Marcela Alonso Ferreira awarded a Writing-up Grant by the IJURR Foundation

Marcela Alonso Ferreira, PhD Candidate at the CEE, was awarded a 2024 Writing-up Grant by the IJURR Foundation in order to support the completion of her PhD dissertation, entitled "Governing urban expansion in Global South megacities: a comparative analysis of Mexico City and Sao Paulo" (supervised by Patrick Le Galès).

The IJURR Foundation promotes urban and regional research. IJURR Foundation Writing-up Grants are awarded to PhD students working within this field, with nationality of a low-income or middle-income country, who have completed all their field work and commenced their writing up.

Marcela's doctoral dissertation examines how informal land tenure is governed in Latin America’s largest cities, Mexico City and São Paulo, using a historical institutionalist approach. Although governments in both cities initially acknowledged land rights for informal settlements, Marcela's research demonstrates that their paths diverged, with São Paulo expanding these rights and Mexico City gradually restricting them. By conducting a comparative historical analysis spanning the past 50 years, she explains these divergent outcomes of land regularization.

Marcela Alonso Ferreira argues that the origins of land regularization stem from social mobilization, but frictions with other institutions better explain its development. Frictions between these institutions explain the drift of land regularization in Mexico City. Meanwhile, in São Paulo, skilled social actors, notably bureaucrats embedded in social movements, were responsible for layering new rules, fostering a process of incremental change that broadened access to land rights.

Find out more

• About Marcela's background and research, on her website
• About IJURR Foundation Grants and the 2024 Awardees