Editorial

Abstract

This issue of Urbe features articles from different regions of Brazil and authors based in Chile and Colombia. The articles discuss issues ranging from transport and urban mobility to urban planning and management training in South America, from the national plan for urban solid waste to the proliferation of club-condominiums across the country. This variety of articles shows the broad diversity of themes in urban studies, and how the problems reported in these papers are part of the routine of studies in urban management. Urban mobility is the theme of the first three articles. Scattered and fragmented urbanization patterns have become common in hundreds of Brazilian cities, affecting not only the big cities, but also the medium-sized ones. Taking the metropolitan region of Natal as their case study, especially its south axis, Ricardo Ojima, Felipe Ferreira Monteiro and Tiago Carlos Lima do Nascimento discuss this phenomenon with particular attention to urban mobility. In São Carlos and Rio Claro, medium-sized cities in the state of São Paulo, Patrícia Baldini de Medeiros Garcia and Archimedes Azevedo Raia Jr. study the patterns of accessibility to major local hospitals. Geo-referenced analysis is used as the main method, where authors compare the modes of transportation used for medical care and accessibility according to socioeconomic groups. They show, in one case, a constant theme in studies of mobility: the modal distribution related to socioeconomic classes. Rounding out the group of articles focused on urban mobility, taking as a case study the city of Santiago, Chile, Cristhian Figueroa Martínez and Natan Waintrub Santibáñez propose an approach that could prompt similar research in Brazil: gender and mobility. The authors show interest in analyzing how women are affected and have their activities limited by the availability of transport, being specially vulnerable and limited by place of residence and provision of urban mobility services. The article by Sibila Corral de Arêa Leão Honda, Marcela do Carmo Vieira, Mayara Pissutti Albano and Yeda Ruiz Maria initiates the second set of themes of this issue of Urbe: environment and the city. In this article, the authors discuss the relationship between the use and occupation of land, production of social housing, and environmental planning. In a study conducted in Presidente Prudente, Sao Paulo state, the authors note that precisely these dwellings, financed by the government, disregard laws at different governmental spheres and ignore minimum social and environmental standards. The Gunnar Vingren municipal ecological park in Belém is the object of the study by Silvia Laura Costa Cardoso, Mário Vasconcellos Sobrinho and Ana Maria de Albuquerque Vasconcellos. In this article, the authors analyze the factors that facilitate and hinder the implementation of urban parks, and show how community participation, patterns of urban settlement on the surrounding areas of the park, as well as forms of urban management, influence the implementation and maintenance of urban...