, for explaining inclusionary

changes in São Paulo’s distribution of public goods. My findings about the role of overlapping,

and sometimes fractious, housing movements are surprising, given expectations that movements

require formal cohesiveness for achieving programmatic welfare outcomes (Lee 2012).

       São Paulo is also not a likely candidate for high state capacity. The autonomy of

government agencies is not expected in a city that had been considered prone to clientelistic

governance (Graham and Jacobi 2002; Whittaker 2011). Furthermore, the ruling party in local

government has changed often and rarely been aligned to the party in power at the national level.

                                   INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE

Defining “embedded cohesion”

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I define “embeddedness” as the connections of the local state to civil society that produce

the ideas and influence for policy change. And I define “cohesion” as the coordinating capacity

of the local state to implement policy changes and effect distributional outcomes. The concept of

“embedded cohesion” adapts prior explanations of social bases of state action to the unique

dimensions of urban administration of public goods. Furthermore, I argue that the analytical

usefulness of these explanations depends on our ability to wield them to explain institutional

change over time, and not only why an institutional configuration produces a given outcome in a

moment in time.

       The distribution of public goods at the city scale is conditioned by unique conditions for

which explanations of the role of embeddedness in generating state capacities do not fully

account (cf. Evans 1995; Heller 1999). On the one hand, the social sectors likely to induce

changes in the distribution of public goods are not likely to be business elites or traditional trade

unions. Social movements for goods of collective consumption, such as housing or

transportation, are much more likely candidates for “embedded” connections to local state

institutions to drive change in the distribution of public goods. The mobilization of such

movements articulates and builds popular pressure for distributive goals. The connections that

these movements have to both politicians and professional bureaucrats within the local state

make it possible for these goals to enter the halls of formal power.

       My invocation of “cohesion” makes a parallel logical move to that in prior work that has

sought to bring the institutions of the state “back in” to sociological analysis (Evans,

Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985; Morgan and Orloff 2017). This work has regularly considered

how national state institutions are in co-constitutive relationships with international, global, and

transnational institutional configurations. The concept of cohesion describes the social bases of

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institutions beneath the national state. Institutional action at the scale of the city therefore

requires coordination across multiple scales of bureaucratic agencies.

       . The role of Weberian “autonomy” of state bureaucracies in driving economic

development that Evans (1995) found in East Asian developmental states was characterized by

single national agencies that manage economic policy. More recent work has found pockets of

bureaucratic effectiveness within a single economic agency in Ghana (McDonnell 2017). In

contrast, cities tend to be nested in intermediate sub-national (eg. state) and national (eg. federal)

levels of authority and the delivery of public goods tends to cut across multiple agencies.

“Cohesion” therefore comprises three types of coordinating capacities, which are relatively

unique to urban — as opposed to national — government: (1) The capacity of municipal

institutions to coordinate across institutions at state and federal levels; (2) Coordination across

multiple line agencies at the municipal level; (3) Because public goods often rely on networks of

infrastructure across space (eg. sewage pipes, transportation routes), coordination across the

geographic space of the city is required.

       Social bases of state effectiveness cannot be theorized without an explanation of change

over time. Configurations of embeddedness and cohesion exhibit aspects of path-dependence and

contains within it structural weaknesses that allow for agentic change. Private real estate actors

need to navigate the institutional architecture that has been established through past struggles,

which are shaped by other actors, including movements and associations in civil society.

Movements that emerge from structural inequalities in the residential standard of living mark

urban politics. Variations in urban politics are not only due to these structural cleavages, which

are often caused by national and global forces, but by the local institutional arrangements that

movements encounter and change.

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My findings in São Paulo lead to the following generalizable expectations of what to

expect in sequences of redistributive urban regimes in other democratic settings. When the local

state is embedded, but not cohesive, it is particularly vulnerable to capture by elites. This is

because institutions are not consolidated sufficiently to prevent the electoral sphere from being

vulnerable to shifts in the social base of governing authority. Alternatively, when the regime is

cohesive, even without embeddedness, it maintains path dependencies of prior regimes. The

political priorities of prior embedded regimes can be sustained through a sufficiently cohesive

institutional sphere even once the original political party is no longer in power. Cohesion can

also have the contradictory effect of weakening embeddedness. In particular, it can make it

appear as though programmatic redistribution can be achieved purely through bureaucratic

intervention. The loss of embeddedness in civil society will, in turn, weaken the cohesion of the

sphere of the state.

        I contend that the configuration of these two factors can help us categorize and compare

how local political power is coordinated in cities. The four possible configurations are presented

in Figure 2. This kind of configurational analysis is dependent on time, and each city is indicated

not only by name but also by the specific period of time during which the city exhibits a given

configuration. The point of emphasizing the role of time in urban politics is to underscore that no

city is immutably in one quadrant.

        Low embeddedness-low cohesion: Low embeddedness is observed through an absence

        of a channel for grievances and policy ideas to enter local state policy formation. Low

        cohesion is observed through the absence of local state authority to address distributive

        concerns. Flint, Michigan, in the United States, has been under the receivership of the

        state of Michigan since 2011 and has subsequently been providing poisoned water to city

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residents for the past three years. Civil society has been rendered almost irrelevant to

formal politics (Fasenfest 2017).

High embeddedness-low cohesion: High embeddedness is observed by a social

movement as the mobilizing force behind newly-elected political leadership. Washington,

DC, USA, under its first black mayor Marion Barry, and New Delhi, India, under the

Aam Aadmi Party are two cases of reform-minded, social movement-backed

administrations. Both are capital cities and have been subject to significant countervailing

power of national governments. Opposing parties have led each city’s respective central

government. The upshot is that each city had only limited financial independence to

reorient the delivery of public goods on a programmatic basis. The space of the city has

been marked by limited change in the distribution and quality of public goods like

housing (Thompson 2006; Chaturvedi 2017).

Low embeddedness-high cohesion: Low embeddedness is observed through the

domination of the policy agenda by business elites. High cohesion is observed through

the implementing capacity of the local state to assist in implementing this agenda. This

configuration is most evident in the literature on “growth machines”, in which the local

political and business elites coordinate to pursue the goal of economic growth. Another

non-democratic case is large Chinese cities since economic reforms that decentralized

borrowing authority to local governments. The hukou system of internal migration

controls has produced extreme rationing of access to urban public goods along with a

strong orientation to economic growth outcomes (Dreger, Wang and Zhang 2015).

High embeddedness-high cohesion: This combination of observed social mobilization

and sustained institutional capacity to deliver on redistributive demands is relatively rare.

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Amsterdam, Netherlands, has managed to maintain high levels of investment in public

       goods, especially housing, which Fainstein (2010) attributes to both the legacy of

       squatters’ movements in the city, as well as continued commitments by the Dutch

       national government to invest in municipal services. Chicago under its first black mayor

       Harold Washington is another example, though his untimely death shortly after he began

       his second term makes this harder to evaluate in terms of material outcomes. The social

       coalition of working and middle-class black residents and some liberal whites that backed

       his administration enabled it to reshape local politics to direct funds and bureaucratic

       administration toward the development of previously marginalized neighborhoods in the

       city (Clavel and Wiewel 1991).

                                  INSERT FIGURE 2 HERE

       For the rest of this paper, I focus on the temporal dynamics of within-case variation

through the case study of São Paulo. The purpose is to illustrate how all of these configurations

can exist within the same city. The precise sequence of change matters greatly for making sense

of the construction of institutional capacity for distribution of public goods over time. We care

not only about what configuration exists, but about the order in which these configurations

change.

Methods

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The city of São Paulo is chosen as a “least likely” case (Gerring 2005) for the observed

outcome of public goods redistribution. I draw on fieldwork conducted in São Paulo between

2016 and 2017. This includes: a) 110 semi-structured interviewsi with current and former high

and mid-ranking officials in government departments, mayors, city councilors, housing social

activists in professional non-governmental organizations and grassroots movements, private

property developers, executives in the São Paulo state sanitation parastatal company known by

its acronym SABESP, consultants and scholars; and b) archival research of legislation,

newspapers, professional trade publications, and internal government and NGO documents.

       I use these data to construct a historical account of change in local state institutions in

São Paulo. This account relies on specifying sequences of change, which roughly correspond to

different mayoral administrations. This approach leverages the variation between the case of São

Paulo and general expectations of existing theory, and the within-case variation across time

periods. The sequential method, or “process tracing”, is useful “for establishing the features of

the events that compose individual sequences (e.g., their duration, order, and pace) as well as the

causal mechanisms that link them together” (Faletti and Mahoney 2015, p. 212).

       I find that there are four key periods in this sequence of configurations between state and

society. I use the original qualitative data to code each period as either “high” or “low” along the

two axes of “embeddedness” and “cohesion” (see Figure 3). These two axes of analysis make it

possible to specify the process of transforming urban regimes. In order to do so, I examine the

politics of the institutions that deliver housing and sanitation.

The case of São Paulo

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Home to 12 million residents, São Paulo is the financial center of Brazil and Latin

America, and frequently ranks high in both qualitative (Friedmann 1995; Sassen 1991) and

quantitative (Alderson and Beckfield 2004) assessments of the importance of globally-connected

cities. While São Paulo and its surrounding metropolitan region comprised the industrial

epicenter of the Brazilian economic development “miracle” of the 1970s and 1980s, the city’s

economic base has made a clear shift towards finance, services and knowledge sectors. Even

during the years of the “miraculous” economic growth spurt, mainly driven by industrial activity

(see Evans 1979), high degrees of stratification in income and living standards were observed by

scholars across the space of the city (see Camargo et al 1975, Kowarick 1980). São Paulo has

seen the steepest drop in manufacturing as a share of total employment of all major Brazilian

cities, and a concurrent rise in employment in services. To illustrate, in 1977, 42% of jobs in the

São Paulo metropolitan region were in manufacturing, which was 11% higher than the next city,

Porto Alegre. In 2009, the share of jobs in manufacturing had been cut almost in half to 22%.

Furthermore, São Paulo was no longer the municipality with the highest share of manufacturing

jobs in the country, a title that is now held by Porto Alegre (Biderman and Lopes 2015). Much of

this shift in labor market structure in São Paulo occurred just as the country was undergoing its

political transition to democracy from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.

       The distribution of housing can be understood through two dimensions: access and

location. What matters is both to be able to live in a decent house and for that house to be in a

decent location. A key dimension of a “decent location” is access to sanitation. This means

having decent sewerage and toilet services.

       The conditions of urban residential life in São Paulo during the military dictatorship of

1968-1988 were particularly dire. For example, in 1968, 41.3% of all households in the city of

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São Paulo were without a sewage connection (Camargo et al 1975). The stark rationing of public

goods between a wealthy core and sprawling peripheral neighborhoods was a defining feature of

the spatial organization of life in the city.

        The conditions for strong local government intervention at the outset of São Paulo’s new

local democratic era were particularly weak from a fiscal perspective. The period of centralized

military dictatorship was characterized by a relatively closed economy focused on

“developmental” state-led policies (Evans 1979). The transition to democracy in the 1980s was

characterized by sluggish economic growth compared to the “miracle” of the mid-1970s.

Economic crisis grew deeper in the 1990s.

        The standard of living in São Paulo has improved substantially with respect to the

distribution of core public goods. While the share of the total households located in informal

settlements has grown from 9.2% in 1991 to 11.6% in 2010, access to sanitation in informal

settlements has almost tripled from 25.1% in 1991 to 67.9% in 2010 (Marques and Saraiva

2017). This shows that due to the upgrading of informal settlements and the extension of basic

services like sanitation, residential standards of living in the city have improved substantially. In

essence, while a shortage in formal housing persists, the difference in overall neighborhood

quality of life has narrowed significantly. Furthermore, recent analysis has suggested shifts in

residential settlement patterns that do not comport with general expectations and the historic

reality of core-peripheral spatial organization of wealthy and poor areas in the city. These studies

highlight growth in the increased heterogeneity of neighborhoods and overall slight decline in

class-based residential segregation in São Paulo (Marques 2015). There is now a more even

distribution of basic services and an increased fragmentation of the boundaries of poor and rich

neighborhoods (Marques 2014).

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Sequencing the regime

       The method of sequential process tracing across five periods makes it possible to explain

why the city’s governing regime of public goods has enabled this redistribution, as well as the

weaknesses in its institutional development to continue doing so. The links between periods in

the sequence show how one period is shaped by that which precedes it. The periods are divided

by the ruling party (or party coalition). This is because the ideological bent and organization of

the ruling party is a necessary, but not sufficient, mechanism for enabling embedded ties of the

local state in civil society. The findings are summarized in Figure 3 below.

       The first mayoral administration after the new Federal Constitution of 1988 was led by

Luiza Erundina of the PT. I call this period a “project regime” because local state institutions

were newly embedded in a social movement sphere that supported the introduction of

redistributive policies that were aimed at encouraging the continuing mobilization of housing

movements. This “project regime” made it possible to introduce new policy ideas for an

expanded redistributive role for the local state and deliver to the movements demanding housing

improvements. However, the minority position of the government in the city council and a

constrained fiscal environment produced low cohesion, prevented wider programmatic

outcomes, and made the regime’s policy commitments vulnerable to reaction.

       The second and third mayoral administrations were led by Paulo Maluf and Celso Pitta of

allied right-wing parties. I call this period a “rentier regime” because it represents a period in

which the traditional business elites of the “growth machine” were empowered. In contrast to a

“growth machine”, the “rentier regime” is not well coordinated and the market-oriented

outcomes more particularistic. For both a “growth machine” and a “captured regime”, public

goods are subject to extensive rationing. To wit: during this period, investments in housing were

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cut and evictions from informal settlements were frequent. A highly conflictual relationship

between social movements and municipal institutions ensured that this regime was neither

embedded nor cohesive.

       This period was followed by what I describe as a “coordination regime” which

encompassed the PT administration of Marta Suplicy and the center-right administrations of José

Serra and Gilberto Kassab. This period renewed the embeddedness of the local state in the social

movement sphere, while developing high degrees of cohesion to institutionalize and implement

the ideas that were rooted in these embedded ties. The “project” of the first PT administration

under Erundina was extended widely through the bureaucracy to achieve more programmatic

outcomes in public goods distribution. The fifth and six mayoral administrations of Serra and

Kassab were decisive for transferring key elements of the political settlement produced through

the coordination of “embedded cohesion” under Suplicy and the PT across party lines.

Continuity in the local state bureaucracy and cohesive political configurations across municipal,

state, and federal scales conveyed policy priorities and programs from the Suplicy

administration.

       The seventh and final mayoral administration under examination was led by Fernando

Haddad of the PT. I describe this as an “erosion regime”. Haddad’s approach minimized the

importance of housing movements, while highlighting a more technocratic approach to policy

formation. Weak embeddedness of the local state under a left wing party eroded the institutional

cohesion to implement these policy ideas that had characterized the prior periods of

“coordination” and “consolidation”.

                                  INSERT FIGURE 3 HERE

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The conceptual regime: Luiza Erundina, 1989-1992

       Three years after the end of his term, Paul Singer, the planning secretary under Luiza

Erundina, and a founder of the PT, reflected on the meaning of Erundina’s mayoral

administration: “This election represented a profound break with two traditions — populist and

technocratic-authoritarian — that had shaped the political history of the city.” (Singer 1995: 17)

The configuration of movements, developers, and political parties after the city’s first direct

mayoral elections in 1988 produced novel possibilities for the urban political economy in São

Paulo. The degrees of freedom that this alignment enabled are all the more notable given that it

was concurrent with a global tendency towards shrinking the state (Fourcade-Gourinchas and

Babb 2002) and integration of global markets (Rodrik 2000).

       The first generation of movements in the city emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, as rapid

urban industrialization and growth put significant pressure on housing availability. In particular,

the extreme eastern and southern parts of São Paulo were home to new land occupations and the

growth of informal settlements. By the early 1980s, many of the neighborhood associations that

had led these occupations were uniting under the common banner of the Federation of Housing

Movements, or UMM (Earle 2012). The UMM was influenced by Catholic liberation theology

priests in the peripheries of the city. These were the areas of the city with the most rapid growth

of in-migration and the neighborhoods most deprived of access to public goods. Veteran leaders

of the UMM reported to me that they first got involved in organizing around the issue of housing

through their Catholic church.

       The evolving and multi-vocal eco-system of housing movements has been instrumental in

forming the electoral base of all three PT mayoral administrations in São Paulo’s local state.

Governing programs for all PT electoral campaigns in the city have been debated with housing

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movements, and professionals affiliated with movements have occupied prominent positions in

all three elected administrations. This link would turn out to be decisive in embedding the

municipal state in civil society under the Erundina administration. This generation of movements

was involved in many of the self-build (mutirão) housing projects that would be the prime target

of support by Erundina’s government.

         Erundina’s PT administration was therefore well-placed to construct embedded ties

between the state and the sphere of housing movements. Erundina herself was a social worker in

the city’s eastern zone, and had longstanding connections with many of the neighborhood

movements of the area. A short woman with a thick rural accent, she was known across the

eastern zone as a “woman of the people”, and was elected as a city councilor representing the PT

during the partial democratic opening that began in 1982. Her ascension to the mayoral seat in

the 1988 election was only possible because of a first-past-the-post election, in which she won

29.8 percent of the vote. Her narrow electoral mandate notwithstanding, she promised to run the

city with an “inversion of priorities” in order to establish the “PT way of governing” (Singer

1995).

         Despite a constrained municipal fiscus in a time of national economic crisis, the Erundina

administration focused on redistributive programs for public goods. The administration made use

of national social welfare funds to seed housing and slum upgrading programs in peripheral areas

of the city. This included funding for the self-build housing programs demanded by housing

movements. By way of comparison, both Erundina and her right-wing successor, Paulo Maluf,

spent 3% of the total municipal budget on housing. In the same time period, the Erundina

administration funded the construction of 10,000 more houses than Maluf (Folha de São Paulo

1996).

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The Catholic church and housing movements were the primary backers of Erundina’s

candidacy within the multi-tendency PT (Couto 1995). In part, this was because of the

intellectual and political leadership of both liberation theology priests and a generation of

architects and urban planners that began working with communities in the favelas of São Paulo’s

periphery. These professionals formed groups offering technical assistance (asistências técnicas)

to neighborhood associations looking to improve their built environment.

       Many of these architects were also part of intellectual circles that were uniting around the

banner of “urban reform” as their main political input to the evolving PT agenda. These

progressive architects and planners first began working in asistências técnicas before the first PT

administration. Mario Covas, an appointed mayor of the MDB, then the only legal opposition

party, began funding slum-upgrading projects in the city’s periphery, during his administration

during the beginnings of democratic opening in Brazil from 1982 to 1985. These few projects

produced key modalities for slum upgrading and self-build housing that were scaled up under the

Erundina administration.

       One of the key researcher-practitioners of this era was Nabil Bonduki, who would

become the second highest official in Erundina’s housing department. His experience as a

practitioner and documenter of mutirão projects was instrumental in making this part of official

housing policy. Funding for mutirões was a priority demand of housing movements after

Erundina’s election. According to both housing movement leaders and officials in the

Department of Housing, Erminia Maricato, the department’s top official, was initially opposed to

mutirão projects due to concerns about quality control of the self-build process. It took

bureaucrats like Bonduki, who had extensive links to housing movements, to bring movement

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demands into the formal policy-making process. Maricato told me that Erundina insisted that

municipal staff open their doors to these movements.

       “In that period, social movements would occupy our offices, one week on, one
       week off. They always wanted to speak with us. My life wasn’t easy because they
       were placing constant demands on our office.”ii

       Many young planners and architects who had been working with housing movements got

their first taste of government bureaucracy in the Erundina years. Geraldo Juncaliii, who had just

qualified as an architect, described the “capillary” work of city government architects who were

based in peripheral neighborhoods of the city:

       “The difference, I think, was the capillary nature of policy. You had technical
       officials in different parts of the city who worked directly with the people, the
       people were their primary reference point, and they were always near a housing
       project. This was the embryo of what we called ‘local government.’”iv

These experiences created a corps of professionals focused on redistributive policy

implementation, many of whom would go on to work in subsequent municipal administrations.

       The Erundina administration’s focus was to re-orient services towards the urban

periphery that had been woefully underserved by prior administrative logics that saw the

peripheries exclusively as a cheap labor reserve for centrally-located business activity. Though it

faced a constrained municipal fiscus and a minority in the city council, it produced an actionable

vision of redistribution in the city that was embedded in the civil sphere of housing movements.

This was by no means a cohesive regime. Political attacks in the press and in the courts made

implementation difficult. Most dramatically, a court-imposed reduction in the increasingly

progressive property tax made it difficult to continue to fund expanded spending on public

goods. The PT’s chosen successor to Erundina was defeated by over 17% in the second round of

the 1992 mayoral election (Patarra 1996).

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I describe the first mayoral administration of the PT in São Paulo as a “project regime”

because its embeddedness in a civil sphere of housing movements established the guiding

priorities of programmatic distribution of public goods. This would continue to serve as a

benchmark for subsequent mayoral administration. However, its lack of institutional cohesion

made it difficult to achieve programmatic outcomes in practice and particularly vulnerable to

reaction.

The rentier regime: Paulo Maluf and Celso Pitta (1993-2000)

        If the Erundina administration lanced the boil of traditional urban political economy in

São Paulo, the years of Paulo Maluf (1993-1996, of the Popular Party) and his successor, Celso

Pitta (1997-2000, of the Brazilian Progressive Party), were the virulent effect. This period shows

how the opposed interests of housing movements and real estate developers realized their

potential for direct confrontation. Maluf was known for large public works projects that mostly

benefited well-established neighborhoods in the city, and for using these large projects to fund

narrow patronage networks. This was the basis for Maluf’s enduring nickname of “rouba mas

faz” (“he steals, but he gets things done”). Maluf was a strong representative of the old business

establishment, his formal political career having been forged during the military dictatorship.

        Pitta was much weaker. The first Afro-Brazilian mayor of the city, he was not as

personally connected to traditional brokers of power. His rise was prefigured by Maluf’s move to

become governor of the state of São Paulo, and he never established an independent political

base.

        To the extent that he was concerned with the distribution of public goods, Maluf focused

on using the municipal housing company, COHAB, to build high-rise dwellings that often hid

much larger favelas. These projects were called “Cingapuras”, named after the state-led housing

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projects in Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew. Under both Maluf and Pitta, new public housing on

the periphery was stopped outside of the “Cingapura” developments. These did little to actually

provide security of tenure and housing to the still largely informal populations of the city’s

periphery.

       While this period was an unequivocal disaster for housing movements, real estate

interests captured the governing ethos. This was a period that saw emergence of new business

nodes in the western part of the city. Beginning in the mid-1990s, new development zones in the

western part of the city were dedicated to these sectors. Favelas were evicted to make way for

high-rise buildings that would become home to the Latin American headquarters of many multi-

national firms (Fix 2007). Claudio Bernardes, a recent president of SECOVI, the organized

chamber of real estate developers in the city, described Maluf as a “fantastic” mayor for

developersv.

The coordination regime: Marta Suplicy (2001-2004), José Serra (2005-6) and Gilberto

Kassab (2007-2012)

       Erundina’s “project regime” represented a conjuncture in which priorities for local state

action were first reoriented. But this governing regime lacked cohesion and remained vulnerable

to reaction. The “coordination regime” of Marta Suplicy represented a moment that put these

distributional priorities on a more durable and programmatic path. It is also in this period that we

can see how the institutionalization of these priorities gained legitimacy beyond the working

class base of the PT. For example, SECOVI’s Bernardes ranked the Suplicy administration as

almost as positive for the real estate sector as the Maluf years.

       The Suplicy administration was, like Erundina’s, characterized by a mobilized social base

of housing movements and allied unions. Her electoral campaign aimed to return to a

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redistributionist political program. In contrast to Erundina, Suplicy’s political strategy was

reconciled to the traditional mode of favor-trading with other political parties ahead of the

election in order to secure a workable majority for passing legislation in the city council.

       A second generation of housing movements had emerged in the late 1990s as an

outgrowth of the UMM in São Paulo. Disinvestment of the city center in the 1990s had led to a

significant loss of population in these central areas. Run down but with public transportation and

commercial space, the area was attractive to new urban arrivals. Younger activists occupied

abandoned buildings in the city center and refurbished them. Their aggressive style grated on

older movement activists who had become accustomed to the boardroom jujitsu of negotiations

with local authorities for accessing land and housing. The new groups were eventually ejected

and formed the umbrella Front for the Housing Struggle (FLM). FLM-affiliated groups built

their own links to PT politicians in the Suplicy administration, and the city’s housing department

began a new program designed to attend to the concerns raised by FLM-affiliated groups in the

city center. This was sea change for a city that had previously considered only the peripheries as

a location for public housing intervention. FLM-affiliated groups later united with UMM groups

under the umbrella of the Popular Movements Front (CMP) (Earle 2012).

       In 2002, the PT won its first national election and Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva assumed

the presidency. The new Ministry of Cities was initially staffed by figures from São Paulo

housing activist circles, including officials from the Erundina administration. The creation of this

ministry made it possible to reinforce the Suplicy administration’s priorities through federal

injection of funds for housing, sanitation and transportation, the three focus areas of the ministry.

       In São Paulo’s democratic era, master plans have only been passed under PT

administrations. The passage of master plans under the latter two PT administrations have been

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key moments for two reasons: First, these are moments that have made it possible to reconnect

housing movements to their political allies within the PT. Second, these are moments when

housing movements and the private real estate sector, while at odds, generate a common

language of policy debate. These master plans have used concepts in the federal constitution of

1988 and the City Statute, especially concerning the “social function” of property, to designate

areas as Zones of Special Social Interest (ZEIS) and to regularize areas without individual title.

This has made it possible to use the zoning code to take well-located land off of the market for

social housing provision and to enable slum upgrading in areas where it would otherwise be

legally impossible (Fernandes 2007).

       São Paulo’s master plan of 2002 was the first to come after the passage of the federal

City Statute in 2001, which empowered municipalities to pass master plans. The City Statute was

the product of two decades of activism by the Urban Reform Movement, which drew mainly on

urban professionals and activists from sectors such as architecture, engineering, and planning.

Many of the innovations of the master plan were debated by these PT-aligned professionals and

housing movements. The municipal housing council and public meetings about the master plan

convened both housing movements and real estate sector representatives. Concepts like ZEIS

were a response to housing movement occupations. The master plan drew on constitutional

provisions that allowed for the municipality to pursue non-market expropriation of vacant

buildings, as well as for the state water company, SABESP, to install water and sewer

connections on land without formal title.

       Participatory councils in Brazil — especially for budgeting — have mostly been

evaluated on two metrics: their direct effect on distributive outcomes and their effect on the

strength of associational life in civil society (Baiocchi, Heller and Silva 2011). In São Paulo,

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participatory councils have not had direct power over distributive outcomes. But they have made

it possible for otherwise opposed interests to mediate conflicts in a formal arena that is

empowered to translate such mediation into policy change.

       Whereas informants in housing movements emphasized their interest in upholding the

“social function of property” in participatory councils, private sector informants consistently

emphasized the sanctity of rights to private property. SECOVI has had the same point person

representing the chamber in public councils and master planning processes since the Erundina

administration, who described the deliberative dynamic:

       When you enter into the game of the master plan, you have to enter — and I’m
       speaking as a representative of a stakeholder, or as a leader of a housing
       movement — we can’t enter this game thinking that we’re going to get everything
       that we want. The master plan, for it to be good for our city, it should mediate and
       perceive what is relevant from society’s point of view, what is the public
       interest.vi

This perspective underscores how institutional processes, especially under the Suplicy

administration began to create a mechanism for ensuring that the real estate sector shaped its

strategies to account for the distributional demands of housing movements. For example, leaders

of the FLM described the master planning deliberations in 2002 as a moment where the

movement learned to negotiate effectively to codify its demands, especially around the

expropriation of vacant buildings, into lawvii.

       Suplicy’s failed re-election campaign at the end of 2003 had the paradoxical effect of

ushering in a moment in which “embedded cohesion” crossed the rubicon of party lines.

Redistributionist claims in the realm of public goods governance in São Paulo moved from a

single party affiliation to trans-partisan administration. Significant injections of support for

redistributionist public goods policies were now available at the federal level, which was

controlled by the PT. The National Sanitation Law of 2007 enabled the municipality to take a

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more hands on approach to extending sanitation networks to favelas and to capture a portion of

revenues from SABESP for this purpose. This had the double effect of making the city an

administrator of SABESP and making SABESP more focused on municipal priorities, especially

upgrading of basic infrastructure in informal areas.

       However, just because money is available does not mean it will be spent. Influential

bureaucrats took up the “urbanist” perspective forged between SECOVI interlocutors and

housing movements in institutional spaces like the municipal housing council. This was a period

of significant continuity of staff across PT and center-right administrations, according recent

network analysis of bureaucratic appointments (Marques 2017). Key departments where we see

this continuity are in planning and transportation.

       Though there was changeover in mid and high-level staff in the housing department, the

redistributive attitude of the department was entrenched. I spoke with three senior bureaucrats

who have had continuous tenures dating back to the Erundina administration. Ricardo Pereira,

housing secretary under Kassab, was previously in the leadership of SECOVI: “Look, in the

private sector you are a capitalist. But when you enter the public sector you become a

communist.”viii

       Other key bureaucrats who entered the municipal housing department during the Serra

and Kassab administration emphasized their focus on redistributive spending on housing and

slum upgrading. Senior officials in the housing department compared their work in slum

upgrading favorably to that of the PT, citing work in favelas in the far south of the cityix.

       While increased administrative cohesion explains this period’s consolidation of the

redistributive regime, this introduced new forms of instability to the durability of state

embeddedness. While housing movements continued to engage and make demands on the local

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state, their attention moved to national programs. This was especially so after the introduction of

new urban infrastructure grants in 2007 and a federal housing subsidy in 2009. The focus on new

national programs reduced the intensity of opposition by movements to the center-right local

administration.

The erosion regime: Fernando Haddad (2013-2016)

       The administration of Fernando Haddad, an academic from the University of São Paulo

who had served as a minister in Lula’s governments, was hailed as a period of significant

innovation in new progressive urbanism. However, this was a period when we begin to see the

sources of fragility of sequential dynamics in “embedded cohesion”. The prior period of

“consolidation” contributed to a growing consensus that redistributive policy did not require

embedded social foundations.

       The campaign and subsequent administration was marked by the São Paulo PT’s

increasing distance from housing movements. Haddad chose to include as a coalition partner

Maluf’s PP, with an agreement to grant the PP the housing portfolio. This deviated from

expectations set during the only other municipal coalition government led by the PT in São Paulo

under Suplicy. Her housing secretary was Paulo Teixeira, who had been a PT student activist and

human rights lawyer with links to housing movements in the eastern periphery of the city, where

he grew up. Haddad’s coalition maneuvers led Erundina, then a member of the PSB (Brazilian

Socialist Party), to end her support for the ticket, and angered the housing movements that

comprise a significant part of the traditional PT mobilizing base in the city.

       The Haddad administration’s lack of embeddedness can be explained in two ways, which

need not be seen as exclusive. First, earlier generations of housing movements — the PT’s

partner for realizing an embedded regime — had become highly bureaucratized: focused on

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accessing subsidies from the federal housing subsidy program, and unable to mobilize the mass

support that they had commanded in earlier years. A third generation of movements united under

the banner of the Homeless Worker’s Movement (MTST) in the mid-2000s. MTST distinguished

itself by shunning engagements with formal participatory institutional structures, such as the

municipal housing council. MTST occupations in the São Paulo metropolitan region began in the

mid-2000s, though rarely within the boundaries of the municipality of São Paulo. Occupations

tend to be quite large, often topping 1,000 families.x The movement’s notoriety amongst elite

paulistanos is such that they were the only movement described as a true antagonist by private

property developers whom I interviewed.

       Second, the Haddad administration was increasingly at odds with both state and federal

government, thereby reducing the cohesiveness of the regime. The conflict with federal

government is surprising, given that both federal and municipal government were ruled by the

same political party. In a reflection on his time in office, published in a popular monthly

magazine in May 2017, Haddad opened by criticizing the Rousseff government’s unwillingness

to prioritize federal investment in São Paulo (Haddad 2017). Interviewed shortly after this

article’s publication, Haddad told me that all of his regular contact with the national PT was with

Lula and that he almost never spoke with Dilmaxi.

       Despite these weaknesses, the Haddad administration was still able to draw on the path-

dependence of prior configurations of “embeddedness” and “cohesion” regime. After the 2002

master plan, the subsequent center-right administrations of Serra and Kassab (2006-2012)

pursued a planning vision that was often aligned to the interests of developers especially through

the new zoning tool of “urban operations” (Alvim et al 2011). Even so, these administrations

faced binding constraints for land use enumerated in the 2002 master plan.

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Haddad tried to present himself as an urbanist modernizer, who could demonstrate a new

21st century “PT way of governing,” just as Erundina had done in 1989. He told me that he aimed

to establish a new “socio-environmental” political coalition. In June 2013, six months after

Haddad took office, protests erupted against a proposed hike in public transport fares. The

protests morphed into more generalized protests against corruption, and took on an increasingly

middle-class tinge that criticized the entire political class (Alonso and Mische 2016; Purdy

2017). This groundswell produced energy on the right to call for the impeachment of Lula’s

successor, Dilma Rousseff, which was achieved in 2016 shortly before Haddad’s failed re-

election campaign.

       The political thread running through both of São Paulo’s master plans was city councilor

Nabil Bonduki, the former superintendent of social housing under Erundina, and the rapporteur

in the city council for the passage of the master plan in both 2002 and 2014. His role highlights

the importance of actors who move between the administrative and political spheres for building

three types of embedded ties: between movements and bureaucrats, between movements and

politicians, and between bureaucrats and politicians. Bonduki’s experience in self-build housing

has made him an important ally for housing movements.

       When he moved from the bureaucratic sphere to the political sphere, Bonduki served as a

main link for movements to articulate and defend their agenda amidst the inevitable wheeling

and dealing of bringing the master plan to a vote. This link was particularly notable in the lead-

up to the passage of the 2014 master plan. PT-aligned housing movements were still smarting

from what they viewed as a foundational betrayal by Haddad: his ceding of the housing portfolio

to the right-wing PP.

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