Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Governance of Mega-Cities

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

Local governments of cities distribute public goods in theory to improve the well-being of their residents. This project compares the trajectories of two mega-cities that in began in the 1980s and early 1990s from roughly equivalent situations, including a relatively high level of local governance and commitment to delivery of urban public goods such as housing, sanitation, and public transportation. Yet despite similar goals and strategies, while state interventions have reduced urban inequalities in one of these cities, they have reproduced these inequalities in the other one. This project promises to generate new insights into the relationship between states, democracy, and urban inequalities. Findings will be useful for urban policymaking in the midst of social change. They will inform understanding of how cities can coordinate politics and institutional change to deliver public goods. This project will use multiple methods to compare public goods provision in São Paulo, Brazil and Johannesburg, South Africa. The methods are: a) field-based participant observation and interviews with key public and private actors; b) archival research of legislation, newspapers, trade publications, and internal government and NGO documents; and c) spatial analysis of 25 years of quantitative data on housing, sanitation and transportation. The research design and comparative-historical methods of analysis make it possible to disaggregate changes in interactions between social coalitions and state institutions over time, and to specify the mechanisms of these changes. The theoretical basis for this work draws on two literatures in sociology: urban sociology, which focuses on the neighborhood or city scale, and the sociology of development, which focuses on the national scale. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.