The trajectory of social housing policy in Brazil: From the National Housing Bank to the Ministry of the Cities

This paper discusses social housing policy in Brazil since the 1990s by analyzing government programs’ institutional arrangements, their sources of revenues and the formatting of related financial systems. The conclusion suggests that all these arrangements have not constituted a comprehensive housing policy with the clear aim of serving to enhance housing conditions in the country. Housing ‘policies’ since the 1990s – as proposed by Fernando Collor de Mello, Itamar Franco, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and ´ Luis Inacio Lula da Silva’s governments (in the latter case, despite much progress towards subsidized investment programs) – have sought to consolidate financial instruments in line with global markets, restructuring the way private interests operate within the system, a necessary however incomplete course of action. Different from rhetoric, this has resulted in failure as the more fundamental social results for the poor have not yet been achieved.

Intervenções urbanas em espaços de desvalia. Transformar para valorizar.

The worldwide transformations that took place in the 20th century redefined the cities fate in this new century. The consolidation of urbanization, the technological revolution that fostered globalization, the economic restructuration and informalization, modified space and time concepts, bringing populations closer together and provoking political transformations. They made contemporaries cities protagonists of world events and as a consequence of such processes, worthlessness spaces appeared and cities all over the world started to bet on the strategy of acting in this problematic areas through initiatives aimed at promoting intentional transformations to obtain a multidimensional valorization urban, financial, environmental, cultural and social. In short, such urban initiatives intend to make cities more competitive, sustainable, creative, productive and fair. Also in Brazil, countless worthless spaces appeared in waterfronts, central areas, and deactivated industrial/urbanized areas, as well as in sub-used or misused areas lacking infrastructure and public services where it is imperative and urgent to perform urban initiatives. This research proposes as a thesis that urban initiatives, when carried out based on an adequate politicalinstitutional model, transform and give value to worthless spaces in their multiple dimensions, offering better quality of life to their residents and helping to fulfill the social role of the city. We intend to prove this thesis through the analysis of national and international cases and by introducing thoughts, critique and guidelines as a contribution to the improvement of the urban initiatives implementation processes, in particular to those regarding worthless areas of Brazilian cities

A loucura interrompida nas malhas da subjetividade manicomial

Psychiatric reform occurring in Brazil has progressed significantly during the last two decades, both in the transformation of the help structure and in the treatment of madness. At the same time a paralell movement is observed marked by the maintenance of the hospital centered or psychiatric ward ideology present not only in the psychiatric institutions but also in the substitute services in the cities and , above all, in the ways of contemporary subjectivation. We affirm that the idea of deinstitutionalization is intertwined with capitalistic agent both from the epistomological, assistance, and legal aspect as from the cultural one. This work aims mainly to discuss madness and subjectivity from the ethic esthetic-political perspective, specially the wishes of the psychiatric hospital, which we inhabit and who inhibits our interactions and our desired and creative productivity. We do also want to access the invisible threads that capture and modify madness, which make our cities a means for the production of pathologies, and those that, on the contrary, insinuate a process of resistance, facilitating life and health