Benjamin H. Bradlow
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About Benjamin
Bradlow's research makes connections between climate change, urbanization, technological change, and the political challenges for democracy, with a focus on the Global South. He is the author of Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg (Princeton University Press, 2024). His new book project is The Climate Hinge: Green Industrial Transitions in the Global South.
Contributions
Transfer and Transition
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Publications
Presents a framework for understanding how social structures, contingent events, and individual decisions combine over time to produce a new populist right. Argues that global, national, and subnational processes interact in causal chains to create an "ecosystem" of right-wing populist support. Analyzes the ascendance of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency of Brazil between 2013 and 2018 to illustrate this framework.
Investigates why some cities are more successful than others in reducing inequalities in urban living environments, focusing on São Paulo, Brazil, and Johannesburg, South Africa. Examines the relationships between local government bureaucracies and urban social movements that have shaped outcomes in these cities.
Argues that the green technological transition in Global North countries will not reach its full developmental potential unless it is expanded globally, emphasizing that technology transfers to the Global South are essential for realizing the ambitions of green industrial policies in the Global North.
Examines how state capacities contribute to movement-initiated policy change in the sphere of housing and land use, analyzing contrasting cases of local state capacities and their relationship to the urban social movements in São Paulo and Johannesburg. Findings highlight the scale of urban social movement organizing — at the city-wide or neighborhood level — and the openness of local government bureaucracy to movements.
Examines the role that civil society organizations (CSOs) played in mitigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Highlights how CSOs supplemented government efforts by providing essential resources and services and supporting highly vulnerable populations during the pandemic, as well as the primary challenges they faced in doing so.
Examines whether place-based policies, like public housing projects, can promote urban development beyond their footprints. Focuses on South Africa, comparing the effects of 166 successfully constructed public housing projects with 140 planned but unbuilt projects. Results show that constructed projects triple the amount of formal housing inside their footprints and lead to one new informal house being built for every three new formal houses.