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Building the Globalizing City With or Without Slums?—Exploring the Contrast Between City Models in São Paulo and Beijing

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Spatial Mobility of Migrant Workers in Beijing, China

Abstract

This chapter is the international comparison between Beijing (a representative of one of China’s primary cities intending to clear up slums) and São Paulo (a typical Latin American primary city in an electoral democracy) in terms of slum landscapes and policies. The former is an example of one of China’s slum-free planned cities; the latter is representative of the Brazilian style with a spectacular spatial concentration of urban poverty in the primary cities. The study evidences some similarities in the inadequate supply of public housing, such as a shortfall in budget to fund public services and inequitable access to welfare among developing countries that experience a high speed of urbanization and city growth. The chapter identifies the features of both China’s land-based public financing and hukou-based public spending systems, within which the land reinvestment and leasing fees serve as a major source of municipal revenue. The function of city and property as a wealth generator explains the contrasting outcomes of space production and city life in Brazil and China.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s in São Paulo saw a rapid growth of shantytowns in the urban periphery, namely favelas, and inner-city slum tenements, known as cortiços. The favela became the dominating São Paulo slum type at the beginning of the 1980s, when it began to spread all over the city. The favela is, in general, a squatter settlement type of accommodation representing an illegal market—an owner-occupied structure located on the squatted or invaded lands and without security of tenure—while the cortiço is, generally, inner-city, dilapidated rental accommodation that is a legal market. Unlike the cortiço dweller, who is subject to the laws of the market, to rent and pay for services, favela dwellers are seen as having ‘an easy life’, not paying for anything. Favela is built with inadequate materials (old wood, tin, cans and even cardboard, etc.) distributed irregularly in lots, almost always lacking urban and social services and equipment (see United Nations Human Settlements Programme 2003: 226).

  2. 2.

    But the public investment and spending remain a quite small portion of the whole fiscal cake, as about 63 % of Brazil’s tax receipts are in the hands of the federal government, 14 % for the municipal administrations and 23 % for the state governments which are also responsible for education, health and policing (Iain 2004).

  3. 3.

    One such case was the ‘scissor’s gap’ policy, in use before the pro-market reforms, which had artificially kept down the purchasing prices for farm products in order to allow cities and industry to develop, using cheap goods as inputs (see Zhou 1997: 24).

  4. 4.

    Zhaijidi is the rural housing land that is owned collectively by the village and allocated to its members. The allocation of Zhaijidi is determined administratively by need, is free of charge, and is inherited in most cases (see Wang and Murie 1999). Self-help within the family is the main means of constructing citizens’ housing. The State Council, since 1982, has issued the Village Housing Development and Land Use Management Ordinance plans in order to stipulate rural housing land-use standards for different provinces/regions.

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  1. College of Resource Environment and Tourism, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China

    Ran Liu

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Liu, R. (2015). Building the Globalizing City With or Without Slums?—Exploring the Contrast Between City Models in São Paulo and Beijing. In: Spatial Mobility of Migrant Workers in Beijing, China. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14738-3_7

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