Communities of Practice Applied to Urban Development Theory – The Case of Insolar in the Favela Santa Marta

Bachelorarbeit, Fachbereich Institutional Economics, Organisational Governance, Integrity Management & Transcultural Leadership, 98 Seiten, engl.

Zusammenfassung:

“The world is becoming increasingly urbanized. Since 2007, more than half the world’s population has been living in cities, and that share is projected to rise to 60 per cent by 2030” (SDG, 2016). With the increase of urbanization in today’s globalized world it is becoming evident that many of the challenges raised by globalization will have to be discussed within the research scope of urban development theory. Uncontrolled migration and subsequent settlement in urban areas leads to unintentional urban sprawl and the formation of informal neighborhoods that evade any attempt of administrative control. This will turn out to be problematic if aspirations to tackle global issues such as climate change with joint objectives like the sustainable development goals (SDGs) require cooperative efforts that also have to be addressed in these unmanaged areas. The uncontrolled spread of urban settlements is already well advanced in some of the BRICS countrieslike Brazil. Therefore, the paper at hand attempts to deduce the difficulties that urban planning is facing in informal areas like the favela Santa Marta in Rio de Janeiro from a general observation of certain core conflicts that dominate the contemporary research field of urban development theory.

Consequently, this bachelor thesis starting point is the historically derived insight that the topic of urban planning corresponds to a problem of organized complexity and can therefore be described above all as a matter of relations. Based on this consideration which can be traced back to the urban theorist Jane Jacobs, the fundamental problems of urban planning are highlighted. Subsequently, these core conflicts will be expounded to be fundamental dilemmas that cannot be solved but eventually may be mitigated through learning processes. This research paper, therefore, proposes the concept of Communities of Practice as a platform for coordinated learning processes that is presented as a sensitive governance structure which enables the bridging of the dilemmas outlined. The potential that the application of the construct of Communities of practice contains for urban theory is, subsequently, tested against the reprocessing of empirical data collected on a research trip to investigate the case of the social business Insolar. This energy distributing start-up is cultivating a Community of Practice that is concerned with the sustainable urban transformation of the favela Santa Marta and therefore qualifies as appropriate research object to investigate the benefits that this concept yields for urban development, especially with regard to the context of an informal settlement.