São Paulo shows the way to civilise a megacity

Jimmy Avila remembers weaving his way around open sewers as he made his way to school in Diadema, a town of some 400,000 people on the southern edge of São Paulo. Back in the early 1990s, Mr Avila’s rough concrete and brick home on Avenida das Nações faced rows of more ramshackle houses made from wood and corrugated iron. Dealers sold crack on street corners.

“People here had no expectations and there were really big frustrations. Most of the kids here had seen someone die and it was really difficult place for the police to enter,” says Mr Avila, 25, who works as a researcher and studies economics.

A decade or so on, Diadema has been transformed. The local administration – run by Brazil’s governing centre-left Workers’ Party (PT) for more than two decades – has asphalted roads, put up street lighting and established more than a dozen libraries and cultural centres. Backed by non-governmental organisations and local businesses, the local police force has clamped down on the drugs trade. Homicide levels – among the highest in Brazil at the end of the 1990s – have been nearly halved in seven years.

The area is still poor but on Diadema’s main streets there are brightly painted cheap restaurants, beauty parlours and stalls selling fruit juice. Children play football and swim in a well-equipped sports facility financed by local employers. From a central bus station, modern coaches ferry residents to São Paulo’s underground railway network, reaching the centre of the city in a little over an hour.

Diadema’s transformation from dangerous slum to stable working-class neighbourhood is part of a broader change in Latin American cities. The scale of urban poverty is still vast. So is the extent of urban violence, highlighted by recent attacks on policemen in São Paulo (although this has more to do with defects in Brazil’s criminal justice system than with the way cities are organised).

But in cities across the region, more effective local government, community and private-sector involvement, economic stability and a decline in rural migration are contributing to an improvement in urban conditions. While flawed in many ways, the Latin American experience holds lessons for Asian and African countries at an earlier stage in the process of urbanisation and suggests that, given the right policy response, many of its problems are ultimately superable.

All this is a far cry from the region’s position in the 1960s to 1980s, when the sheer scale and speed of urban expansion overwhelmed the ability of the public sector or business to provide houses, jobs or infrastructure. Rural migration and social and demographic shifts, including the break-up of extended families, converted what were mainly agricultural economies into one of the world’s most urbanised regions.

Three out of four Latin Americans live in cities that include four (Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and São Paulo) of the world’s 15 largest. Since 1870 São Paulo, the biggest city in South America, has doubled in size on average every 14 years, a more rapid rate of expansion than any other city in history, according to Norman Gall, director of Instituto Braudel, a local economic think-tank.

Initial responses complicated matters. In Rio, the authorities moved physically to wipe out favelas (slums) that had grown up on the hills separating middle-class neighbourhoods. Slum-dwellers were despatched to poorly planned estates such as the “City of God” – made famous in an award-winning film of that name – miles away from services, jobs and entertainment.

São Paulo authorities relocated slum-dwellers to high-rise apartments only to find that they quickly abandoned their new homes, unable to pay bills or tempted by the cash from sale or sub-letting. “These have been extremely costly failures,” says Eduardo Rojas, an urban development specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington.

Gradually, however, policymakers have changed tack. Rather than wipe slums from the map, the authorities looked to civilise them and integrate them into the urban fabric. Roads have been asphalted, water pipes and electricity lines extended into squatted settlements. Further measures ranging from the provision of street names and house numbers to the granting of legal titles to properties have been a feature of this approach, as have moves to introduce schools, clinics and regular policing.

“It is important to establish the presence of the state,” says Jorge Wilheim, a prominent Brazilian architect and planner. “People have to believe that the government exists.”

One of the most ambitious efforts has taken place in Rio, where the local authority (backed by funding from the IADB) has since 1995 sought to integrate more than 60 favelas into the city’s fabric through upgrading infrastructure and improving services.

Economic stability has helped. Since the mid-1990s most governments across the region have managed public finances more effectively, with resultant falls in inflation. Brazilian interest rates are still high but in Chile and Mexico rates have fallen to such levels that it has been possible to develop a mortgage market.

That, combined with new building techniques that make use of prefabricated materials, has brought cheap mortgages within the range of the urban poor. Meanwhile, business is waking up to the what C.K. Prahalad, the Indian academic, describes as “the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” – the opportunities that lie in providing services for the vast numbers of people confined to the informal economy.

Progress, however, continues to be slow and uneven. One problem – highlighted by the IADB in a recent report – is governance. Latin America, with its strong traditions of centralised authoritarian government, has embraced the idea of elected local government only within the last 20 years or so.

Local government tends to be poorly resourced: while 35 per cent of public spending is directed through local government structures in Europe or the US, the figure is only about 20 per cent in Latin America. More importantly, urban growth has been so rapid that it has often rendered irrelevant many administrative divisions.

Latin America’s penchant for bureaucracy has made matters worse. Mr Rojas at the IADB says that more effective and properly resourced local government will be an essential ingredient in tackling the region’s housing problems. He compares cities such as São Paulo and Rio to fast-growing teenagers. “Their brain – or governance – is not just able to cope with the speed of fast-growing limbs.”

In São Paulo, for example, an administrative maze blurs lines of responsibility. The city is divided into 96 districts grouped into 28 regional administrations, but these overlap with countless other planning units created by federal, state and municipal agencies. One reason for Diadema’s success is that its municipal status has set it apart from the city proper, says Mr Gall.

There is no guarantee that planners and politicians will not repeat mistakes, as the residents of São Paulo’s Favela do Gato (“cat slum”) found out recently. Shortly before local elections in 2004, the city government razed the dense warren of wood and corrugated iron shacks and moved some 500 families to new purpose-built apartments.

Two years on, promised community developments have failed to materialise. More than one-quarter of residents have sold their homes to better-off outsiders. And last month, after several warnings about non-payment, the electricity company cut off power to 200 families. Sitting outside an abandoned security post at the entrance to a block, Sassá, a grizzled former building worker who heads the residents’ association, is drowning his sorrows with a plastic cup of cheap cachaça (sugar cane alcohol). “We have been abandoned. I am really disappointed,” he says.

But there are powerful counter-examples. A widespread sense that conditions for the urban poor are improving is expected to hand President Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva – himself a product of Brazil’s epic shift from the rural north to the industrial cities of the south – victory in elections on October 1. And, in Diadema at least, it feels like São Paulo is turning a corner.

A move to take buses out of the slow lane

Being stuck in a crowded, decrepit bus as it chugs along one of Latin America’s endless urban motorways can make the case for underground trains, light rail or tramways seem pretty persuasive. How else to transport millions of poor city-dwellers from homes in the peripheral suburbs to their jobs and improve some of the world’s longest, most uncomfortable and dispiriting journeys to work?

Yet there is increasing evidence that buses rather than trains could be the answer, as long as they are allowed to travel along specially designated lanes free of other traffic. Such systems known by policymakers as “bus rapid transit” have been deployed with increasing success in a number of Latin American cities. Supporters claim they are cheaper and just as effective in reducing air pollution.

Curitiba in southern Brazil, Quito, the capital of Ecuador, and Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, have all introduced schemes. Both Mexico City and São Paulo have put more limited schemes into effect. Later this year Santiago, Chile’s capital city and, until recently, one of the region’s most polluted, plans to follow suit.

The schemes involve establishing a traffic-free lane – sometimes physically separated from other road areas – along axial highways. Colombia’s Transmillenio, one of the most ambitious schemes, runs from the wealthy north to the poor south of the city, with feeder routes carrying passengers from outlying suburbs to stations. Electronic tickets bought in advance minimise boarding times.

The arrangements entail start-up and maintenance costs. But specialists say these are much lower than they would be for urban railways. Joe Ryan, who works for the Hewlett Foundation in San Francisco, says BRT schemes typically cost as little as $5m a kilometre to establish, only a twentieth of the cost of urban railways. For budget-strapped Latin American cities that can be compelling.

At least one urban railway – in Lima, Peru – has been abandoned and several projects in the region have virtually ground to a halt because of financial difficulties. Deadlines on a project begun in the late 1990s in Salvador in Brazil’s north-east have been repeatedly missed and the project is still far from completion. “BRT is the easiest thing to do when the budget is tight,” says Mr Ryan.

The schemes also bring environmental advantages. Mr Ryan says that because buses move faster in the special lanes – average speeds in Mexico City’s north-south bus lanes have increased from 12mph to 25mph – they tend to spew out fewer pollutants.

Backers have faced opposition from middle-class car-owners worried that their mobility would be reduced by such projects. But the success of existing schemes is creating political momentum. “We used to think it was too difficult to introduce these systems in developing countries. Bogotá has proved that assumption wrong,” says Mr Ryan.