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This chapter presents an assessment of the participatory process during the PUI upgrading initiative, drawing on extensive interview data with residents, experts and municipal staff. It highlights the potentials and limitations of participatory processes in upgrading informal settlements. Structured into three parts, focusing on the process, the products and the effects of the PUI, it discusses topics such as social and material sustainability, self-esteem, place attachment and use of space, formal and informal economic development, political image-making and more.

While a substantial amount of study of informal settlements has been undertaken, they remain largely unstudied in terms of urban form. In this analysis, the purpose of this paper is to set forth a conceptual framework, which considers the context in which informality takes place, the settlement itself, the houses contained therein, the dwellers of those houses and the process through which a settlement is designed and transformed over time.

This is a literature review.

This framework aims to be sufficiently flexible to be deployed across diverse national settings. Its formulation is important because informal settlements are a permanent fixture of the global urban landscape, and are increasing in scale.

Any sustainable strategies to improve informal settlements depend on a better understanding of their urban space, as well as of the producers of this space – the residents themselves. Finally, professional designers may be able to learn from this contemporary urban vernacular grammar – perhaps the only one left in the era of sanitized, contrived and prosaic urban design.

This case features an entrepreneur striving to rapidly grow a successful chain of hair salons that serve women with afro hair. After doubling from 13 to 26 salons across Brazil in 2014, the founders' expansion plan called for 120 Beleza Natural salons and R$1 billion in sales by 2018. CEO and cofounder Leila Velez is considering various fundamental marketing strategies to catalyze growth: Should Beleza launch a new mass-media campaign, increase promotional discounts, expand its target market to serve men, broaden its service offerings, streamline processes to reduce wait times, expand distribution channels, or franchise? Students assume the role of Velez and are asked to recommend which growth strategy would be their top priority. In doing so, they are required to evaluate how these strategies pertain to the company's business model and value proposition. They are also challenged to consider what a brand is and what makes a strong service brand in order to verify if their strategies are consistent with Beleza's brand. The teaching note outlines a framework for developing or evaluating a business model as well as developing strategies for managing growth. The case is accompanied by a series of video interviews with Velez that support case preparation, in-class discussion, and key learning points.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role played by small-size non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in slum upgrading, building and incremental housing processes in Brazil and Guinea-Bissau, focusing, in particular, on actions to reduce vulnerabilities and enhance community resilience.

The research method relied on literature review and fieldwork. It included surveys, activities with the communities, interviews and questionnaires. The data collected were subject to cross-disciplinary and comparative analysis.

The paper analyses the innovative methods and solutions used by NGOs in informal settlement upgrading and housing improvement works related to disaster risk reduction, namely, community mapping and design, and show how they end up building community resilience.

Grasping the impacts of NGOs’ work whether in slums of Brazil or Africa requires staying with communities for a significant amount of time. However, those stays raise many practical problems regarding security, health and related costs.

The existing literature misses to address from a comparative perspective, the methods used by social workers and designers teams in slums. This paper aims at filling this gap in slum studies. Its originality and value rely on the particular experience of the authors, who were personally involved in the NGOs actions and could deepen the connections between vulnerabilities, risk and successful aid-self-help practices.

This study aims to identify the transformations of the residential landscape and trends in the popular real estate market associated with tourist activity in a low-income neighborhood in Bogotá.

The methodology was mainly qualitative, although the author analyzed some quantitative data. The author conducted three guided tourist tours in the area and systematically compared photographs taken in 2022 with satellite images in 2019 before starting the tourist activity. To analyze the real estate market, the author uses data on housing offers for sale and rent. Finally, the author conducted semi-structured interviews with tour guides, residents and other key actors in the sector.

This study identified some dynamics of change in the real estate market, particularly associated with an increase in housing sales and rental prices, as well as a possible effect on the increase of new informal growth processes. The author found a growing transformation of the urban and residential landscape associated with the painting of facades by the local administration and mural painting processes by community organizations. There are evident housing investment processes, some associated with verticalization and other use changes for tourism activities. It is necessary to reflect on these processes’ effects on the city’s sociospatial dynamics.

This study makes an empirical contribution to the relationship between residential real estate markets in low-income sectors and tourism activity. Although analyses of community-based tourism in popular areas have been conducted, less is known about the effects on the real estate market and the associated sociospatial transformations.

This chapter presents a comparative study of the trends and patterns of communication and tourism research in Brazil and the United States over the last 20 years. Through a bibliometric analysis of the CAPES and EBSCO databases, the study identifies the main theoretical and methodological references, classifies the fundamental themes in the area, and describes the role of communication for tourism. The results indicate the predominance in North American scientific literature of research related to the image and the brand of the tourist destinations, as well as the measurement and the evaluation of the communicative strategies. On the other hand, Brazilian research presents a greater diversity of approaches: destination image studies, tourism consumption, tourist narrative analysis, identities, social networks, community-based tourism, sports, and ecological tourism, with an explicit recognition of the dangers of sexual objectification and dehumanization within tourism. The survey showed that the scientific community has a strong interest in this area, signaling a search for knowledge to deepen the conceptual understanding of the subject. Thus, this chapter provides insights regarding the opportunities and directions for the next decades of research in this field of study.

This study aimed to analyze the most common child’s play of students (approximately seven years old) both during the playtime and the time they are not at school, also considering the teacher’s interpretation of the child’s play practiced in the school, located in a small slum of the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte. In this way, the analysis considered the issues that involve the recognition of the essentiality of childhood (Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 2003; Sarmento, 2007), in the context of the reality and affectivity of children in the place called slum (Coelho, 2007; Perez & Jardim, 2015, Tuan, 1983), as well as in aspects that demonstrate the control of their bodies through the child’s play performed in the school (Brighente & Mesquida, 2011; Foucault, 2009). As a methodological basis, participant observation was chosen because it was believed that from this practice it was possible to extract important experiences and reflections from the research participants, know our actions and, by observing these people, their behaviours and attitudes in routine situations (Lüdke & André, 1986). The results suggested that the slum children’s play, both in school and outside, are different among boys and girls. In the open areas of the slum, the boys explore more spaces than girls, who prefer child’s play in the domestic sphere. At school, educators try to censure some behaviours and attitudes of children, suggesting the pursuit of obedient postures and disciplined bodies. In this context, it is crucial that educators do not convert the school into a place of censorship of the child’s play that resides in the slums and thus transforming the school into a space that reinforces the domestication of bodies from the earliest stages of childhood.