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Despite boosting cities and preserving local culture in the face of changes imposed on urban markets in the global south, urban street fairs are territories that are still not well understood. Our objective is to evaluate urban street fairs as a locus of local territorial development from the perspective of the ecosocioeconomy. Methodologically, it is a survey with a sample of 334 on 485 street vendors in Curitiba, complemented by documentary surveys, interviews, and observations in-situ. As a result, urban street fairs are socio-productive arrangements emerging from the interaction among multiple rationalities; street vendors opt for their work due to tradition and preference for trade and not a market limitation; natural products (organic and traditional) are links between ecologically desirable commercial and productive practices. The perspective of ecosocioeconomy captures the material and symbolic constitution and development of urban street fairs as a complex relational territory embedded in the city, with its internalized and externalized interrelations in an urban governance system influenced by different rationalities and constituted by a multiplicity of actors in different spaces and times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban rivers have been considered, for different cities, as sources of problems and solutions. The objective of this article is to evaluate local communities’ perception of sociopolitical actions and the natural attributes of the Belém River, located in the city of Curitiba. This study is justified by the theoretical contributions of evaluating urban rivers based on perceptions of the community. The results indicate that the river has been progressively deteriorating to the point where, paradoxically in relation to the constructed view of the sustainable and ecological city, the community considers it useless for domestic purposes, representing a source of discomfort and health hazards. However, the same community still values the river as a public good and demands solutions with society and government shared efforts. Data collection was conducted in 2012 through a stratified random sampling. The margin of error for 586 respondents was 5% at the 95% confidence level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]