Urban planning has been reluctant to grapple with the role of anti-Blackness in Rio 2016’s Olympic development policy beyond a few fleeting references to the disproportionate impacts experienced by Afro-Brazilians. Herein, we explore “ para inglês ver ” as a state obscuration policy deployed to cloak and deflect from a larger city-wide project of Black displacement and dispossession in Rio de Janeiro. By contextualizing anti-Black urban development policies and countering the narrative omissions, reductions, and silences of Rio 2016’s opening ceremony, we identify the ways in which Brazil’s development history shaped Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic-era urbanism and contributed to the worsening of the city’s social inequalities for Black Cariocas .
This work uses a speculative city to examine how urban science conceptualizes inclusion, exposing assumptions about accessibility. Rather than treating accessibility as compliance, it reframes inclusion as a systemic condition shaped by infrastructures, interfaces, temporal rhythms, and governance across scales. By examining urban form, mobility, services, and climate, it shows how anticipatory design can normalize diverse bodies while revealing limits of design-led solutions. Inclusive spatial arrangements may reduce barriers but cannot overcome institutional bias, redistribute power, or ensure justice. Accessibility is thus framed not as an outcome, but as an ongoing process requiring sustained political, institutional, and spatial commitment.
Research suggests that disaster assistance, because it focuses on infrastructure replacement, may encourage redevelopment in hazardous areas or compete with mitigation planning. Using mixed methods, this paper explores the effect of recovery funds on relocation and structural mitigation decisions of businesses and household recipients after Hurricanes Ike and Harvey. We found that homeowners that relocated were approved for higher loan amounts, with the opposite pattern for businesses, though damage, disaster risk, financial considerations, and community attachment all played a role in mitigation decision-making. Recovery assistance was often a facilitator rather than a catalyst in these choices, highlighting an opportunity for coordinated planning efforts.
Using a novel block-level dataset covering all residential (re)developments in São Paulo, this paper examines why some blocks are (re)developed while others are not. Consistent with development-viability theory, the results show that blocks with greater residual development potential (residual floor area ratio [RFAR]), lower plot fragmentation, and higher incomes were significantly more likely to be redeveloped. Development was also more likely where RFAR varied within blocks, indicating a preference for infill opportunities. The findings further show that redevelopment was less likely in blocks with higher proportions of Black residents, suggesting racialised outcomes. The paper explains where redevelopment occurs and how regulatory and structural factors combine to mediate these patterns.
Planning in the United States is primarily taught using domestic examples, often excluding perspectives from other world regions. If planning schools in the United States include international cases, they are typically limited to electives or costly study abroad experiences that reinforce a universal and Western view of planning. As scholars from non-sovereign and occupied territories who studied planning in the United States, we propose pluralizing planning education through dialogic pedagogies with knowledge from the borderlands. We contribute a practical pedagogical intervention to encourage engagement with diverse geopolitical contexts and worldviews that challenge what and how students learn about planning.
Why are many (early-career) urban academics expressing frustration over the division between the values scholars espouse and how academic work contributes to the institutional changes it promotes? Building on the premise that “critique” (exposing wrongs) and “vision” (advocating for new, enlightened ways of acting) has remained a prominent strategy in urban studies, this commentary reflects on the limits of relying on “critique and vision” alone as a means of pushing for change. As our contexts are more nuanced than simply fault-finding and advocating for more political space, this text considers the capacity of urban scholarship to support different planning possibilities.
Ride-hail and delivery platforms offer new ways to earn income using a car. But the ways that ride-hail and delivery platforms shift or fit into work opportunities for people earning low incomes remain unclear. Focus groups and a national survey of low-income ride-hail and delivery drivers in the United States examine motivations to drive and how driving relates to broader work opportunities. Findings show that driving complements (fills employment gaps), supplements (provides extra money), or replaces traditional work. Drivers leverage flexibility and adjust work hours based on changing needs. In many ways, driving reflects the systemic economic precarity faced by low-income workers.
Housing insecurity in the United States continues to deepen, with conventional housing policies failing to meet the needs of unhoused populations. In response, tiny house villages (THVs) have grown as a grassroots solution, offering small, community-based dwellings. THVs sometimes operate outside conventional zoning and building regulations, reflecting a less formal mode of housing. Scholars have conceptualized similar arrangements using terms such as gray spaces , semi-formal housing , and hybrid urbanisms to describe similar forms of informality. Building on this literature, we employ the concept of quasi-formal housing to describe housing practices that have not yet been fully integrated into or recognized by formal urban planning frameworks. THVs can exemplify this in-between status and demonstrate how communities respond creatively to crisis and systemic exclusion of low-income classes. We argue for a more intentional integration of such models into housing policy to support equity, dignity, and inclusion.
