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This article examines a case of urban displacement currently underway in central Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In some respects, this case represents a classic example of what researchers call ‘downward raiding’: a type of urban displacement whereby low-income housing is exploited by higher-income groups. Yet, in other respects, it also raises important questions about the ways urban displacement happens in public housing, as well as how downward raiding operates on the ground in cities. By exploring these questions, this article aims to accomplish two goals: first, to investigate an overlooked and often hidden form of urban displacement that, in this case, coincides with a large-scale, public–private housing initiative; and, second, to critically interrogate the concept of downward raiding in order to better understand and define the process. It is argued that by placing greater emphasis on how, empirically speaking, urban displacement happens, researchers may gain new insight into diverse forms of urban displacement in cities around the world.
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Health effects of heat vulnerability in Rio de Janeiro: a validation model for policy applications
Abstract Extreme heat events can lead to increased risk of heat-related deaths. Furthermore, urban areas are often hotter than their rural surroundings, exacerbating heat waves. Unfortunately, validation is difficult; to our knowledge, most validations, even if they control for temperatures, really only validate a social vulnerability index instead of a heat vulnerability index. Here we investigate how to construct and validate a heat vulnerability index given uncertainty ranges in data for the city of Rio de Janeiro. First, we compare excess deaths of certain types of circulatory diseases during heat waves. Second, we use demographic and environmental data and factor analysis to construct a set of unobserved factors and respective weightings related to heat vulnerability, including a Monte Carlo analysis to represent the uncertainty ranges assigned to the input data. Finally, we use distance to hospital and clinics and their health record data as an instrumental variable to validate our factors. We find that we can validate the Rio de Janeiro heat vulnerability index against excess deaths during heat waves; specifically, we use three types of regressions coupled with difference in difference calculations to show this is indeed a heat vulnerability index as opposed to a social vulnerability index. The factor analysis identifies two factors that contribute to >70% of the variability in the data; one socio-economic factor and one urban form factor. This suggests it is necessary to add a step to existing methods for validation of heat vulnerability indices, that of the difference-in-difference calculation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1664091
- PAR ID:
- 10316629
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SN Applied Sciences
- Volume:
- 2
- Issue:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 2523-3963
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s42452-020-03750-7
