FERNANDES, Ana Silva    NASCIMENTO, Augusto. The ‘right to the city' in PALOP: Four decades of urban expansion, political and social changes. Notes for research. []. , 35, pp.109-132. ISSN 1645-3794.  https://doi.org/10.4000/cea.2679.

In the Portuguese-Speaking African Countries (PALOP), facing both the intense urban expansion triggered after independence and the difficulty in producing structural responses, cities have become spaces of social refraction, increasingly creased by the unstoppable growth and consequent reproduction of social vulnerabilities and exclusion. This paper therefore aims at mapping out the challenges and strategies adopted in the fight for the ‘right to the city' in the capital cities of the PALOP, as well as their impact on poverty reduction, namely by focusing on issues such as the difficulty in planning in the face of political instability, major public investments and (de)centralization of power, dependency on external financing, the possession of the land and the regularization of informal settlements. This text, starting from examples of Lusophone African cities, discusses the urban social and spatial challenges, the diversity of policies and actions to overcome poverty, as well as the roles of the different stakeholders in these processes, thus trying to discuss mechanisms for an effective ‘right to the city'.

: PALOP; urban policies; disparities; poverty; development; Africa; informal settlements.

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