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“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

The concept of novelty is central to questions of creativity, innovation, and discovery. Despite the prominence in scientific inquiry and everyday discourse, there is a chronic ambiguity over its meaning and a surprising variety of empirical measures, which muddle the interpretation of prior findings and frustrate the consolidation of knowledge. To help dispel some of the unclarity, this paper presents a survey and synthesis of conceptualizations and operationalizations of novelty scattered across social, cognitive, and organizational studies. From this analysis, I advance the argument that novelty is generally regarded as a function of frequency or proximity, and in these two complementary perspectives, it is commonly bounded its empirical study and theoretical understanding. I further argue that contextual and temporal aspects are integral to the specification of novelty and primary contributors to its multifaceted nature.

In Brazil, to speak of the ‘suburb’ is to evoke a rhetoric of need and subordination, and in Rio de Janeiro this is even more the case because, there, ‘suburb’ tends to connote something very different from the usually upper- or middle-class neighbourhoods the same term brings to mind, say, in the United States. This is because, in general, in wealthier countries the term mostly connotes affluence and ‘white flights’, while in the Global South it can include both such wealthier areas and the largely impoverished peripheries. This is very much the case in Rio: to live in a ‘suburb’, there, tends to mean that one comes from a poorer background and needs to content oneself with living far removed from the cultural, social and economic centre of the city inhabited by elites – often, suburbanites spend up to three hours only to get to their jobs, and then the same amount of time to get back home again at the end of a tiresome day.