Doctoral student Flávia Feitosa reporting from Brazil

My field research also included many visits to government institutions. As I have already described in this blog, the aim of most of these visits was to obtain existing official data. But there were some special cases, like my constant visits to the Municipal Public Archive. Many people found my work at the archive to be intriguing, stopping to inquire and find out why I was systematically copying advertisement information from the classified sections of old newspapers. Well, it was not that easy to guess the purpose of such an activity. I was actually collecting historical data about the real estate market, the idea being to collect the dwelling/land asking price in different neighborhoods within the city. Collecting and processing this data was definitely the most boring thing I have done during my field work! But I will try to focus on the gratifying side of this sacrifice.

First, the product we produced was great: the tables and maps created from this data, which show how real estate values and offers changed in the last decade, represents a key data set for understanding residential dynamics. Second, the time I spent at the municipal public archive was actually interesting. Looking through the pages of those old newspapers was like traveling back in time. I had the chance to read about many things that happened while I was a child, such as the news about old TV shows that I used to watch, or about Collor, the first president elected after a long period of dictatorship, who later suffered a process of impeachment due to corruption. It was also impressive to recall the major instability in the Brazilian economy during the early 90's and how the prices of dwellings would erratically rise due to the effect of inflation that was often increasing at rate of more than 1000 % per year.

The time I had in São José dos Campos - driving around, talking with people, visiting institutions, or while I was simply working in my office - was an enriching opportunity which I used to rediscover this place in a new light. I used this time to better understand the reality of what segregation really means and how it can affect the life of people. Indeed, it was definitely comfortable to be around old friends, to use my own language, and to have all the Brazilian things that were so familiar. But now I'm ready for the next phase of my work in Bonn. I feel more than ready to come back to ZEF and the daily fascination of learning from this unique environment where different cultures integrate and various backgrounds coexist.

March 2008
The other side of the story: Jardim São José II

Removing people from three shantytowns and concentrating them in a remote place can't be something good - was my first thought when I heard about Jardim São José II. Jardim São José II is a social housing settlement built in 2003 for accommodating about 450 families coming from favelas known as Nova Tatetuba, Caparaó, and Nova Detroit. It was the first place I wanted to visit after my meeting with the housing department director, but at this time I didn't want to conduct a field work as I usually do. My visits to social housing settlements - or I should say poor neighborhoods in general - are normally pretty much 'controlled', done with the accompaniment of a social worker, or quickly done by car, taking pictures, and checking places, equipments, housing typologies and land uses. This time I needed a different approach; I should be able to interact with the residents in order to understand their opinions about the positive and negative aspects of their new place. For this reason, it was better to leave the car and spread sheets for another time, and simply go there by bus, early in the day, when the place is not considered to be dangerous. So I did.

After a one hour bus trip, I arrived at Jardim São José II accompanied by Roberta, a field assistant that has the perfect character for this task; always happy, outgoing and motivated. Her first comment about the neighborhood was: 'Wow, what a lively place!' There were so many people on the streets, women talking to each other, kids around, and loud music playing everywhere. The atmosphere was definitely much different from the neighborhoods Roberta and I are familiarized to, where neighbors would complain about any excessive noise, where kids are not allowed to play outside the walls of their houses or condos, and adults are mostly busy at work.

Afterwards, we saw a group of women, surrounded by many kids, and we decided to just go talk with them. Their reaction was a bit odd, quite defensive, and different from the reaction of those we had met till then. But after some time, the conversation started to flow, and it continued like that until the moment when I committed a crucial mistake: I took a digital camera out of my purse and said 'Roberta, could you take a picture of us?' It was like having a sudden storm on our heads. They abruptly stood up, took their kids, and went strait to their houses telling us they wanted no pictures. We also reacted quickly - 'ok, no pictures' -, but it was too late. Then one of the women came back and said: 'Sorry for that, people here are suspicious of their own shadow. It is because at the time we arrived here, about 2 or 3 people had been murdered, just about every night.'

I know that the woman's words were an overstatement, but it was definitely enough for us! So, Roberta and I decided that we have called enough attention and it was time to leave. But then we had to face the reality of public transportation in such a distant and poor neighborhood; the soonest the next bus would arrive was 1 hour later. Considering that, our next plan was to go to the foundation and continue this visit under the supervision of a social worker who was already familiar to everyone. But on our way to the foundation we found another group of women, and they were so outgoing, with so many things to say, that we spent the remainder of our time with them. They acted as though they feared nothing, talking openly about so many things, and even asking us to send journalists there, and being very happy to have their pictures taken. I wonder why they behaved so differently from the first group but the only guess I have is related to the fact that they came from another favela. By the way, it was interesting to see how some people there despise neighbors who used to live in a favela different from the one they came from. They would also complain about being victims of prejudice, because nobody wants to give a job to someone who lives in Jardim São José II and so on. I thought: 'That sounds contradictory! They complain about the prejudice against them but act as prejudiced people against their own neighbors.' Actually, it is a fact that those who moved to Jardim São José II suffer with the stigma of living in a place where all the residents came from favelas, but at the same time they are happy with the fact that their old neighbors also moved to the same place and friendly relationships can be kept. Considering that, who can they blame for the stigmatization of their neighborhood? They blame those who are not their friends, who came from a different favela.

The advantage of being a foreigner

Once I entered the director's office for my meeting, I could see she looked exactly the way I expected: strong, decisive and self-assured. After exchanging greetings, the first thing she said was that she never gives data to students, since, in her opinion, they are all sympathetic to opposition parties, with the main intent of their studies being to criticize her department. However, she also said I seemed to be an exception, since I was an 'outsider' conducting my PhD in Europe. After hearing that, the only thing I could do was to take advantage of my condition as a 'foreign', emphasize my 'non-political' interests, and listen to what she had to say in order to understand better how the things work in her department. We talked a bit about my work, although I had to be extremely careful about the word segregation, which was not welcome at all. When the word appeared, she immediately claimed that everybody criticizes her for building houses in far places and said: 'I could build houses in more central areas, but it is expensive, and if I have to choose between building ten houses downtown and a hundred in the periphery, I will choose to build a hundred.' Well, this was a clear statement, which advocates a quantitative criterion of assessing housing policies. Then we started to talk about the program of 'desfavelização', which she has led since assuming her position. Opponents may have many arguments against the program, but one thing is a fact: she has achieved nearly all of the program's goals, which was to finish with the favelas of the city. The only remaining favela is the 'Favela of Banhado', which is located in a preservation area at the heart of the city. The favela has been 'frozen' for ten years and nobody can build a single wall there, but the residents keep resisting in leaving the place. The resistance is an expected reaction, since the favela is in an incredibly good location, where many formal and informal jobs can be found. The director, however, advocates that the resistance comes from few residents, who somehow profit from the favela's existence, such as drug dealers. According to the director, the resistance is also promoted by residents who own two or more shacks and profit from their rent. 'It is the poor exploiting the poor' she said.

While I sensed that the housing department had a centralized structure, ruled by a very decisive woman, the urban planning department seemed to have a different organization. My first contact there was with the head of the GIS section, who immediately provided me with the data that is considered to be 'public' and then gave me some tips on how to acquire data that required additional permissions. She also introduced me to the head of the research section, where the most important data for my work resided. This is the dataset of a survey conducted by a group of demographers, which includes information about intra-urban mobility, in other words, why people move from one residence to another. I had already talked with the group that organized the survey and collected some information about it, such as questionnaires, reports and its sample design. But this would be useless if I couldn't acquire permission from those who paid for it. Although very friendly, the head of the research section told me that this was the first requirement for the dataset/microdata itself and we would have to wait for the 'verdict' from the urban planning department director. The time of waiting for the director's answer was incredible uneasy, since the whole direction of my field research would have to be changed in case of a negative result. But in the end, everything went fine, despite the fact that the whole process of 'first contact/official requirement/receive the permission/get the data' took nearly 3 months.

So far I have described successful stories and these were definitely not those who consumed me the most. My first 'failure' was at the cadastre section of the treasury department. From this place I wanted to obtain data about urban buildings, such as its use (e.g., commercial or residential), condition, and fiscal value. While talking with the man responsible for this data, I could feel a strong impatience from his side. I had the impression that he was probably thinking something like: 'Please, let's skip this entire introduction and tell me exactly what you want'. So I tried to be as direct as possible, and received a dry answer affirming that it is impossible to have a digital table with this information, and that I should make an official requirement for having the data in a printed format. Ok, but what should I do with this huge pile of papers? Digitize all the information of more than 200.000 buildings? I submitted an official requirement anyways, but no sign of an answer so far. Meanwhile I started looking for alternative sources of information to serve as a proxy of the data I am seeking.

But the worst case, where I tested all my ability of being insistent, happened at the transportation department, where I was trying to acquire temporal data of public transport. I followed the standard procedure of going there, talking with the person who holds the data, and writing an official requirement. The answer came after a long time and many calls asking about the status of my request. I received the following response: 'Sorry, the public transport of the city is currently under a bidding process and our data is being protected. We advice you to use the information available in the internet'. The homepage of the department provides a consult system with the buses itineraries. Is it possible to organize, digitalize, and include this data in my geographical database? Yes, but it will require additional effort for something that already exists. However, I also need the same data for past years, when many of the current neighborhoods did not exist yet. This information is not available in internet, since nobody wants to check the bus schedule of 15 years ago. For this reason, instead of trying to understand the unclear relation between the denial of my request and the bidding process, I decided to focus on trying to obtain at least the data for some past years. I explained a bit more about the project and what I would do with the information (to make very clear that my intent is not to criticize the public transport system they advocate). Then I showed understanding for the need for confidentiality during this bidding period (I don't understand, but conflicts wouldn't help me), and asked about the possibility of obtaining only the outdated data (and therefore 'harmless' for the bidding process). The answer was negative again. Finally, I decided to write again (I didn't give up yet) and ask about the possibility of having the data after the bidding. I received no clear answer, only a repetition about the importance of confidentiality during the bidding period. So, the insistence exercise is over for now. I will probably try again during this new year. But only after the bidding process, of course!

These poor/rich residential ghettos I just mentioned are the most segregated areas of the city, and I will write a bit more about them later.

The National Institute for Space Research - INPE

The place where my office space is located, the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), could also be called a kind of "scientific" fortress. For two years I was a Master student at INPE, and following my graduation I worked there as a research assistant for a year before starting my PhD. Although the institute has become a very familiar place, I still remember the first time I arrived at INPE and how impressed I was with the imposing entrance, the presence of security guards well-dressed in black suits, cameras everywhere, the entrances and exits being controlled by personal name tags with chips, and cars being randomly inspected during their exit. I thought: 'Wow, this looks like a place where high technological secrets are being protected from spies'. But after hearing many stories, including a tragic one about a bank robbery that ended up with the death of one person, I realized that nowadays this control focuses less on scientific secrets, and more on protecting the institution against robberies and urban violence in general. Anyhow, what I can say is that INPE offers a great environment, with highly-qualified scientists. Thanks to that, my field research has an "academic" touch which goes beyond data collection and processing. I enjoy exchanging ideas with other people who are also working with modeling, receiving their feedback and learning from their experiences. I must confess that I consider this as the easy part of the work, where everybody talks a similar language and discordances often bring something better. It is much more difficult to face what lies beyond the walls of this fortress, where communication is often not as easy.

I'm an architect and urban planner, and my scientific interest about this topic started in 2003, during my master studies, when I focused on the development of global and local spatial measures of segregation. Through global measures it is possible to obtain the segregation degree of the city as a whole, while the local measures can be displayed as "maps of segregation" that reveal spatial patterns and indicate the most segregated areas.

Although very useful for diagnoses, these measures are simply snapshots of the segregation of a city. These snapshots can be compared through time but cannot reveal too much about the dynamic of segregation, which factors influence this dynamic, and how urban policies can act to minimize or intensify the phenomenon. Such shortcomings represent exactly my challenges as a PhD student at ZEF.

But how to understand the dynamics of segregation? Segregation has many features of a so called 'complex phenomenon'. Micro-level interaction between households and their urban environment are responsible for generating macro-level patterns of segregation. Such features that are inherent to segregation require the adoption of a bottom-up approach, which focuses on the individual behavior in a certain spatial environment and how the interactions of these individuals create global structures. Considering that, my work concerns the development of a multi-agent simulation model of urban residential dynamics for understanding the evolution of socioeconomic segregation and supporting policy strategies able to minimize the phenomenon.

My study area is São José dos Campos, a medium sized Brazilian city located at the State of São Paulo. During a preparatory period at ZEF I developed a simple prototype of the model with artificial data inspired on the structure of this city. Afterwards, I felt ready to start my field research with the main purpose of collecting the necessary data to build an empirical model. And it is what I have been doing since arriving here in September 2007.