Urban Development Project Riberira Azul Program Article Review

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Ribeira Azul

The development project at Ribeira Azul in Salvador, Brazil embodies the principles of Amartya Sen's development as freedom principles, wherein freedom and development are closely linked. Such principles emphasize measures of human development as the measures of poverty, rather than a traditional approach focused on income (Frediani, 2007). The Ribeira Azul program focused on a number of key tasks, including upgrade of critical infrastructure like water, sanitation and lighting, as well as construction of new homes and human development projects aimed at improving the access to education and health care of the population.

Amartya Sen describes the theory of development as freedom, wherein greater levels of human freedom and development are intertwined. Sen argues that "freedom is central to the process of development for two reasons," those being the evaluative reason and the effectiveness reason. The former reflects improvements in outcomes and the latter reflects that the achievement of development is dependent on the free agency of people (Sen, 1999, 4). His basic idea is that human development is facilitated by the freedom from constraints such as lack of access to food, housing, water, education and health care.

Sen's ideas seem to have been enacted successfully in Ribeira Azul. By enhancing access to education, health care and by providing more stable, safer living conditions, the lives of the people in that area have been enhanced, even if their income has not. Sen's argument, however, is that when such precursors are in place, economic development will follow.

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This contrasts with a traditional top-down approach wherein economic development is supposed to bring benefits to the people, an approach that only works well when income distribution is relatively even in society.

Frediani (2007) offers an evaluation of the Ribeira Azul project. He argues that despite the impressive sums spent on the project, its effectiveness was modest. Evaluating the project through Sen's capability lens, Frediani notes that when new houses were provided to the people in the slum, they were not permitted to add to those houses, but that they have done so illegally. Not being able to upgrade a home reflects a lack of capability, but in this case there has not been enforcement of that condition, so the capability remains, albeit not by design.

The program faltered even more badly on the point of freedom to afford living costs. Sen's logic would hold that with greater capability, economic improvement should….....

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