"Estudos Avançados" #111 highlights priorities for the next administration of the city of São Paulo
In the midst of the campaign for this year's municipal elections, when candidates are expected to present an agenda of proposals, issue #111 of IEA's journal Estudos Avançados brings a wide range of analyses and proposals on the main problems of the city of São Paulo in order to contribute to the public debate on the priorities to be addressed by the next municipal administration. The digital version is now available, free of charge, at the Scientific Electronic Library Online (Portuguese only).
The publication's editor, Sérgio Adorno, emphasizes that in a city where complex networks of social and institutional relations are established "the main challenge to governance lies precisely in promoting sustainable development with equity and social justice, with respect for the environment, with the participation of the most diverse social groups in decision-making that affects the lives of the greatest number of people, and with the promotion of a culture of respect for human rights".
These challenges have guided the composition of the dossier "Municipal Elections in São Paulo: Problems and Challenges," with 15 articles authored by 40 researchers from different institutions in areas such as urban planning, public health, education, sociology, economics, administration, and management of public policies.
A fundamental factor in meeting the demands of the people of São Paulo - as long as political decisions are made and procedures are established - is the appropriate allocation of budgetary resources. This is the concern of the article that opens the dossier: "Reassessing São Paulo’s Budget Management Post-2014: From Resource Scarcity to Surplus," by Ursula Dias Peres, from USP's School of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (EACH) at USP.
She defends "the need for greater pressure and control" for the effective use of budget resources. According to her, this is important to avoid the repetition of what happened between 2018 and 2022, when a set of factors led to the accumulation of a cash balance of more than R$20 billion, which "remained idle, despite the unmet demands of the population."
The work is the result of the analysis of a set of revenue, expenditure, and personnel structure data collected for the period of 2003 to 2023, in addition to interviews with key players in budgetary governance. Peres explains the factors that led to the municipality's surplus and indicates ways for the governance of the São Paulo budget to stop being characterized by a "significant increase in the political discretion of the head of the Executive."
Security, health, and education
A recent survey by Datafolha, one of the most important and complete research institutes in Brazil, indicates that 20% of São Paulo residents point to security as their main concern. Health and education are tied in second place, both cited as the main problems by 18% of the group surveyed. The importance of security as an issue in the São Paulo elections is addressed in an article by four researchers from the Brazilian Public Security Forum. They reflect on the shift in this agenda, "transferred from a predominantly state-level agenda to a central part of the city’s mayoral electoral strategies."
The hypothesis developed by the researchers is that homicides were given the status of "the city’s main public safety problem between the 1990s and 2000s." However, "there has been a change in the scenario with their reduction. The focus has become Cracolândia (literally "Crackland" in Portuguese, a popular denomination for a region in São Paulo) as well as the sharp increase in property crimes, especially cell phone thefts and robberies. These factors have led to the "construction of an acute scenario of fear and insecurity among the population of São Paulo."
They warn that "deciphering the sphinx of public security" in São Paulo and other municipalities in Brazil "is still a risky and violent challenge for significant portions of the population, even more so in a time of social 'cultural war.'" The unknown arises from the doubt of whether "the new protagonism of municipalities in public security will be accompanied by reforms in the institutional architecture and organizational cultures of public security forces or if it is just a way of dissipating social demands and pressures for social justice, violence prevention, and citizenship."
The challenges of public health are the subject of an article by six researchers from USP's School of Public Health (FSP). They believe that the multiplicity of health service providers that operate under contract with the municipal government creates difficulties in state regulatory processes. "It is imperative to improve these regulatory processes of the public-private relationship in order to ensure the intentionality and public control of the health system," they state.
The authors also advocate strengthening governance structures, especially in relation to the state government, which has a "large and strategic installed capacity for health services," unlike what occurs in most Brazilian states.
Rounding out the trio of main concerns for the people of São Paulo, the issue of education in the city is addressed from the perspective of the challenges for the municipality and the state arising from the relationship between the aging population and adult education (EJA). The article by Marcelo Dante Pereira, from the Municipal Education Network, and Maria Clara Di Pierro, a senior professor at USP's School of Education (FE), is the result of a demographic and educational diagnosis of the elderly population in São Paulo and a comparative case study in the state and municipal education networks of the city.
The authors list four recommendations for São Paulo's future management. The first is to strengthen the public provision of EJA to meet the potential demand of elderly people with low levels of education, especially in the outskirts. This provision should be accompanied by guidance processes for the adaptation to school by elderly people, who feel many impacts when returning to EJA. The third recommendation is that education networks seek technical advisory support for the development of normative guidelines and the implementation of ongoing training on topics that address overcoming ageism and the promotion of educational practices with elderly people.
Finally, they recommend the production of intersectoral policies involving Education and other state and municipal departments, and the State and Municipal Councils for the Elderly, in order to encourage the active search for elderly people with low levels of education in addition to include the issue of aging in the continuing education of teachers and technicians.
Labour and mobility
Despite the recent reduction in the unemployment rate, the supply of jobs and their quality remain a relevant concern for a significant portion of São Paulo residents, especially in light of the city's economic transformations. These issues are present in an analysis of the city's labour market over the last decade by researchers from USP's Institute of Brazilian Studies (IEB), the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP), and the Federal University of ABC (UFABC). They highlight how trends in the workforce, unemployment, and occupational patterns affect income inequality and poverty.
The article discusses the recent period based on data from 2012 to 2023 raised by the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD Contínua) of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The main convergences and divergences in terms of occupational polarization, income distribution, and poverty in the São Paulo and national scenarios are addressed. Some dynamics related to the intersectionality of race and gender are also presented.
According to the researchers, everything indicates that the labour market in São Paulo tends to become more unequal and polarized, diminishing its role as the center of the country's social transformations "even when it combined 'growth and poverty.'" In light of this scenario, they point to two strategic vectors for new opportunities: incorporating social inclusion as a goal, including taking its capacity to generate jobs and income into account, through the expansion of public policies (health, education, and social assistance); and investing in new productive conglomerates based on high productivity and employment potential, given the city's continued prominence on the national level.
"These technological leadership actions in new sectors and segments – in a context of 'new industrialization' as advocated by the federal government – could even be developed with a view to reversing the city’s current spatial hierarchy," they conclude.
Largely associated with the labour market issue are mobility problems in the city, where a large part of the population lives far from their workplaces. "There are many economic, political, and social problems affecting transportation and urban mobility that will await the next elected mayor of the city of São Paulo and will require courage to innovate," state the three researchers of UFABC in the synopsis of their article on the necessary transformations in urban mobility in São Paulo.
They consider it essential to implement an "unorthodox policy" to transform the current scenario of urban mobility in São Paulo. Among the changes they highlight "the most comprehensive and systemic ones, proposed by the Triple Zero Mobility coalition – zero fares, zero emissions, and zero traffic deaths." The researchers mention another proposal by the coalition: the creation of a Unified Mobility System (SUM) with interfederative management based on principles such as equity, accessibility, and sustainability.
They also advocate an "effective break with the public transport pricing model, which has already been innovated in the city of São Paulo with the Zero Fare model." They associate this action with the urgency of rethinking the sector’s financing, "considering the fair distribution of resources, and overcoming political and technological challenges to achieve a fairer and more sustainable mobility."
Housing and zoning
Nabil Bonduki, a professor at USP's Faculty of Architecture, Urbanism, and Design (FAU), former city councilman and former Secretary of Culture for the city of São Paulo, is the author of the article "Balancing Population Density and Verticalization: Preserving São Paulo’s Heritage and Environment." The study reflects on the regulation of land use and occupation in São Paulo, taking the guidelines of the Strategic Master Plan and the implementation of the instruments provided for therein as references, in addition to the need to adjust complementary legislation.
The article seeks to show that the population density of São Paulo is absolutely necessary to meet the current and future housing needs of the Metropolitan Region, but that verticalization and the real estate transformations essential to accommodate more people in the same space must have limits and cannot destroy the city's cultural, environmental, and urban references.
Other articles in the dossier on land use and occupation in the city discuss the management of territorial planning instruments based on the idea of urban design as a new level of zoning prevalence, the predominance of corporate urbanism to the detriment of a redistributive and cooperative one, and the role of urbanization in history and its contemporary transformations.
The dossier is completed with works on sustainability, the reduction of inequalities, the financial situation of the elderly, the privatization of the Anhangabaú Valley, and the patterns of spatial distribution of votes for São Paulo city councilors in the 2020 elections.
Impacts of Artificial Intelligence
The second set of texts contains five of the papers presented at the 1st International Seminar on Artificial Intelligence: Democracy and Social Impacts, held by the Center for Artificial Intelligence, a partnership between USP, IBM, and the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). One of the articles presents tools developed by researchers and professionals in computing, engineering, and mathematics for processing public political documents to make the information more accessible to citizens.
In another article, written by computer science and law researchers, they propose a path to a new paradigm of fair and ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI) in content moderation on the internet, in which the State and platforms play a relevant role. According to the authors, this path involves the adoption of explainable AI associated with transparent and legitimate criteria defined by society.
Three computer science professionals use their article to present a project aimed at reviewing several training and testing databases with the purpose of mitigating and reducing personal biases in a multimodal model for classifying urban-social categories. In the foundation of the project, they used theoretical references from discursive linguistics, the construction of morality, and analytical approaches to bias/variance. They state that this allowed the work to assertively achieve the objective of bias mitigation, which, "although being a laborious task, is of algorithmic-social importance to maintain plurality and robustness in public data."
Based on studies of the recent promotion of Big Data and AI for the production of official statistics for the United Nations, two researchers from the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) present an analysis of some transformations in public statistics produced by national statistical institutes around the world. The analysis was carried out through empirical research based on theoretical contributions from the sociology of quantification, and science and technology studies.
The use of AI in the private sector is also addressed. Researchers in the area of management examine decisions made or supported by AI in organizations. The article summarizes a study based on secondary data, analyzing 128 cases of AI use in order to understand how it has contributed to organizational decision-making. According to the authors, it was possible to identify a greater representation of AI adoption in the areas of operations and marketing, predominantly at the operational decision-making level and as a support for decision-making.
The list below contains the names of the authors who have contributed with each one of the addressed themes:
Municipal Elections in São Paulo: Problems and Challenges
Reassessing São Paulo’s Budget Management Post-2014: From Resource Scarcity to Surplus - Ursula Dias Peres
Challenges in Municipal Management of the Unified Health System in São Paulo - Aylene Bousquat et al.
Polarization, Inequality, and Poverty: Dilemmas and Challenges of São Paulo’s Labor Market - Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa, Ian Prates, Ângela Cristina Tepassê, and Levi Cristiano Oliveira
Addressing Youth and Adult Education Amidst São Paulo’s Aging Population - Marcelo Dante Pereira and Maria Clara Di Pierro
The Financialization of Old Age and the Convergence of State and Market Interests - Guita Grin Debert and Jorge Félix
Drastic Measures for Urban Mobility in São Paulo - Silvana Zioni, Thiago Von Zeidler Gomes, and Priscila da Mota Moraes
Balancing Population Density and Verticalization: Preserving São Paulo’s Heritage and Environment - Nabil Bonduki
São Paulo in the 21st Century: Instruments for Urban Management and Territorial Challenges - Sarah Feldman
Pursuing Sustainability and Reducing Inequalities in São Paulo: A Unified Process - Claudio Salvadori Dedecca and Cassiano José Bezerra Marques Trovão
Corporate Vs. Cooperative Urbanism: Is Responsible Management Possible in São Paulo? - Nadia Somekh, Bruna Fregonezi, and Guilherme Del’Arco
The Political Economy of Urbanization: A Reinterpretation in Light of Municipal Elections - Ricardo Carlos Gaspar
Critical Perceptions on the Privatization of Vale do Anhangabaú Since 2021 - André Biselli Sauaia and Anália Maria Marinho de Carvalho Amorim
Fear, Violence, and Politics in São Paulo: Who Should Decipher the Public Security Sphinx? - Renato Sérgio de Lima, Guaracy Mingardi, David Marques, and Thais Carvalho
Challenges in Municipal Management to Reduce Inequality in São Paulo - Jorge Abrahão and Igor Pantoja
Spatial Voting Patterns for the São Paulo City Council: A Study Based on the 2020 Elections - Lucas de Oliveira Gelape, Joyce Luz, and Débora Thomé
Artificial Intelligence: Democracy and Social Impacts
Decision-Making in Organizations: What Changes with Artificial intelligence? - Abraham Sin Oih Yu et al.
Public Statistics, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence: The Case of the UN Global Platform - Oscar Arruda d’Alva and Edemilson Paraná
Bias Mitigation of Multimodal Datasets in an Urban-Social Category Classifier - Luciano C. Lugli, Daniel Abujabra Merege, and Rafael Pillon Almeida
Explainable AI to Mitigate the Lack of Transparency and Legitimacy in Internet Moderation - Thomas Palmeira Ferraz et al.
Augmented Democracy: Artificial Intelligenc as a Tool to Fight Disinformation - Alexandre Alcoforado et al.