February 24, 2026

On February 11th, the UHC hosted Dr. Benjamin Bradlow, Assistant Professor of Sociology & International Affairs at Princeton University. Bradlow's research makes connections between climate change, urbanization, technological change, and the political challenges for democracy that confront societies across the globe. For the first Invited Speaker of the year, Bradlow spoke to the UHC about conceptual frameworks he has developed to understand why some cities have shown more success in addressing their inequality than others.

His talk largely expanded on his book Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg. While both cities are deeply unequal, he argues, both have pursued policies to reduce inequality with results that have shown they are not “equally unequal.” This is exhibited through each city’s ability to adequately distribute public goods equitably, such as housing, transportation, and sanitation. His talk today largely focused on the distribution of inequality in housing and land-use law.

Johannesburg, he explains, today operates public housing projects that largely exist on peripheries developed during apartheid, and evictions are carried out by both public and private landowners, leading to more inequitable outcomes for the city. São Paulo, meanwhile, has reserved desirable urban land for use in public housing, informal settlements are being ‘upgraded,’ and the city has ended municipal communal evictions. The inequalities seen in housing policy trickle down to issues in sanitation (as in the proliferation of informal settlements, for example), and can also serve as the basis for inequities in public transit access.

Bradlow argues that this discrepancy in adequately addressing inequality in cities can therefore be seen through two processes: the efficacy of the local government being embedded in civil society, and how much of the institutional sphere of the local government remains cohesive. He goes on to explain that he characterizes a local government’s embeddedness by its ties to civil society that can provide the ability within bureaucratic agencies to enact redistributive policy change. For example, “Do mid-level bureaucrats interact regularly with movements that demand the things they are supposed to be working on?” (e.g., promises on affordable housing, etc.).

He defines cohesion of institutions as the coordinating capacity of local governments to implement policy changes. This is to say, does a local government have the horizontal cohesion within the framework of its agencies, and vertical cohesion across scales of government (local, state, federal), to deliver public goods?

Watch a recording of the talk for more insights from Dr. Bradlow:

More experts will be coming to present with the UHC as the year progresses through our Invited Speaker Series! View the full schedule below: 

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