Cultural heritage and urban capital: disputes over industrial legacies

This dossier brings together articles that, when articulated, reveal the “concrete unity” (Adorno, 2008, p. 243) that has been observed in North American, European and South American cities: the transformation of metropolises from centralities of industrial society to what is now called the service society. This reconversion of economic centrality significantly alters the perspectives of analysis if we consider that it was industrial activity that, for more than a century, configured the metropolises and produced a set of issues that made them an object of knowledge in the scope of urban studies and parameters of intervention and economic management.¹ It is therefore a question of paying attention to the implications that these transformations in the economic field and in industrial activity on a global scale bring to the debate on the production of urban space (Lefebvre, 2000), including introducing new actors, tensions and dynamics in deindustrialization scenarios, factors that have stimulated new fields of knowledge and challenging themes, such as the emergence of cultural heritage, in the context of industrial heritage, faced by the authors presented here.

If this historical process contained in the idea of deindustrialization of national economies dates back to the end of the 1970s in European cities and the United States (Hall, 2011), it was only from the 1990s onwards that it intensified in Latin American cities, as a result of the global consensus around the imposition of neoliberal precepts in the conduct of macroeconomic policy. (Oreiro e Feijó, 2010; Cano, 2012; Abdal et al.; 2019; Pasternak et al.; 2023; Ribeiro, 2024).

Alexandre Abdal and Felipe Madio, in the article that opens this dossier, The process of industrial emptying of the São Paulo metropolis: restrictions, trends and perspectives, emphasize that the Brazilian national-developmentalist economic policy, responsible for industrialization since the 1950s, was confronted, at the end of the 1990s, by the insertion of the neoliberal macroeconomic tripod, with high interest rates, floating exchange rates and primary surpluses, directly impacting industrial activity. Subsequently, the same situation is observed in Argentina, by María Eugenia Goicoechea and María Soledad Arqueros Mejica, in Tertiary spaces. Urban restructuring trends in the deindustrialization context? According to these authors, the combination of economic, commercial and financial openness with labor deregulation and the lack of investment in productive infrastructure, which had been present in Argentina since the mid-1970s, was intensified by the appreciation of the exchange rate in the 1990s, which was a determining factor in the disarticulation of Argentina’s industrial production matrix.

However, it is by introducing the territorial variable into the debate on deindustrialization that the authors not only innovate in the discussion commonly held by the economic field, but also ensure a dialogue with the production of urban studies. Taking the metropolitan regions of São Paulo (RMSP) and Buenos Aires (RMBA) as a reference, both Abdal and Madio and Goicoechea and Mejica, respectively, highlight the unequal distribution of the effects of deindustrialization in the territory in relation to the tertiary sector. In this direction, they are in the tradition of studies produced since the late 1990s, driven by the discussion proposed by Sassen (1998) who, for the first time, in the face of the emphasis given to economic globalization and the international fluidity of capital, especially favoured by information technologies, drew attention to the territorialization of services of the globalized economy precisely in cities that had lost control of industrial activity (ibid., p. 13). Nevertheless, comparing the analyses made for the RMSP and the RMBA, we see that the tertiary sector is not always the one linked to the global economy, as characterized by Sassen for industrial metropolises in the Northern Hemisphere, giving new clues for other research agendas in South American countries.

Abdal and Madio, using their own methodology, show that deindustrialization is a fact in the RMSP’s core municipality, the city of São Paulo, although they note that there is a hierarchy in industrial deconcentration to other municipalities in the state (considering the territorial division into the Metropolitan Ring, the Macrometropolitan Ring, the Macrometropolis of São Paulo and the West of São Paulo). According to them, it is the low-tech and more labor-intensive industries that show the greatest territorial deconcentration, while the more high-tech ones remain in the municipality’s surroundings. Precisely for this reason, the city-pole remains the location of the most specialized productive services. In a way, they corroborate what studies have long said about the city of São Paulo, which earned it the epithet of global city until critics confronted it (Carvalho, 2000; Ferreira, 2007; Fix, 2007).

In contrast, Goicoechea and Mejica present an analysis that focuses not on the typology of industries that are deconcentrated in relation to the metropolis, as Abdal and Madio did, but on observing the so-called “tertiary spaces”, almost always promoted by local governments, with the aim of renovating obsolete and deteriorated urban areas, reactivating their economy. The authors identify that the services that come to occupy these regions are those linked to the real estate market, which, according to them, is the real economic activity driving these territories, bringing with them what they call “simple and banal services”, consumer-oriented, with low levels of qualification and little organic capital. The opposite, therefore, of what has been evidenced by the literature that triggered the idea of the global city, focused especially on metropolises in the Northern Hemisphere and located in central economies. As the authors themselves say, “we observe that our tertiary spaces do not fit into the dynamic modes of the globalized economy”, not only because of the nature of the activities there, but also because of the economic actors who carry them out. That’s why they conclude that these territories are no longer production-oriented, as were the services linked to the production chain of industrial activity, but have become spaces of reproduction, in a double sense: simple and banal services aimed at the end consumer and consumption of urban income, represented by the advance of the real estate market over the deindustrialized territory. Here we find the research agenda suggested by Abdal and Madio: the importance of thinking about the pressure of urban capital and the consequent capture of urban income from spaces abandoned by industrial plants.

Goicoechea and Mejica bring up the role that local governments play in the production of urban space with the aim of “revitalizing” cities abandoned by industrial activity. They therefore indirectly take up the debate in urban studies about the strategic role that urban planning has played in attracting investment, with the aim of boosting the local economy: “urban entrepreneurship” producing cities as “growth machines” (Molotch, 1976; Harvey, 2005; Arantes, Vainer e Maricato, 2000). The emblematic case is Barcelona, which is approached from a different perspective by Cristina López-Villanueva and Montserrat Crespi-Vallbona in the article Resistances in the transformation of industrial spaces in Barcelona.

It was the role that strategic planning played in the renovation of Barcelona, with a view to hosting the 1992 Olympic Games, that alerted researchers around the world to the role that sporting mega-events have come to play as “cultural anchors”, through which “degraded” spaces are “requalified” (Arantes, 2000). In fact, this dossier has its origins precisely in research on “Metropolization and mega-events: impacts of the World Cup and the Olympics on Brazilian metropolises”, conducted by the INCT Network of the Observatory of the Metropolis (OBM). Tasked with studying the impacts of the opening of the 2014 World Cup in São Paulo, the research team from the São Paulo branch of the OBM identified, at the time, that the incentives offered by the São Paulo City Hall (PMSP) to attract the tertiary sector to a traditionally working-class region, the city’s East Zone, already indicated its deindustrialization process (Carvalho e Gagliardi, 2015; Carvalho et al., 2018; Carvalho e Wainer, 2019; Gagliardi e Carvalho, 2022 e 2023).

Likewise, it is not surprising that this dossier proposes articles that originate from case studies in the cities of São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. The managers and private agents of these cities, which had gone through deindustrialization, mobilized efforts through strategic urban planning to produce a “good image”, as Jordi Borja would say (Carvalho, 2000), which was necessary to attract investors and reactivate the local economy, but they never managed to position them as technological or financial services hubs. Barcelona, Lisbon, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro hosted mega-events to attract investment, respectively the 1992 Olympic Games, the 1998 Lisbon Universal Exhibition, the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. In addition, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, all port cities, have invested in waterfront revitalization projects, the best known being Porto Maravilha and Puerto Madero. Real estate capital and tourism-oriented services were the prospects that fueled these experiences.

In all these urban interventions, the partnership between public authorities and the private sector has been the keynote, generating important lines of research in the field of urban studies. The following two articles by Cristina López-Villanueva and Montserrat Crespi-Vallbona and Nadia Somekh and Guilherme Henrique Fatorelli Del’Arco are aimed at understanding these urban regimes (Stone, 1993; Carvalho, 2020). Through comparative studies, they both discuss the way in which urban projects are implemented in post-industrial cities, but now introducing a new actor into the debate: industrial heritage. In order to observe the role that heritage preservation plays in confronting the interests of capturing urban surplus value, the case of Barcelona is analyzed, as well as a comparison, by Somekh and Del’Arco, between King’s Cross Central in London and the Água Branca urban operation in São Paulo, in the article Deindustrialization and refunctionalization: King’s Cross and Água Branca Urban Operation.

The text by López-Villanueva and Crespi-Vallbona focuses on the challenges of preserving industrial heritage when confronted with real estate interests. According to these authors, “the conservation and reuse of industrial infrastructures are sustainable actions in themselves” because of their triple nature: they are symbols of identity and collective memory; they are local development strategies; and they can generate a “brand” that attracts a new economy and positions the city globally. However, such possibilities do not necessarily occur without conflicts between the local population (neighbors), the local administration and private investors, especially those from real estate capital. The two cases analyzed - the conversion of the former Can Ricart and Can Batlló factories - show that the great challenge in preserving territories and buildings that have become protected heritage is the necessary investment of resources, which are scarce when they come from the public authorities, but abundant when they come from private capital. In the case of Can Ricart, where preservation has been shared between the public and private sectors, there is a glaring imbalance in the progress of the works aimed at reusing the heritage. While, on the side of the private investors, the work has progressed apace, what is under the responsibility of the public authorities still looks ruinous. In the case of Can Batlló, the only reason the situation isn’t the same is that, as opposed to the slow consolidation of the proposals by the municipality, the space has been appropriated by civil society, popular and neighborhood movements and, despite the challenges and difficulties, they have been promoting the requalification in a self-management model. Even so, some sections of Can Batlló remain unfinished and are in danger of once again becoming rubble.

Although the meaning of industrial heritage is a way of confronting the reconversion of the industrial legacy into spaces aimed at the reproduction of urban capital, the authors highlight the enormous challenge involved in the reappropriation of this heritage, as it concerns not only the will and interest of the population, as it is highly dependent on public resources, a counterweight without which private capital tends to come out on top.

Despite the difficulties pointed out in the cases analyzed in Barcelona, a city heavily pressured by real estate capital and tourist interests, the two cases analyzed were already protected as cultural heritage sites by the public authorities. The situation is very different when we look at the city of São Paulo.

In line with the authors of the previous article, Somekh and Del’Arco agree that public authorities play an important role in the preservation of industrial heritage, but point out that the way in which they act can contribute to its greater or lesser effectiveness. To this end, they focus their attention on two interconnected points: a) the existence or not of an urban project around which different proposals and interests can be articulated; and b) the way in which dialogue takes place with the cultural heritage preservation body. In the London case, the existence of an urban project allowed English Heritage, the British public heritage protection body, to be one of the agents discussing the project that should be implemented in King’s Cross Central, considering that there were several sets of buildings there that were destined for preservation. The presence of this body in the construction of the urban project ensured greater flexibility when it came to discussing interventions in listed buildings. The opposite is observed in São Paulo, in the case of the former Água Branca factory area. Starting with the fact that the starting point is an urban planning instrument, the Operação Urbana Consorciada (Consortium Urban Operation), whose main objective is to make urban zoning more flexible in order to attract the real estate market and revenue for the municipal treasury. Beyond this legal instrument, there is no urban project around which the different interests can be negotiated and accommodated. On the contrary, the local government only operates as a regulatory body according to the demands made by those who have an interest in building in the OUC space. Precisely for this reason, the relationship with the heritage preservation bodies is one of confrontation, when they rebel against what has been previously decided without their participation. This explains why the request to open a state listing process for the largest industrial complex in Latin America until the 1950s, the large industrial center of Indústrias Reunidas Fábricas Matarazzo (IRFM), did not prevent its demolition, leaving only the boiler house and its chimneys. The image of the insignificance of what remains, completely decontextualized and surrounded by residential and corporate condominiums, gives the exact measure of the difficulties faced by heritage agencies working in the city of São Paulo when it comes to the expansion of urban capital.

Somekh and Del’Arco’s study, recalling the demolition of almost the entire IRFM unit in Água Branca, reaffirms the weak position that industrial history occupies in Brazilian heritage policies. The aestheticized construction of a selective standard in the federal government sphere of which phases and typologies of architecture would have value, which began in the 1930s, based on a modernist plastic canon that privileged the buildings of the colonial period and the modernism of the so-called “Rio School”, still remains, in the 21st century, as a preponderant parameter for legitimizing what should or should not be preserved, as well as for electing the agents who may or may not participate in the technical processes of selection and attribution of value (Marins, 2016). To give an idea of the exclusionary scope of this standard, since 1937 only ten industrial buildings have been listed by the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute (Iphan), of which only three in the state of São Paulo, where industry has played a central role in shaping the territory, social relations and way of life since the end of the 19th century, an exclusion of the memory of work which, incidentally, also extends to the world of sugar mills and coffee, tobacco or cotton farms (Marins, 2013 e 2023).

Among other variables, it is the neglect of industrial heritage that leads to the ruin of properties that have managed to break through the selection criteria of Brazilian cultural heritage bodies, such as the Portland Cement Factory in Perus, in the far north of the city of São Paulo, listed in 1992 by the Municipal Council for the Preservation of the Historical, Cultural and Environmental Heritage of the City of São Paulo (Conpresp). Faced with the neglect of the heritage agency and even the Abdalla family, who still own the buildings, Pedro Vianna Godinho Peria, in the fifth article in this dossier, Narratives and public action in the ruins of the Perus Cement Factory, sheds light on another form of public preservation: that promoted by the social movement Comunidade Cultural Quilombaque (Quilombaque Cultural Community). By collecting testimonies, Peria reconstructs narratives - or, as he prefers, counter-narratives - that recover the memory of the place, specifically those relating to the Queixadas strike, which took place in the early 1960s and is currently inspiring the Quilombaque movement, alongside local residents, to reclaim the factory space for a cultural center. The Tekoa Jopo’i Territorial Museum, an open-air museum that welcomes visitors to tour the ruined factory space, and the Queixadas - Sebastião Silva de Souza Memory Centre (CMQ) are some of the initiatives resulting from this popular mobilization.²

The author also highlights two important aspects of this experience. The first suggests that forms of preservation should also originate from popular initiative, from which government preservation bodies could learn. The second concerns the fact that a factory, which was notorious at the time for its acute exploitation of its workers, is now being rescued against the grain. Not by the “bad boss”, but by the Queixadas. This is a very relevant aspect to which Peria draws attention, and one that dialogues in some way with the articles that discuss, also in this dossier, the preservation of the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s former coal territory, by Rafael Rezende and Gerardo Silva and Karsten Zimmermann, in which they address both the projection achieved by the proposed refunctionalization of mines and steel industries there, and the new meanings given to spaces where strenuous and oppressive forms of work took place, as Peria suggests in relation to the Perus Cement factory.

One of the most important issues in Rezende’s text Industrial heritage, identity and memory: the case of the Ruhr Valley, is to contrast two possible forms of symbolic appropriation of what was once the Ruhr Valley industrial region, now part of the Industrial Heritage Route, made up of “dozens of mines, factories, canals and old sediment deposits [. ...] converted into parks, museums and venues for various events [...] which showcases 150 years of German industrial culture along a 400-kilometer route and has 27 points of interest [...], 17 viewpoints and 13 villages, all very well preserved”. On the one hand, the author draws attention to the danger of preservation idealizing the past in a nostalgic and conservative way, because, after all, we are talking about a polluting mining industry and extremely precarious and exploitative forms of work. But, on the other hand, it highlights its other side, in which the pride of the local population is expressed in relation to this same work, which led to the mobilization of civil society in defense of the revitalization of a region whose declining economy could no longer be reversed. This gave rise to a sustainable economy, which also combated the cycle of real estate speculation common in deindustrialized areas, as the other authors have shown so far. In this sense, it is appropriation and refunctionalization through a counter-narrative, if we can use Peria’s expression here.

What may have defined the success of the Ruhr Valley Route, as opposed to the difficulties encountered by the Perus Cultural Centre, despite the mobilization of the local population in both cases, is the fact that, according to Rezende, civil society found a favourable interlocutor in the state, with a social-democratic profile, who, in the 1980s, created the institutional capacity needed to carry out what was being proposed. Thus, the Department of Monuments and Monument Preservation was placed under the direction of the Ministry for Urban and Regional Development, creating the conditions for linking heritage preservation and urban planning. It’s worth remembering that this is the variable - institutional integration between urban design and historical heritage - that also differentiates the success of King’s Cross Central from the failure of the IRFM’s comprehensive preservation of the Água Branca industrial estate in São Paulo.

These cases are important because they reveal a different role for industrial heritage, the concept of which, according to Rezende, was also popularized at the time, and which, according to him, was essential for the Ruhr Valley Route to come to fruition. As opposed to thinking of heritage bodies as alien to urban planning policies or as a means of confrontation, the cases of the Ruhr Valley and King’s Cross Central show that urban planning and heritage bodies can work together, as long as they are part of a project led by the public authorities. In Brazil, what we have seen is the repeated isolation of public heritage preservation policies from those of urban intervention, with preservation being proposed on the basis of aesthetic and contemplative criteria based almost exclusively on the instrument of listing, which has very limited effectiveness and ends up in ruins because it is not incorporated into a project for the economic reactivation of the city and its urban functions (Weissheimer, 2023).

As Rezende rightly says, the Industrial Heritage Route is the result of the realization that the area in decline also needed to be restored to its economic vitality, generating employment for the region’s population. Therefore, guaranteeing productive activity as opposed to the reproduction of simple and banal services that accompany real estate capital, as Goicoechea and Mejica show for Buenos Aires.

This is the focus Silva and Zimmermann give to the Ruhr Valley, which, according to them, since it stopped being an area focused on coal and steel production, has become known for its tourist vocation. However, this redirection was only possible thanks to the commitment of public authorities at all levels. The federal government, according to the authors, was responsible for the productive transformation of the region, as well as for its environmental recovery, which is essential in a mining region with a high ecological impact. The state and municipal governments also acted to promote tourism in the region, “underlining the importance of industrial heritage as a central element of communication work [...] because of the strong link with the construction of regional identity”. Finally, the authors emphasize the regional integration of tourism as a relevant variable for its success, which, although they don’t say so explicitly, avoids the competition to attract investment and tourists between municipalities affected equally by the closure of the mining industry. Evidence of this regional action is the work of the Ruhr Regional Planning Authority, which brings together representation from 53 municipalities and is the company behind the Industrial Heritage Route.

In the opposite direction is the fate of the industrial remnants of Rio de Janeiro’s suburbs, where just over half of the industries originally established there are inactive or have been converted to other uses, as shown in Maria Paula Albernaz’s article, Suburban industrial remnants: the transformative potential of the Latin American developmental legacy. The government, however, is responsible for a small portion of these reconversions; of these, 75% were carried out by the private sector, with a predominance of real estate investment (around 40%), aimed at residential condominiums and shopping centers, reiterating the pattern highlighted by Goicoechea and Mejica. In contrast, 10% of the industrial buildings, located near still active industries or slums, were occupied by groups or groups of vulnerable classes for housing purposes. The blatant contradiction in relation to these precarious occupations, highlighted by the author, lies in the fact that the new residential condominiums built on industrial land, located in better-qualified neighborhoods, were implemented with financing from the Minha Casa Minha Vida Program..

One of the few initiatives undertaken by the State points to a possible solution to the above contradiction: under pressure from a “community collective”, the occupation of an inactive factory was transformed into a housing complex. Cases like this, the author suggests, could be expanded to the remaining 20% of industrial sites that are still inactive, in a region with urban infrastructure and transportation, thus meeting the housing needs of the local population, if only the political game were to tip in their favor.

Albernaz’s work also includes an effort to map and classify industrial remains, which was only possible based on information obtained during fieldwork. This is one of the difficulties in designing public policies aimed at refunctionalizing these industrial remains. Sílvia Borges Corrêa, in Refunctionalization of industrial remains in the city of Rio de Janeiro, also intends to address this challenge for the city of Rio de Janeiro.

In very close dialogue with the research carried out by Gagliardi and Carvalho for the RMSP,³ Corrêa assumes that, in order to think about refunctionalization - “understood as a process or procedure through which a new function and a new rationality, which respond to new socioeconomic needs, are attributed to an urban object” -, it is necessary to know where these industrial remnants left over from post-industrial society are. The lack of systematized and organized data is what, according to her, also makes processes of preserving industrial heritage unfeasible.

In order to partially fill this gap, the author conducted a mapping exercise using secondary sources, both bibliographic and documentary, and identified 56 large and medium-sized industrial remnants present in the landscape of the capital of Rio de Janeiro. Regarding refunctionalization, the data partially diverges from that obtained by Albernaz for the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. While residential condominiums and shopping centers predominate here, in Corrêa’s survey, also carried out in the state capital, uses focused on culture and the creative economy predominate, although shopping centers come next. Residential condominiums are also present and, in this case, following a repeated model, an expression of the power relationship between urban capital and industrial heritage: the entire factory building is destroyed, leaving only the iconic chimney standing. It is impossible not to remember the Luzes da Mooca Condominium in the city of São Paulo, built on the land of the old União Sugar Factory, of which only the chimney remains.⁴

Tourism in the Ruhr Valley, the creative economy in the capital of Rio de Janeiro and the digital city in Lisbon, all activities practiced as solutions to industrial legacies. In his article, A factory for unicorns: continuous and flexible refunctionalization in the digital era of Lisbon, João Felipe Pereira Brito analyzes the implementation of the Hub Criativo Beato (HCB), an infrastructure focused on digital innovation in the city of Lisbon, in a process of continuous and flexible refunctionalization of a former military industrial complex. Based on this particular case, Brito contrasts the agile city of flows, of the digital economy, with the long-lasting city of industrial activity. The very terms used in the plans drawn up to promote the refunctionalization of factory buildings convey the ephemerality that characterizes the space of flows: adaptability, permeability, reversibility and flexibility, so as to be suitable for hosting equally transitory services: shared housing for short-term use (coliving), startups, digital innovation incubators, coworking spaces, events. According to Brito, the HCB functions both as an anchor for urban rehabilitation and as a representation device for a Lisbon that competes internationally to attract capital in a context of global rise of the digital economy and attracting digital nomads. The author does not ask himself this question, but it would be worth speculating what difference there would be between this city of the Hub Criativo Beato and that of the 1998 Exhibition.

The last text in the dossier, Industrial brownfield in light of the center-periphery relationship: Marabá - State of Pará, by Mateus Teixeira de Souza, deals with the recent deactivation of the steel industry in the Marabá Industrial District (DIM), linked to the iron ore mining chain in the Carajás Mineral Province, in the state of Pará. Having been installed during the developmental period and experienced different economic crises that the Brazilian economy has gone through since the 1980s, the facility was recently deactivated, leaving in its wake what the author calls a “campo marrom” (brown field): socio-environmental damage; depressed municipal and regional economies; impact on social relations and demobilization of the working class; and urban repercussions, especially with the migration of the poor and unemployed population to the cities surrounding Marabá, which accentuated the increase in social inequalities. In addition to analyzing the specific case, Mateus’ article highlights the connection between the process of deindustrialization in Brazil, which is already affecting production chains and recent industrial parks, and the country’s insertion into the global economy as the largest producer of commodities, including iron ore. The decline of Marabá is not part of a generalized process in its area of activity, since the neo-extractive iron industry has not declined in Brazil. On the contrary, the effects in Marabá are mainly due to fierce competition from Vale do Rio Doce, now a transnational mining company. The closure of the Marabá Industrial District is an example of what the country could suffer if it does not reactivate its productive activity beyond that linked to neo-extractivism, which is harmful and runs counter to the eco-urban society, if we can coin that neologism.

In the last section, there are seven texts that complement the dossier. They do not address its central theme - deindustrialization and refunctionalization of industrial heritage - but they do address issues related to the current development of many cities that sometimes involve their collective reappropriation, including their heritage. This theme is central, for example, in the text Reading attributes of urban space: a possible methodology for urban heritage, by Adriana Fabre Dias and Sonia Afonso, who apply a methodology to qualify the urban design of public areas. In the exercise carried out in the city of Laguna (SC), they end up showing that the heritage status takes urban areas out of the speculative circuit, since the listing of its central area caused new real estate investments to head east of the city; at the same time, they demonstrate that it is through the social use of urban spaces that their appropriation is guaranteed, in addition to an institutional recognition of heritage instances. Seeking to understand the extent to which cultural heritage has been integrated into urban planning policies, Eleonora Bahr Pessôa, Mariluci Neis Carelli and Dione da Rocha Bandeira, in their article entitled Cultural heritage, master plan and the right to the city in Brazil: state of the art, survey the literature that relates it to the master plan (PD) and the right to the city, concluding that the overlap of this articulation is minimal. The recognition that the safeguarding and reappropriation of cultural heritage are part of the fight for the right to the city, but are not duly contemplated by the instruments for its planning, only reinforces the relevance of the theme of this dossier.

Still on the limits and possibilities of planning and social action in fulfilling the social function of the city, the following texts contribute: Joana Martins, City, participation and political culture: games and other forms of representation and engagement, on participation and political culture; Débora Mendonça Monteiro Machado, Amarilis Lucia Casteli Figueiredo Gallardo and Cláudia Terezinha Kniess, The environmental dimension in master plans: international experiences of strategic environmental assessment, on the environmental dimension in master plans; and Yara Baiardi, Angélica Benatti Alvim and Jorg Schröder, Node and Place: spatial dilemmas around Transport Stations, about spatial dilemmas around transport stations. The first of these three texts discusses possible resources for expanding political participation amid the crisis of representation identified, given that, often, social participation in city planning is directed towards obtaining consensus for projects that do not always correspond to social demands. Some texts in the dossier, such as in the case of Perus and Can Batlló, for example, show other possibilities for appropriation and active participation outside of the formal channels of participation, which here are shown to be insufficient for fulfilling the social function of the city. Furthermore, what this author identifies as manipulation of the issue of participation to validate projects of interest to the state-market coalition that do not achieve public reappropriation of heritage can be nuanced in the text by Machado, Gallardo and Kniess, to the extent that they demonstrate how environmental issues begin to permeate the urban planning agenda. In his article, which assesses the application of Strategic Environmental Assessment in Master Plans (PDs) of European cities (given the absence of national cases for study), the internalization of the environmental variable indicates intersectoral urban policies that include preservation, safeguarding and valorization of cultural heritage, as well as its potential for integrating diverse cultural groups into the tourist promotion of its rehabilitation. The first of these three texts discusses possible resources for expanding political participation amid the crisis of representation identified, given that, often, social participation in city planning is directed towards obtaining consensus for projects that do not always correspond to social demands. Some texts in the dossier, such as in the case of Perus and Can Batlló, for example, show other possibilities for appropriation and active participation outside of the formal channels of participation, which here are shown to be insufficient for fulfilling the social function of the city. Furthermore, what this author identifies as manipulation of the issue of participation to validate projects of interest to the state-market coalition that do not achieve public reappropriation of heritage can be nuanced in the text by Machado, Gallardo and Kniess, to the extent that they demonstrate how environmental issues begin to permeate the urban planning agenda. In their article, which assesses the application of Strategic Environmental Assessment in Master Plans (PDs) of European cities (given the absence of national cases for study), the internalization of the environmental variable indicates intersectoral urban policies that include the preservation, safeguarding and valorization of cultural heritage, as well as its potential for integrating diverse cultural groups into the tourism promotion of its rehabilitation. Although the authors note that considering the environmental variable of PDs is not enough to demonstrate its effectiveness, from the perspective that is relevant to our dossier, a possible path is opened here to rehabilitate the post-industrial city for social functions through environmental policies, considered as transversal in the search for quality of life in cities.

Considering the theme of urban mobility in this context, we can also identify urban transport nodes as catalysts for urban renewal, if they are capable of overcoming the functionalist character, articulating themselves with territorial dynamics, integrating and favoring the logic of place, a category privileged in the text by Baiardi, Alvim and Schröder. The authors note that the concepts adopted for the stations studied in São Paulo do not take people into account, privileging the logic of efficiency and competitiveness, the same logic that guides the conception of smart cities, the theme of the text by Wesley Morais da Silva, Mônica Luiza Sarabia and Suely Maria Ribeiro Leal, Smart cities: theoretical formulations and empirical approaches in the national and international scenario. These authors note the apolitical rhetoric present in this city model conceived through “imperative technocratic planning”, since it is mobilized more by technological data than by social problems, leading to the question of for whom, how and by whom the data generated by the technologies implemented in smart cities are being produced. The role of the market in the creation of this model is evident here, since it simultaneously acts in the development of technologies for urban space, that is, the market promotes, the concept is disseminated (notably through international rankings) and the State undertakes to increase competitiveness, as has already been observed in the logic established by the concept of global cities. In the examples analyzed by the authors, in São Paulo, Ceará and Kenya, the discourses in favor of integration, of the solution of urban and socio-environmental problems, through intelligent urban management, are shown to be fragile and further promote new real estate products, renewing the desire for “socio-territorial” movements to oppose imperialism, advocated in the text by André Felipe dos Santos Vasconcelos, Production of territories of urban resistance in the Amazon: analysis of Belém, Pará, on the production of territories of urban resistance in the Amazon, which closes this issue of Cadernos Metrópole.

May the articles gathered here stimulate research agendas capable of raising, more than just debate, effective political influence on the production of urban space. And it is important to emphasize, once again, that the State and public policies for heritage preservation, linked to urban management and planning, have a highly relevant role in this direction. More than preserving ruins, it is about opposing the limitless expansion of urban capital, so as to guarantee the effectiveness of the preservation of social legacies and avoid, in the future, new ruins arising from exclusionary and unqualified actions.

Notes

• 1
  This discussion is mainly produced among authors of critical tradition. For some references, see classic studies: Lefebvre (1999a and 1999b), Castells (1983), Harvey (2005). In Brazil, Kowarick (1979 and 2000); Rolnik (2015) and Ribeiro (2020). We invite you to read the texts produced by the INCT Network of the Observatory of Metropolises, which has been notable for its extensive reflective production on the impacts of changes in the world economy and the production of urban space. See publications in https://www.observatoriodasmetropoles.net.br/. Accessed on: 8 Sep 2024.
• 2
  A similar perspective is discussed by Gagliardi (2023).
• 3
  Reconversion of the built environment: from factory warehouses to cultural heritage in the city of São Paulo. Call for Proposals CNPq/MCTI/FNDCT Universal Notice No. 18/2021, Process 423670/2021-2, CNPq. Ongoing mapping of industrial remnants in the RMSP can be consulted on the digital platform designed within the scope of this project, available at the link: https://patrimoniofabrilrmsp.com.br/.
• 4
  With regard to the dynamics of verticalization and the potential for reappropriation of industrial heritage in Mooca, see the article by Gagliardi, Carvalho and Caporrino (2023).

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  13 Dec 2024
• Date of issue
  Jan-Abr 2025