Slum Upgrading beyond incubation: exploring the dilemmas of nation-wide large scale policy interventions in Brazil´s growth acceleration programme (PAC)

Abstract

Slum upgrading policies and practices have continued to interest both scholars and practitioners. The 2007 launch of the Brazilian Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) has added a new dimension to the debate. The latter represented an ambitious program of interventions, regulation and finance that articulated states and municipalities at national level around the development of local slum upgrading programmes, with a scope and scale that had never been achieved before in the country. Our main objective here is not to review the relative extensive and growing literature on slum upgrading in the Global South. Nevertheless, a few observations are in place to both situate our empirical analysis regarding the impact of PAC within the broader discussions on slum upgrading, as well as to argue how this paper contributes to the existing work in the field. A first strand of research has emphasised the evolution of national slum upgrading policies, often illustrated with the analysis of specific upgrading experiences in emblematic cities to reinforce the overall argument. This historical approach has stressed how initial slum clearance and removal has given place to ‘non-conventional’ strategies such as incremental housing, aided self-help, sites and services and the rolling out of upgrading programs. A number of authors have also claimed the more recent hollowing out of these ‘alternative’ approaches and the comeback of ‘conventional’ housing strategies through the provision of social market housing, or the emergence of urban entrepreneurialism through large urban redevelopment projects (Wakely 2015; Lindert, 2015; Dupont et al. 2016). This strand of work frequently combines broader historical research on tendencies of donors and national governments with paradigmatic upgrading experiences in specific flagship cities (Imparato and Ruster 2003; Burra 2005; Magalhâes 2016). Dupont et al. (2016), for example, analyse Rio de Janeiro, Delhi, Chennai, Durban, Cape Town and Lima in order to flesh out the mismatches between the design and implementation of upgrading and its subsequent undermining through urban neoliberalisation in Brazil, India, South Africa and Peru. Likewise, Ren (2017) combines detailed case studies in Rio, Bombay and Ghuangzhou in order to analyse how the inherent tensions between entrepreneurial urban governance and slum upgrading strategies are being played out in these countries. Along the same lines, Werlin (1999) provides an extensive overview of large-scale upgrading experiences in Calcutta, Jakarta and Manilla and argues that the ‘minimal state’ approach that was implicitly advocated by John Turner is unlikely to succeed in up-scaling policies in these countries (and the Global South as such) if issues such as land tenure, the finance-cost-recovery nexus and participation in the design, implementation and maintenance of projects are not taken into consideration. A second strand in the upgrading literature is focussed on detailed, sometimes comparative case studies on the limits and potentials of slum upgrading