Dan Banik speaks with Benjamin Bradlow about urban inequality, informal settlements, and why access to housing, sanitation, and transport remains so unequal in many of the world’s fastest-growing cities. The conversation explores how local politics, state capacity, and civil society shape whether cities become spaces of exclusion or inclusion.
Dan Banik speaks with Benjamin H. Bradlow, Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University, about how cities can grow without leaving millions behind. At a moment when more than a billion people live in informal settlements or slum-like conditions, the conversation explores why access to housing, sanitation, transport, and other basic urban services remains so unequal across the world’s rapidly expanding cities.
The discussion centers on Bradlow’s award-winning book, Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg, which asks why some democratic cities are more effective than others at reducing urban inequality. Drawing on a comparison of São Paulo and Johannesburg, Bradlow explains how local state capacity, bureaucratic coordination, and the relationship between governments and civil society shape whether excluded communities gain access to the material foundations of urban life.
Dan and Ben discuss informal settlements, affordability, infrastructure, and the role of housing movements in shaping urban governance. The episode offers a rich and accessible conversation on urban development, inequality, and the politics of inclusion, with lessons that extend far beyond the Global South.
[Dan Banik]
Ben, wonderful to see you and congrats on a brilliant new book.
[Benjamin Bradlow]
Thank you so much for having me, Dan.
[Dan Banik]
I was reading a UN report and it said that around a billion people, slightly over a billion people in the world live in so-called slums or informal settlements.
And that's like, what, 24% of the 25% of the world's urban population.
And this is only expected to rise to around 3 billion in 2050.
Much of this is, of course, driven by rapid and perhaps unplanned urbanization.
And, you know, given the fact that, you know, we have so many people living in these so-called informal settlements and slums, do you think this is a failure of urban planning or is it reflective of how our societies are organized?
[Benjamin Bradlow]
That's a great and big first question.
I mean, there's always been some degree of unplanned urban settlement in the history of urbanization. And that goes back to the kind of canonical industrial revolution cases in places like Manchester and England. The difference is the scale is much larger over the last 50 years or so, the more contemporary wave of urbanization. And the fact that it's not been attached to the same kind of industrial growth that earlier industrial urbanization was associated with.
So that's meant that the kinds of revenues that are being generated in the places where urbanization is happening, are not the same. So that means you don't necessarily have the fiscal capacities to actually deal with unplanned urbanization.
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That's also meant that you have governments that don't necessarily plan for urbanization because the growth model has not been an urban and industrial model.
In fact, economic growth in the rapidly urbanizing parts of the world over the last
few decades, last 30, 40 years, has been quite variable.
I mean, when I was beginning to work on these issues in the late 2000s, early 2010s, there was a kind of growth spurt going on in Africa.
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And you saw all these kinds of invocations of Africa rising, et cetera, et cetera.
And that growth spurt slowed down by the mid 2010s, particularly in
In some cases, you see it moving again now, but it's much more variable.
So you don't have the same kind of tight link between economic growth as traditionally accounted for and urbanization.
That's at the macro level.
A more micro level or meso level, you do see, at least in some cases...
Accompanying a wave of decentralization over the last 40, 50 years, you see increased capacities at subnational level, particularly at the local level.
That might lead us to expect that local governments can begin to plan for what otherwise we might think of as unplanned urbanization or informal urbanization.
[Dan Banik]
But do you think this is mainly because, let's say, in the so-called global south, that the starting point was difficult, that, you know, some of these cities were struggling before economic growth took off.
There were, you know, there was a lack of resources, unlike in maybe in our parts of the world, in the global north, where you have some space to adjust, to absorb this new, you know, wave of immigrants that are coming in to the cities.
Because, you know, some of the statistics show that it is mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia that this problem is getting worse.
So the question is, is it because the starting point was difficult, that they didn't have any breathing space?
There was a lack of resources.
Is that the story or is it also a matter of governance, of democracy, etc. ?
[Benjamin Bradlow]
So in a way, it's a bit of all of those things.
I mean, one of the kind of characteristic points to make about many aspects of development in the so-called Global South and why it's different than what we think of as the developed countries today is that state formation along many lines of analysis has been much newer
as these states are dealing with these pressures like rapid urbanization.
So post-colonial states in particular have had to develop state structures and state capacities at the same time as they're dealing with a range of demographic pressures, infrastructural pressures, economic pressures that earlier industrializers could
deal with all of these issues with, as you're suggesting, a bit more of that breathing room, as it were.
That's really important to understand that developing countries today face a degree of concatenating pressures along demographic, economic, political, social lines that
that are much more fluid and much more intense than what we might think of as the traditional models of planning and development that are associated with earlier industrializers.
[Dan Banik]
So, Ben, when I think about Beijing and I think about Mumbai or Johannesburg, some of the cities that I visit quite often in relation to my research projects, you know, it's fascinating to see how some of these cities have evolved in the last decade or so.
Like Beijing, the hotel I have been staying in for the
more of an informal settlement.
I wouldn't say a slum, but it was like, you know, smaller houses, but this is prime real estate.
And now you have, all of that has been cleared.
And now I think high rise buildings for offices are going to be constructed.
So these people have been moved.
But that's a different level of governance, you know, where things can happen.
I mean, people are told to move and they have to move.
Mumbai, where, you know, you have some of the richest people in the world living vis-a-vis slums.
You know, some of these really expensive five-star hotels, the view is a slum.
And all of this is happening at the same time.
And in Joburg, and I know you've been studying Alexandra, the township, one of the largest in the world, or in Nairobi.
So you have this fascinating thing about cities developing, countries, economies developing, inequality perhaps increasing between different groups.
Some cities, of course, had inequality to start with.
That was the earlier point I was trying to make.
About Beijing.
Not Beijing, not Beijing.
Beijing was much more equal, right?
So you have this kind of evolving situation.
And as I understand from your book, the big challenge for many people in these big cities is housing.
It's like the rent.
So people are worried, it's getting more expensive.
I can't afford to live here.
And so you have to move out and maybe commute.
So transportation is also important.
And then access to water, sanitation, facilities, etc.
So walk us through some of the typical challenges that local governments face when they have this rising urbanization.
And help us understand, Ben, successful cases.
I know in the book you talk about Sao Paulo and you compare it with Johannesburg.
Where have local governments actually succeeded in resolving some of these problems?
And where are some of the challenges that remain?
[Benjamin Bradlow]
So the more general point that you began with, when people move to cities, the first issue is where am I going to live?
I mean, that's a very intuitive problem for anybody to understand.
In international development circles, we have these poverty lines, for example.
These are poverty lines that are often very irrelevant to the urban experience, where the cost of living, particularly due to rent costs, is so much higher than anything that's captured in the kind of subsistence poverty line that institutions like the World Bank or the UN would use.
You have to find the cheapest place that you can meaningfully live, and that means just a roof over your head, and it might not be a very high-quality roof.
And that means that you're often occupying land that's not serviced with basic infrastructure that hasn't been incorporated into any kind of formal collective transport or even semi-formal or informal collective transport mechanism.
And so the question is, how do these services get extended to informal settlements?
The way that I think about this
is you can't just measure inclusion in the city, in the public goods of the city, the built environment of the city, merely by virtue of whether you have a place to live physically in the city.
And in fact, if we start from the position that informality
is characteristic of significant parts of urban residential life in most of the world, then the question for inclusion is, how do the basic infrastructures of the city get progressively extended to these informal spaces?
One problem, for example, with sanitation services.
So if you want to have a flush toilet, which would seem like a very basic modicum of dignity for residential life, that will mean usually some kind of sewer system, which requires an extension of pipes underground.
Usually there are some more experimental technologies that people use, but that's commonly how we think about it.
In order to extend a service like that, most governments in the world will require that the property, the land parcel that is receiving the sewer has a clearly identified ownership title.
So that can make it very difficult to extend these services in contexts of quite extensive informality.
So, you know, you have cities, many cities where more than half of residents are living informally today.
[Dan Banik]
And local governments would sometimes be justified, perhaps, if they say, well, it's illegal where you're living, so we can't provide you that service, right?
So that's an easy way out for them, a good excuse.
[Benjamin Bradlow]
Exactly.
And it's not as though, you know, it's a bit complicated because you don't want to cast local government from the outset as just kind of an arena of shirkers, let us say.
There's so many competing pressures on local governments in these contexts of significant informality.
And what they might reasonably say is not just, well, this is illegal, though there are plenty of instances.
I mean, I've heard this from local government officials in different parts of the world quite explicitly.
They'll invoke that kind of rationale.
But even a more benevolent local government logic might be,
Well, if we extend this now, then we won't be able to do the comprehensive planning that we'd like to do in the future for a city that could be more formal.
That's a more benevolent twist on the same thing that you're suggesting.
But nevertheless, if we accept informality as characteristic of urbanization today, then we can see why that either form of that logic is highly problematic, because the ultimate outcome is that you're not going to be able to extend those services to significant populations in the city.
And so one of the things that I set out to do in my work is to try to understand why some local governments are more effective than others in trying to extend these services precisely in the context of informality where such deep challenges arise and make it difficult to extend those services.
[Dan Banik]
So in that context, tell us about this comparison that you've undertaken in this wonderful book of yours between Sao Paulo and Johannesburg.
What worked in Sao Paulo and what has worked and not worked perhaps in Joburg in relation to the provision of these services?
[Benjamin Bradlow]
I think one thing that's important is to explain why did I choose these two cities to try to illuminate this much broader phenomenon that we've been discussing so far.
In a way, these are contexts where we might expect, in some ways, we might expect the worst possible outcomes.
These are globally integrated, global south cities that are really dependent on forces well beyond the control of a local government.
in those kinds of contexts.
So we might expect that local government in cities like Sao Paulo and Johannesburg can do very little.
On the other hand, these are cities, the largest city in countries that had major urban mobilizations for democratization in the 80s and early 90s, that led to a reallocation of significant powers and fiscal authority to the
local government, strong political will to redistribute to the poorest people in the country.
And in fact, in those cities in South Africa, you had the operating slogan of de-racializing the city with one tax base for one city in Johannesburg.
And so in that instance, we might expect that these cities would be very well situated after democratization to redistribute.
And what I found is that actually there's significant variation between these two cities over the last 30 years or so.
That is essentially after democratization and decentralization in these two contexts.
And that Sao Paulo had actually been, it actually started from a situation that in many ways was worse than
than Johannesburg if you look at conditions and informal settlements at the moment of democratization.
If you take, for instance, access to a flush toilet if you live informally.
In Sao Paulo, one in four households had access to a flush toilet in the first census after democracy.
And it was about a third of households in informal settlements in Johannesburg had access to a flush toilet in the first census after democratization.
That led me to want to do a more kind of field-based and historical study to understand why this variation existed.
And what I found in a nutshell is that two factors mattered here.
The first is what I call embeddedness, and that's referring to the embeddedness of the local state in civil society and particularly in a sphere of citywide housing movements.
These are movements of people in informal settlements in the city.
And we can talk about that concept a bit more if you
if you'd like.
And the second is what I call the cohesion of the local state.
And that refers to the capacity of the local state to coordinate across line agencies or departments within local government, as well as to coordinate vertically across scales of government, local, state or provincial government, national or federal government.
[Dan Banik]
Right.
So that is what you call urban power.
So it has the embeddedness and the cohesion aspects.
And I know you're inspired by Peter Evans' work.
He taught me many, many years ago.
What a wonderful book, Embedded Autonomy.
[Benjamin Bradlow]
He was on my committee too.
[Dan Banik]
Oh, he was.
So Ben, I'm thinking about, I've never been to Sao Paulo, but I've been to Rio.
And among the many things I remember very well, it is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
But of course, some of the best views come from the favelas that are sitting atop a hill.
But getting there is really difficult.
Transportation, long and winding roads, often unsafe because of crime, etc.
And one of my vivid recollections, Ben, from that time was this cable car that they had constructed from the center up to these favelas.
Some of these favelas were pacified, some weren't.
But what was fascinating is that this was a way in which citizens, firstly, of course, it was cheaper to live.
The further up, it was cheap, right?
Rent-wise, further away from the center, it was cheap.
But this was a way, using this cable car, you could bypass all the roads and all the challenges down below, and you could go home.
And it was like a fixed amount of money or whatever, the ticket, and it was pretty safe.
So the thing that I wanted to ask you is that in addition to what you were mentioning about housing, affordability, transportation, and also access to sanitation, safety appears to me at least to be a very important demand, particularly in Jo'burg.
where crime is pretty high.
And so people often, when I talk to colleagues, they say, I can't afford to live here.
The rent is, it's safe, but the rent is high.
I have to live somewhere else where it is cheaper, but I'm exposed to other vulnerabilities.
So where does safety figure in all of this?
And how is the situation different in Sao Paulo from Rio that I just described?
[Benjamin Bradlow]
In my work, I actually didn't, I made a conscious decision not to study public security and policing.
The reason for that is it's a very different kind of service from the physical infrastructures of things like housing, transportation, and sanitation.
And what I was interested in studying those are what are the social and political dynamics behind a physical infrastructure?
Whereas security is a fundamentally, it's just a social infrastructure.
And human resources, particularly in policing, they're not only in policing, are often much more central here or exclusively central.
The difference between Sao Paulo and Rio, it's often been
This is not very well documented, particularly in academic literature, but the story there is kind of well known in the sense that they're very different organized crime dynamics and the relationship between organized crime and government in these two contexts.
And actually in Sao Paulo, the Primero Comando de Capital, the PCC, has a kind of hegemony
as organized crime in the state of Sao Paulo.
And it's even been argued in many instances that the state government of Sao Paulo actually struck a deal of sorts or some kind of truce with the PCC in order to enable quite a stable sort of hegemony, whereas Rio has been riven by fights between two major organized crime groups for quite some time.
And there are a number of studies of crime in Rio that have
that have documented this.
[Dan Banik]
The favela dynamics are the same or similar?
[Benjamin Bradlow]
So one thing that I think is important, even for the physical infrastructure of favelas, these are the informal settlements in Rio versus Sao Paulo, is that you don't have the same... Actually, so the conditions in Sao Paulo have improved quite a lot compared to Rio.
Very important variation there.
And you don't have the same kinds of housing movements...
that are organized at the citywide scale in Rio as you do in Sao Paulo.
And this is something that I really want to emphasize.
A lot of the work on informal settlements and movements has focused on the role of movements at the neighborhood level.
And how do neighborhood movements achieve gains for their neighborhood?
And what I found in Sao Paulo is it's not just about a single neighborhood.
It's about how do movements organize at the citywide scale in order to generate programmatic policies that can achieve a degree of inclusion that's realized at the citywide scale.
This is much more about how movements influence policy and then make sure policy is instantiated in implementation on the ground, as opposed to what a lot of the literature on urban movements is focused on, which is how do more particular neighborhood level benefits get secured through neighborhood activism?
And in Rio, there are certainly instances of that.
But you don't have the same kind of programmatic changes that I found in a case like Sao Paulo.
[Dan Banik]
President Lula, who's now back in power in Brazil, and his party have apparently played a very important role in this success story in Sao Paulo, right?
How would you characterize this embeddedness and cohesion aspects briefly?
What worked in Sao Paulo that has been more of a challenge, say, in Johannesburg?
[Benjamin Bradlow]
The first mayoral election where the Workers' Party, known as the PT, won in Sao Paulo was part of a wave of municipal elections where the PT first came to power in a number of cities in Brazil at the end of 1988, starting their mayoral terms on January 1st, 89.
The person who won the mayoral seat in Sao Paulo was actually, she ran in a primary against the preferred candidate of Lula.
So Lula has actually had a kind of more ambivalent relationship, as a personality, Lula has had a more ambivalent relationship with the politics of Sao Paulo over time, but his party for sure is important here.
And what this mayor did, her name was Luisa Arrungina, and actually she's still, she's quite old now, but she's still active in Brazilian politics.
She insisted that her, she had been a social worker in the peripheral working class neighborhoods of the city prior to becoming mayor.
And she insisted that her top officials all engage on a very regular basis with the movements that had helped her get elected, which were housing movements from the peripheral favelas of the city.
And one key outcome of this is the housing department began a program for self-build housing programs in the far peripheries of the city, which to this day remains a key calling card, let us say, of housing movements in their activism with city officials.
That is, they were given a direct stake in the housing policies of the city.
And what these projects did, it wasn't just about housing, but it enabled the city itself to begin extending sanitation services, sewers, water.
You began to see in later years, you began to see public transportation extended to many of these areas in the bus system.
[Dan Banik]
What explains this coordinating capacity, that second aspect?
What worked?
How did they suddenly get this capacity?
[Benjamin Bradlow]
So in this early period, one thing that happened was you had a huge expansion of what sometimes we call street-level bureaucrats.
In the housing department, for example, these would be field architects who are working in the favelas with housing movements on these early self-built housing projects.
These field architects, some of whom I interviewed, they would become later very senior officials.
in city government.
So you had the development over time of very deep network ties within city government that was rooted in these early experiences of working at the street level.
I remember one of these kinds of officials who became quite senior but started as a field architect, he used the language of this was the embryo of what we understood as local government.
But one thing that's really important is I don't want to say this is just about the PT.
The PT is certainly important.
But what struck me was how bureaucrats, many of whom came out of the PT in their kind of activist formation, they referred to other kinds of initiatives that they felt made their work more effective.
Part of that was the role of planning, that a law passed under a center-right government.
This was actually still under the government of the most, I'm a sociologist, so the most famous sociologist, head of state, Fernando Enrique Cardoso in the early 2000s.
passed a city statute in Brazil, which, among other things, mandated that all cities must produce master plans.
And the city of Sao Paulo used its master planning process, and this was the first large city in Brazil to actually produce a master plan, to include tools like one in particular that's called Zones of Special Social Interest.
That's the translation of its Portuguese name.
which allows the city to extend services to areas that have not fully formalized individual land title.
And this drew on a constitutional provision for what's called a social function of property in the Brazilian constitution.
All of which is to say that there was a much deeper set of conditions between scales of government, linking the federal and the local in this case, that gave local government power to begin extending services.
By the time you have a set of center-right governments at the local level in Brazil, it's important.
The PT has never won reelection in the city in Sao Paulo.
you have a set of center-right bureaucrats where many of the informants that I interviewed in those governments described their relationship with movements in the city and their use of these kinds of legal tools and fiscal transfers from the federal government that enabled that work to continue.
So it was not something that
required the PT to always be there in order for it to work.
Though I do think these early experiences of a workers' party government were quite critical to make this process begin in the way that I've described.
[Dan Banik]
It was interesting to hear you talk about the street-level bureaucrat.
And I was thinking about Peter Evans' work, Embedded Autonomy, and the argument that particularly in South Korea, some of these district-level officials took upon themselves this idea or this responsibility to function as entrepreneurs.
So they were not just state officials.
They were trying to sell their district.
They were trying to do their best to promote their district, attract investments.
And I wonder to what extent that also explains the fact, and I read in your book that in Sao Paulo, local government was able to enter into agreements with private transporters, right?
Transportation actors.
And so there was this deal that was done.
And if you can then compare this with the role of the ANC and the street level bureaucrats there in Joburg,
What was it that didn't work for the ANC?
What is it that didn't work for local officials in Joburg?
Why were they not able to strike these deals?
What explains the lack of embeddedness and the lack of cohesion in Joburg that you saw in Sao Paulo?
[Benjamin Bradlow]
It's important.
When Evans was writing Embedded Autonomy, he was talking about national economic development.
So I think you're absolutely right to bring up this kind of low-level entrepreneurialism within the bureaucracy.
which is important because at the end of that book, he says it's true that relationships with business elites and bureaucratic elites has driven the heart of the story that he's telling about national economic development in Korea.
And he uses a few other comparison cases, including Brazil.
But he ends the book by saying civil society is likely another way that this could work.
And in his last chapter, he brings in the work of Patrick Heller in Kerala in India to talk about the development of a welfarist developmental state there that's driven by much more kind of participatory mechanisms that link government to civil society.
Now, in Johannesburg, ANC, this is a party that is the party of Nelson Mandela.
This is a party that has, in the early 90s, it has very strong links to organized labor.
COSATU, the Trade Union Federation in South Africa, is an alliance partner.
It still is an alliance partner of the ANC.
The early policies of the ANC are very geared towards
redistribution and the building of a welfare developmental state.
And at the municipal level, you have the city of Johannesburg immediately starts with a set of significant fiscal outlays to extend services to very deprived Black townships in the city.
One key difference is that there's an interim
political arrangement in the city where sub-municipal structures, there were four of them for a few years at the beginning of municipal government in Johannesburg, have a lot of power, including the power to initially collect property rates revenue, which is then supposed to be handed over to a central city fiscus.
And I found that there was an emergence of wealthy neighborhoods that actually were ring fencing their tax contributions
to stay in their area so it wouldn't cross-subsidize the kinds of fiscal outlays that the central city was making in the former black townships of the city.
But then there's another dimension.
The fiscal capacity of the city was being undermined almost from the get-go in the Joburg case.
But the other thing is the ANC government in Johannesburg takes a very different attitude towards movements than the PT government does in Sao Paulo.
And that's why I emphasized the way that this mayor in Sao Paulo entered office and the kind of almost co-governing that she insisted that her officials must do with movements.
ANC had a different kind of almost explicitly Leninist, vanguardist orientation to how it entered government, saying the movements that brought us to power must now stand down.
And we believe in a state-only driven model where we will now deliver to the people.
And the idea was that movements would make governing too messy and too difficult.
So in some instances, you had movement leaders being brought into government and effectively being de-linked from their movement bases.
And in other instances, you had some high profile cases of movement leaders who insisted on a more kind of co-governing or embedded set of arrangements who ended up being purged precisely because they were seen as kind of making governing too messy.
And so what I argue is that you had a double whammy in a way.
On the one hand, you had the fiscal capacity of the state being in a kind of hidden way undermined as rates were being withdrawn.
And then you had the demobilization of precisely the kind of movement base that
that could have generated counterpower within the local government sphere to counter those kind of more traditional elites who were withdrawing their fiscal contributions to what would necessarily have to be some kind of cross-subsidizing arrangement to include the most excluded parts of the city in the physical infrastructures of the city.
[Dan Banik]
I'm just thinking about the concept of political settlements, which has become really important in the literature.
Stefan Durkun has been on my show.
He has this argument about gambling for development, that elites have to agree on an idea of development.
And so to what extent do you think there was that political settlement, that elites in Brazil, in Sao Paulo, actually agreed that the provision of these services...
to informal settlements was important for their survival, for their welfare.
So it was actually good for everyone versus the fact that perhaps elites in Jo'burg even today don't agree.
Is that one way in which we can see this?
And I also wanted to ask you about corruption.
How does that fit in or does not perhaps fit into the picture?
[Benjamin Bradlow]
So in terms of these kinds of elite agreements, it's absolutely important.
But there's always the question of, well, where does the elite buy and come from?
In many ways, we might have expected Sao Paulo to have much more intransigent elites in a way.
Arguably, this was a much more pacted democratic transition.
The legitimacy of elites in Brazil was not challenged in the same way in South Africa.
I mean, there was a real kind of deeply moral content there.
to the transition in South Africa that made this kind of a moral beacon to the world in a lot of ways, which was around the issue of race.
So you had traditional and almost exclusively white elites could not make an argument formally that redistribution was not required.
The political and even normative legitimacy of the ANC government was extremely high in the mid-90s.
The question remains, well, how do you actually bring elites to the table to make the bargain in practice?
And what my findings suggest in this regard is that it's precisely this embeddedness of the local state in a sphere of movements over a long period of time that produces the kind of counterpower that elites, particularly real estate elites, because these are the kinds of elites that matter in a lot of city politics.
elites had to reckon with that counter power that was being generated through this embeddedness.
And one example that I like to give to demonstrate this is the real estate sector in Sao Paulo had to participate in participatory municipal housing councils.
Now, this could have been a very pro forma kind of arrangement.
But the representatives from the real estate sector readily acknowledged that their interest alone could not serve the public interest.
Similar kinds of people in Johannesburg would insist that the public interest was contained within the real estate sector itself and that there was no need to listen to activist voices in order to plan
for the management and extension of services in the city.
So there's a very different kind of attitude that's generated by this counterpower that I think suggests at least an answer to why do elites come to the table in some instances and not in others.
And corruption?
Yeah, the question of corruption.
Corruption is such a normative concept in a way.
And, you know, if you look at the work, I can't remember if she's been on your show, but she seems like the kind of person who could be on your show, Yuan Yuan Ang.
She has.
Yeah, she studied corruption and development in China.
And she's written about, I can't remember the exact term, but effectively a form of developmental corruption.
That is, sometimes corruption enables certain kinds of elite bargains effectively.
And in other instances, corruption is true capture and elite extraction.
I want to caution to say that Sao Paulo, if you arrive there for two minutes, you will see that it's a very unequal city and there's all kinds of problems there.
So this is not kind of heaven on earth.
And there's a lot of corruption there.
There's a lot of corruption in most large cities in the world.
The question is, when does that begin to undermine the capacity of cities to really begin including the most excluded parts of the city?
In Johannesburg, which has actually gotten a lot worse in many ways in terms of public service delivery since the time that I study in my book, which ends in 2016, that was when the ANC stopped having a majority in the city council.
you see an even greater deterioration in public services in Johannesburg that's accompanied by an even greater degree of extractive corruption in the city.
Whereas in Sao Paulo, I think you see a much more, I don't know if it's always developmental, but at least something that doesn't undermine the capacity of the bureaucracy to continue to extend services to the most excluded parts of the city.
[Dan Banik]
So a lot of this wonderful evidence that you've generated from these two cases from the global south could have huge implications, not just for other cities in the global south, but also in our parts of the world.
And I'm thinking of Oslo, Norway, where I live.
Housing is a huge problem, the same problem.
demand the same complaint that you mentioned earlier.
Everybody's talking about high rents and how difficult it is to find housing because we're not building enough and a lot more people are moving into the city.
And this has implications for transportation.
It has implications for sanitation.
It has implications for my garden because now maybe a few years ago, actually, the local government was thinking about taking over some of this property because they felt that they wanted to build high rises.
rather than having some of our houses have gardens.
So very quickly, if you can reflect on how some of the experiences that you've reflected on in the book can also offer some lessons for cities in our parts of the world.
[Benjamin Bradlow]
Well, the example that I've been thinking about most recently is in New York City with a movement-oriented mayor, Zoran Mamdani,
And one of the first things that he did upon entering into office about two months ago was create something called the Office of Mass Participation.
And in fact, the conceptualization of this office was in part driven by people who drew directly on the Brazilian experience.
And the argument that was made is in order to deliver on the substantive values
priorities of the Mandani administration.
And housing was absolutely front and center throughout his campaign.
The argument was you need to have
a continuous embeddedness, if you will, of local government in a sphere of activism that can help drive precisely the kinds of elite settlements that we've just been talking about.
The issue that you face in New York, this is the seat of global capital.
If ever there were a seat of global capital, certainly New York would be a contender.
If ever there were a seat of global real estate, certainly New York would be a contender.
And so the Mamdani wager, as it were, is that in order to generate some kind of counterpower to begin delivering on the kinds of goals that he has around more affordable housing, you need to be embedded in a sphere of activism at a citywide scale that can actually generate a more even approach to city making.
And so I think it's absolutely right that the arguments that I'm making from
a comparison in the global South, I would like to think could be very helpful for rethinking approaches to urban governance challenges today, including in wealthier parts of the world, even in New York.
[Dan Banik]
Well, Ben, I really enjoyed reading your book, and I also very much enjoyed this conversation.
So thank you very much for coming on my show.
[Benjamin Bradlow]
Thank you so much for having me, Dan.
I can also clean this up into a polished transcript with paragraphing, removal of repetition, and correction of obvious captioning errors.
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