Abstract
Abstract Grounded on semi-structured interviews, we seek to examine the impact of neighborhood effects on the individuals’ living conditions in four shanty-towns of Salvador, Brazil, addressing the question of under what conditions the proximity to affluent gated communities fosters their socio-economic integration. The research demonstrates that the relationship between spatial proximity and socio-economic integration is conditioned by the capacity of public space to promote (non)employment cross-class interactions, the impact of crime, and the gated communities' degree of securitization. Whereas in Calabar, large opportunities of socio-economic participation in its surroundings mitigate the negative impact of neighborhood effects, (non-)employment relationships sharply decline in the less centrally located Vale das Pedrinhas and Bate Facho, where the informal proletariat has been excluded from using the public space for commercial activities. The construction of the highly isolated gated community Alphaville II has neither fostered cross-class interactions nor benefitted the economic integration of the Vila Verde inhabitants. In all neighborhoods physical boundaries have been internalized by a similar discourse that emphasizes class-hierarchized opportunities for upward socio-economic mobility, particularly regarding the access to schools and public security. The study urges to reflect on a more holistic approach to social inequalities, comprising socially more integrative labor and housing policies.
Highlights
Research on neighborhood effects has a long-standing tradition in US American scholarship and has influenced the academic debate about urban poverty and racial segregation since the 1990s, while giving important impulses for desegregation policies (Sampson, 2012; Wilson, 1987)
We further examine the communities’ capacity of collective efficacy based on Sampson’s (2012) methodological framework, a component not integrated in Häußermann’s original proposal, but which becomes relevant for our study given the high incidence of crime in Salvador
Inferring from our results, we can conclude that neighborhood effects show a direct correlation with the socio-economic profile of the neighborhoods’ populations
Summary
Research on neighborhood effects has a long-standing tradition in US American scholarship and has influenced the academic debate about urban poverty and racial segregation since the 1990s, while giving important impulses for desegregation policies (Sampson, 2012; Wilson, 1987). Convergent trends in urban development show that the recent construction of wealthy gated communities in peripheral areas predominantly inhabited by the lower echelons tend to reproduce these spatial settings (Caldeira, 2000; Janoschka; Sequera, 2016; Prévôt-Schapira; Pineda, 2008). We seek to examine under what conditions the proximity to affluent neighborhoods mitigates the impact of structural disadvantages concentrated at neighborhood scale In this sense, we aim at contributing to the still incipient debate on neighborhood effects in Latin America and to the ongoing discussion on gentrification. Urban scholarship has analyzed the impact of gentrification on the metropolises’ socio-spatial organization (Borsdorf et al, 2015; Janoschka; Sequera, 2016; Prévôt-Schapira; Pineda, 2008) and has shown what happens inside these upper-class enclaves (Blakely; Snyder, 1997; Caldeira, 2000; Low, 2004), but hasn’t dedicated the same efforts to examine the impacts. The second section introduces the study’s methodological framework, whereas the third section exposes the results obtained within the qualitative fieldwork, which will be discussed in the fourth section
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