Inequality, scale and public policy: A spatial analysis of public services in Rio de Janeiro’s slums

Abstract

In the literature on the relationships between public policies and urban social structure, several works show that, by concentrating investments in higher-income areas, the State reinforces inequalities instead of alleviating them. Known as “circular causation”, this dynamic is generally studied through the comparison between neighborhoods within a city. In this kind of analysis, the middle class and upper middle class neighborhoods emerge as areas repeatedly valued by public investments, to the detriment of poorest neighborhoods of the city, favelas included. In this paper, the intention is to check the hypothesis that this dynamic is not inherent to the city scale, as it can also be observed on the neighborhood scale. For this, it was analyzed the spatial relations between public services and the socio-economic areas of Rio de Janeiro’s three largest favelas. Using 2010 Demographic Census data at the census tract level, the analysis shows the concentration of services in the higher income areas in each favela, suggesting a process analogous to the one operating at citywide scale.