Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Governance of Mega-Cities

城市地方政府分配公共物品的理论目的是提高城市居民的福利水平。 该项目比较了两个始于20世纪80年代和90年代初的特大城市的发展轨迹，它们的情况大致相当，包括相对较高的地方治理水平和对提供住房、卫生和公共交通等城市公共产品的承诺。 然而，尽管目标和战略相似，但国家干预措施在其中一个城市减少了城市不平等，却在另一个城市再现了这些不平等。 该项目有望为国家、民主和城市不平等之间的关系提供新的见解。 研究结果将有助于在社会变革中制定城市政策。 该项目将使用多种方法比较巴西圣保罗和南非约翰内斯堡的公共产品提供情况。 这些方法是：a）实地参与观察和与主要公共和私人行为者的访谈; B）对立法、报纸、行业出版物以及政府和非政府组织内部文件的档案研究;以及c）对住房、卫生和交通方面25年的定量数据进行空间分析。 研究设计和比较历史的分析方法，使之有可能分解的社会联盟和国家机构之间的互动随着时间的推移，并具体说明这些变化的机制。 该奖项的理论基础是关注邻里或城市规模的城市社会学和关注国家规模的发展社会学这两大社会学文献。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Local governments of cities distribute public goods in theory to improve the well-being of their residents. This project compares the trajectories of two mega-cities that in began in the 1980s and early 1990s from roughly equivalent situations, including a relatively high level of local governance and commitment to delivery of urban public goods such as housing, sanitation, and public transportation. Yet despite similar goals and strategies, while state interventions have reduced urban inequalities in one of these cities, they have reproduced these inequalities in the other one. This project promises to generate new insights into the relationship between states, democracy, and urban inequalities. Findings will be useful for urban policymaking in the midst of social change. They will inform understanding of how cities can coordinate politics and institutional change to deliver public goods.This project will use multiple methods to compare public goods provision in São Paulo, Brazil and Johannesburg, South Africa. The methods are: a) field-based participant observation and interviews with key public and private actors; b) archival research of legislation, newspapers, trade publications, and internal government and NGO documents; and c) spatial analysis of 25 years of quantitative data on housing, sanitation and transportation. The research design and comparative-historical methods of analysis make it possible to disaggregate changes in interactions between social coalitions and state institutions over time, and to specify the mechanisms of these changes. The theoretical basis for this work draws on two literatures in sociology: urban sociology, which focuses on the neighborhood or city scale, and the sociology of development, which focuses on the national scale.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.