Smart Cities, or smart cities, are increasingly in the spotlight, yet we can hardly describe exactly what they are.

Are they cities that manage to adopt, in a decentralized way, the array of new urban service apps from various providers that are increasingly present in our daily lives?

Or are they those that hire a major corporation to manage and monitor all urban services from a massive, centralized command center?

In recent days, a series of reports and articles correctly diagnosed the cause of the recent floods in the state capitals of Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and Porto Alegre, as well as in smaller cities such as Iconha, in Espírito Santo. The primary cause of these disasters was the urbanization of our cities—both planned and unplanned—which amplified the potential damage.

Tokyo is a chaotic city, in the sense that it did not develop from city-wide coordinated urban planning. By the 18th century, it already had around 1 million inhabitants, with most of the population living in conditions similar to modern Brazilian favelas. Tokyo's dense suburbs resemble Brazilian peripheries, with low-rise but closely packed buildings on narrow plots and a wide variety of uses. Furthermore, Tokyo features a multiplicity of architectural typologies, different modes of transportation sharing the same space, and—not unlike Brazilian cities—billboards and exposed overhead wires clashing with the urban landscape.

On flat terrain, where the horizon is visible in every direction, buildings with over forty stories rise across different areas of the city. Recently, a fifty-story building was completed; at 191 meters (626 feet) high, it is the tallest in the country. While some criticize this development model for its impact on the landscape, in a capital with rapid population growth, one would expect the cost of housing to rise steadily, along with the housing deficit. This, however, is not the case in Goiânia.

In the book “Order Without Design”, Alain Bertaud mentions that indicators are crucial in urban management to give cities a real-time view of what is happening within them. One interesting indicator related to housing affordability is the so-called “Price/Income Ratio.” This is essentially the average home price in a city divided by the average resident's income. It is a highly generic indicator that does not account for differences between properties, such as location, nor does it address rental housing (still a minority in Brazil). Nonetheless, it provides a general overview of housing affordability in a city.

Real estate speculation is undoubtedly the greatest villain singled out by those who study, inhabit, or are simply interested in cities today. It gets blamed for practically every urban problem: whether a city is too dense or too sprawling, choked with traffic or prohibitively expensive; whether local politics are corrupt or the poor are marginalized to the periphery; whether corporations profit from public investments or public infrastructure lies idle; whether historic heritage is destroyed, new buildings alter the cityscape, or informal settlements are burned down. The list is endless.

The Minha Casa, Minha Vida (MCMV) program was a cornerstone of federal housing policy under recent administrations. By financing new affordable housing, MCMV incentivizes developers to build in areas far from urban centers. This occurs because performance metrics focus solely on the number of units delivered, creating a strong economic incentive for developers to build far from downtown areas, where land is cheaper. Consequently, many of these developments are distant from job opportunities and basic services, as well as isolated from public mass transit networks, which are structurally unsuited to serve low-density peripheral areas.

3D-printed houses. Prefabricated houses. “Open-source” houses. Minha Casa, Minha Vida. From technological panaceas to government programs, countless solutions aim to resolve the housing deficit by building houses. The problem with this strategy is that the housing shortage is not a shortage of houses, but of apartments.

In the popular imagination, *cortiços* (tenement houses) represented the worst of urban housing in Brazilian cities. Deeply rooted in the national culture and immortalized in Aluísio Azevedo’s classic novel, *cortiços* were depicted as unsanitary, dilapidated dwellings where disease proliferated, the margins of society lived, and landlords exploited tenants with extortionate rents.

Anyone who has ever been to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro has certainly seen vendors selling grilled *queijo coalho* (curd cheese) or grilled shrimp, sweet mate tea, and Globo biscuits—classic snacks of the Rio shoreline. In São Paulo, open-air markets serve sugarcane juice and fried *pastel*, a local adaptation of a dish originally brought by Chinese immigrants and popularized by Japanese immigrants. In Minas Gerais, there is *pão de queijo* (cheese bread) and pastel, also filled with cheese. In Salvador, it is impossible not to mention *acarajé* (with or without hot sauce), which has been declared an intangible cultural heritage asset by IPHAN. The capital of Bahia even has its own Street Food Guide, reflecting the immense culinary diversity found in the city.

Urban Brazil is deeply ugly. Why did this happen? Some blame "the absence of urban planning and zoning, manipulated height limits, and the nefarious power of contractors and builders influencing the drafting of master plans."