From Global Goals to Periphery Realities: SDG 11, Metropolitan Fringes, and the Resilience Gap in São Paulo Metropolitan Region, Brazil

Cities have become central to global sustainability and climate agendas, yet the translation of SDG 11 into implementable territorial action remains uneven, particularly in metropolitan regions of the Global South where growth concentrates in peripheral jurisdictions. Drawing on a spatially explicit case study of the Juqueri–Cantareira sub-basin on the northern fringe of the São Paulo Metropolitan Region, this article examines how multilevel commitments to sustainable urban development are diluted by regulatory fragmentation and institutional routines. The analysis triangulates document review of urban and climate instruments, a harmonized zoning mosaic aligning municipal and metropolitan regulations, and semi-structured interviews. It identifies recurring planning disjunctions, including cross-scale misalignment between metropolitan strategies and municipal zoning, a regulatory bias toward land conversion despite environmental designations, and the marginalization of green–blue infrastructure in land-use rules. These disjunctions help explain why robust policy architectures coexist with persistent service deficits and rising climate exposure. The article argues for reframing metropolitan fringes as strategic resilience zones to close the SDG 11 implementation gap.