Brazil-UK Partnership

The Brazil-UK partnership began in the early days of the Urban Transformations programme, with the Healthy Urban Living and the Social Science of the Food-Water-Energy Nexus – UK-Brazil Calls for Collaborative Research. Four projects, ranging from health and housing to gender-based violence and age-friendly design, received funding and began in 2016:

• Brazil-UK Healthy Urban Mobility (HUM)
• Healthy, Secure and Gender Just Cities: Transnational Perspectives on Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) in Rio de Janeiro and London
• Healthy Urban Living and Ageing in Place: Physical Activity, Built Environment and Knowledge Exchange in Brazilian Cities (HULAP)
• Place-Making with Older Adults: Towards Age-Friendly Communities

This culminated in a seminar, ‘Research and Metropolitan Health in Unequal Cities‘, co-hosted in Rio de Janeiro with Brazilian partners, showcasing some of the ESRC-funded research that came out of this work. In addition to the specific projects that came out of this call, however, there were many other projects within the wider Urban Transformations portfolio that included a Brazil component to their work. Some of the different aspects of Brazil-UK urban research were profiled in a volume of the Urban Transformations magazine, UT Connect, highlighting some of the portfolio’s key areas of collaboration and emerging findings from the projects. Urban Transformations also developed a partnership with BBC Brasil, commissioning researchers on the projects to author a series of articles looking at different challenges facing Brazilian cities today that were published in Portuguese for a wide audience in Brazil.

• What can we say about the future of cities in Brazil and the world?
• Health in remote Amazonian cities
• Exploring the difficulties older residents experience in cities
• Combating gender-based violence through better urban design
• How science and technology can help transform the sanitation system in Brazil

Some of the outputs of this research will also be showcased in a forthcoming volume, Urban Transformations and Public Health in the Emergent City, to be published in 2020 with Manchester University Press (MUP) and edited by Michael Keith and Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos.