New Books: Urban Power
Featuring Ben Bradlow, author of Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg published in 2024 by Princeton University Press. Urban Power examines how social inequalities are created and addressed through the urban built environment by comparing the case studies of São Paulo and Johannesburg.
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Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow. Princeton University Press, 2024.
Guest
Ben Bradlow, Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, Princeton University
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Ben Bradlow
But what I think that rapidly urbanizing context in the global South really help us to do is to shine a spotlight on questions on distribution in the urban built environment and to what degree excluded informal parts of cities, territories of cities get included in the formal infrastructures of cities, and so in in shining a light on that question, I'm then able to move outwards and show actually questions about the urban built environment and inclusion in the infrastructures of the urban built environment are in many ways not only a global South question, but actually quite central to politics in global North cities as well. And we can rethink those cities through frameworks generated from a southern comparison.
Emily
Hi, this is Emily Holloway, and you’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by the journal Urban Affairs Review. You just heard from Dr. Ben Bradlow, the author of Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in Sao Paolo and Johannesburg from Princeton University Press.
Ben Bradlow
My name is Ben Bradlow. I'm an assistant professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University. I work on issues related to climate change, urbanization, technological change, and democracy around the world. My research has primarily been in Brazil and South Africa, and I think a lot about the role of the global South in world politics and global sociology.
Emily
Thanks so much for joining us today, Ben. So your book, Urban Power, explores the management of social inequalities in two megacities of the Global south, Johannesburg and Sao Paolo, through the governance of urban infrastructure in the built environment. What made you decide to compare these two cities?
Ben Bradlow
So my family is in South Africa. I grew up in the US and my parents are from Johannesburg and moved back there about 20 years ago. And I've been going back to South Africa all of my life, and in 2009 I moved there to start working as an entry level journalist in the middle of a presidential election campaign, and I proposed a story to my editors at one of the daily newspapers in Johannesburg to follow around the different political parties as they were campaigning on the ground as part of that election. And the three parties that I followed along with took me to different working-class urban neighborhoods, some in informal settlements, some in more formal neighborhoods, and this kind of exposed me to the nature of politics in the kinds of places where most people in a city like Johannesburg live.
And I eventually started working for an organization that supports social movements in informal settlements across a number of countries in Africa, South Asia and Latin America. And so when I eventually started my PhD, I wanted to compare Johannesburg with somewhere to try to understand the city that I've been working in for a long time that I had a strong family connection to and I realized that there's quite substantial literature comparing Brazil and South Africa. There is not a book that's done this exact comparison at the urban scale before, and I realize there are a lot of similarities both in the transitions to democracy in both countries, the nature of inequality in these two large cities at the moment of transition to democracy and I was struck by the fact that there were actually very different trajectories in terms of reducing inequalities, particularly in the built environment in these cities after democratization. And so it was that divergence, that puzzle, as it were, that motivated me, that this could be a good project to pursue with the idea of eventually writing a book about it.
Emily
Your book is primarily concerned with understanding and analyzing the specific conditions and contexts under which different forms of social mobilization actually translate into concrete state actions to address unequal distributions in these megacities. And you use two key terms to probe at this issue of what you call “urban power”: embeddedness and cohesion. Can you unpack this framework for our listeners a bit? How does the urban built environment factor in here?
Ben Bradlow
So in the in the book, there are three main empirical chapters which look at three policy arenas, which are housing, sanitation, and collective transportation, and the argument that I developed out of the examination of these three policy areas is that it's a configuration of two factors that explain why some cities are more effective than others in reducing inequalities in the built environment. The first is what I call embeddedness, which is the embeddedness of a local state in a sphere of civil society, and in particular I focus on the sphere of housing movements in civil society, and the second is what I call cohesion, which characterizes the internal coordinating capacity of the local state and there are kind of there are two dimensions of cohesion that we can think of. The first is a horizontal dimension, which is the capacity to coordinate across line agencies within local government, because often for intervening in the built environment in areas like housing, sanitation, and transportation, you need to coordinate across multiple agencies and also a vertical dimension of cohesion and coordinating across local, state or provincial, national or federal government, and so that those two factors taken together, I develop a typology of different kinds of regimes, or intervening in the urban built environment based on variation in configuration of embeddedness and cohesion.
Emily
And what’s the genealogy of this framework? Where does your book make interventions in these debates in urban sociology, international development, political sociology?
Ben Bradlow
A lot of this terminology of embeddedness and cohesion comes very explicitly inspired by work on national developmental states, most notably the book by Peter Evans on embedded autonomy which compares Korea, India, Brazil and what was then called Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo to understand why some developmental states are more effective at unlocking economic growth in mid to late 20th century and so in a way what I'm doing is taking a lot of the ideas that Evans developed focused on a national economy with really focused on a single ministry and national governments and bringing it down to an urban scale where the nature of social actors is much more diffuse. Basically, he's focusing on the role of business elites and the way that they interact with a single bureaucratic agency in national developmental states. But the social sphere is much more fragmented and diffuse at the urban scale.
And perhaps even more so, the state apparatus at the local level is much more fragmented and diffuse than the single agency that Evans was looking at the national level. And so what I do is I adapt these terms to an urban context that requires a kind of reformulation and retheorization of how these ideas might be applied and then taken together, I suggest that the terminology of urban power can help us to understand what these coordinating dynamics taken together mean for attempts to actually intervene in distributional questions in in the built environment.
And so what I'm suggesting is that urban power is this internal local state capacity and this capacity to navigate local, state and society interactions in order to generate the power to intervene in the built environment, which is actually quite complex and difficult thing for municipal states all around the world and in particularly in the in rapidly urbanizing context in the global South.
Emily
The built environment captures a lot of different things, empirically – housing, green space, industrial facilities, but also some of the less visible, or maybe just taken for granted categories like infrastructure, which is where you focus your analysis in these cities. And you classify these as public goods: housing, sanitation, and transportation. And all of the physical units that compose these infrastructures have complex social and political networks underpinning them, but these infrastructures also produce and reproduce these networks. Did you ever consider other categories or types of public goods in this study?
Ben Bradlow
Well, when I started the project, I thought I would focus on income and labor. And I realized that the municipal scale would not be a very useful scale in which to analyze that question because so much of what shapes labor and income policy is happening at larger scales of government: this is about macroeconomic context.
A lot of it is how national policies filter down to the local level. We certainly see various kinds of local economic strategies, but whether these succeed or fail are very often determined by actions taken at more aggregated scales of government.
And so I decided that wouldn't be a very fruitful approach if I wanted to look at the municipal scale. But the other thing that that has often come up in discussions and lectures about this book is education policy and security policy/policing.
And the big difference between the kinds of policy areas that I look at in housing, sanitation and transportation in these areas like education and policing is that in education and policing, there's always a physical infrastructure component to it, like a school or a police station or something. But where those are located does make quite a difference. But so much of what matters for those policy arenas is about the management of the teacher or the management of the police officer. It’s about a human infrastructure first and foremost, whereas the output, there's always a human. I mean, I'm a sociologist, so the human infrastructure is always going to matter, no matter what policy area we're talking about. But the there's a physical output in the built environment that makes it that is a particular kind of tractability to analyze, but it also means it's a distinct kind of function for state action compared to the kinds of outputs that we would associate with education and policing where you would. It's about like test scores or educational achievement measured in other ways or reductions in crime and things like that, so the output is a social output. It's not a physical output.
Emily
I’m a geographer, so I’m obligated to ask this question. But I’m wondering if you can talk a bit about the significance of geography, of place and territory, to this investigation. I think it’s still quite common in some social science fields to sort of take geography for granted, to treat place as a kind of receptacle for the various social activities and conflicts that are simply staged like it’s in a vacuum. And I think your book is very attentive to geography, particularly when thinking about political questions like territory.
Ben Bradlow
One thing that I discuss quite a bit is efforts in Sao Paulo to upgrade informal settlements that are located next to a water reserve called Quadra Piranga.
And this is an area that the state level sanitation company was very loath to service because it was very flood prone. And basically, there was a huge desire to move everybody who lived in those informal settlements away from that area entirely. But one of the key achievements of the Sao Paulo city government actually, this was under a center right government that followed a center left government, was to use a provision of the city's master plan that calls for what are called zones of special social interest, which allows the municipality to upgrade informal settlements without finalizing individual land title for every home. The city was able to use that law to enable the state level sanitation company to extend sewers and sanitation services to this area that was particularly difficult as an engineering question due to its proximity to this water reserve, so in that sense as from an analytical perspective, when you see a city able to overcome a challenge of geography like that, that to me suggests that quite a great deal of capacity has been developed internally within the local state. So in that sense, thinking about the geography or even the physical topography is a way to help understand what is actually significant about these efforts to extend services like sanitation.
Emily
I’d really like to learn more about your fieldwork. You spent well over a year in these two cities to conduct hundreds of interviews with mid- and high-level government officials along with your archival research to reconstruct the history of the recent past and basically trace the emergence and development of these institutional structures, practices, and relationships. And what emerges is this really complex and rich map of the municipal bureaucracy’s role in housing, transportation, and sanitation. What was that experience like, speaking with so many different government officials?
Ben Bradlow
I did a lot of interviews in municipal offices and I spent, I feel like I spent so much time in municipal offices, in both Sao Paulo and Johannesburg, that there was something very disorienting to me about how so much of what's happening in these drab old buildings is playing out in physical territory. It's almost if you've ever watched the show, the TV show Severance, it's like you enter the building and you're cut off from the rest of the world and then suddenly, all the consequences reverberate outward, and in a way, what I see this book trying to do is to make sense of that disorientation, that is, how is it that when you that sense of being cut off when you enter the building, how is it that that ends up having such large consequences on these immense cities with millions, even tens of millions of people?
And so that that's kind of like that's the sense of awe or wonder that really motivated me during a lot of the research just trying to keep, you know when I really needed to keep going in the research, I was like, how can I square that visceral circle that doesn't quite make sense to me?
Emily
Right – and I think what’s also interesting to think about here is that, rather than studying these structures from the street – what political scientists and political sociologists might call “street-level bureaucracy,” those actors who are directly interfacing with the public to administer policy, like beat cops, social workers, even teachers. But you’re speaking with those officials and actors in these remote, as you put it, “Severance-like” offices at a remove from the everyday.
Ben Bradlow
I talked to a lot of municipal officials, with municipal politicians. A lot of social movements leaders. With private bus operators, sanitation company officials. Real estate developers.
So this was a kind of relational approach to qualitative research that is focusing on the relationships between these different spheres of the state, civil society and market and in in terms of the public sector, I was not talking to that many street-level bureaucrats and in part because that's not where the policy questions were really playing out and I was curious about what is driving policy change. But then when I was talking to a lot of mid-level bureaucrats and then higher level bureaucrats and actually it's this mid-level that in a way I think is kind of like undervalued in the literature where it's either a focus on elite policy or the street level and it's this mid-level where a lot of this stuff gets translated. How does a piece of legislation end up being put into actionable bureaucratic directives?
The other thing that I found, and this was particularly important in the case of Sao Paulo, which is the more positive case for this study, is that a lot of the people who ended up in these higher positions had long experience as street-level bureaucrats and that was actually where they first encountered social movements. So that was the way that movement-state interactions got deep into the state, was through these people who had these experiences as street level bureaucrats. So in part, the question of the street level was thematized through this relational, qualitative approach rather than kind of initially targeting the street level from the outset.
Emily
What do you think we can learn from cities in the Global South? Not just urban sociologists or even political scientists, but academics coming from other disciplines in fields, even practitioners? Do these policies and strategies travel?
Ben Bradlow
So that's a question that I explore quite explicitly in the conclusion of the book, and I try to illustrate what might be some cases outside of Sao Paulo and Johannesburg, that this approach could be helpful to understand, so the kinds of cases that I look at span Global South and Global North contexts. I think this framework allows us to see similarities, for example, between a number of Indian cities and Flint, MI and the way that these both are can be seen as examples of low embeddedness and low cohesion, where you have distinctly poor outcomes in distributional questions in the built environment, particularly related to water and sanitation infrastructure.
I also discuss Chinese megacities as an example of high embeddedness and low cohesion. So this is extending to authoritarian urban context, but China is always an interesting case for urbanists because it's in -- it's kind of according to conventional definitions and authoritarian environment, but highly decentralized, such that municipal scale matters quite a lot and sub-national government is actually where most of the action is in the Chinese government. If you look for example at fiscal expenditures. I talked about a European case like Amsterdam. So, the goal here is that this is a framework generated from a comparative study in two cities that can then be extended outwards in very different contexts across the world. But what I think that rapidly urbanizing context in the global South really help us to do is to shine a spotlight on questions on distribution in the urban built environment and to what degree excluded informal parts of cities, territories of cities, get included in the formal infrastructures of cities, and so in shining a light on that question, I'm then able to move outwards and show actually questions about the urban built environment and inclusion in the infrastructures of the urban built environment are in many ways not only a global South question, but actually quite central to politics in global North cities as well. And we can rethink those cities through frameworks generated from a southern comparison.
There's also a kind of policy dimension to this book, and the way that I frame it towards the very beginning and end of the book is to say, in a climate changed world, we have to rethink anew what drives capacities to intervene in the built environment, because so much of the urban question in a climate change world is about how you manage the built environment and how you change the built environment. And so what this book is suggesting is that, it's not a policy recipe by any stretch of the imagination, but it's suggesting here’s a set of analytical tools to understand what is going to make some cities more capable or effective of intervening in the built environment to address a set of climate change concerns that have renewed interest in the built environment in the city more generally.
Emily
I want to sit with comparison for a minute here, as it functions to frame and also guide your work here. You mention in the final pages of the book how this approach generated what you call counterfactuals, a reflection on paths not taken. And comparative urban studies have been so integral to innovating on these sort of hegemonic, dominant ideas about urbanization.
Ben Bradlow
The book is trying to carve out a way for thinking about comparison that cuts against two different poles of how debates around comparison are currently portrayed in the literature. So on the one hand, there's long been an effort to generate universal urban theory, that is, that all cities follow very similar patterns of development and then particularly among a group of scholars who have focused on urbanism in in the global South there's been an effort to say, actually the global South is distinct, and the comparative project that's generated from the global South should focus instead on the incommensurability of southern cases to northern cases.
And what this approach is trying to intervene this approach is trying to intervene to say actually we do need to be attentive to what is new and different about the global South, but we can reconstruct theory from the South in order to speak also to the north in a way that's not just about a single universal theory, but actually that's about accounting for variation. And so that's what this book is trying to do theoretically within the social sciences.
Emily
My thanks to Ben Bradlow, author of Urban Power from Princeton University Press. You can find a link to the book in our show notes.
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to Drexel University and the editors at UAR. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was mixed and produced by Aidan McLaughlin and written and produced by me, Emily Holloway. You can find us on Bluesky at @urbanaffairsreview.bsky.social for updates on the journal and the show. Please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.