Políticas públicas

The emergence of new participatory mechanisms, such as participatory budgeting, in towns and cities in recent years has given rise to a conflict between the old protagonists of local participation and the new citizens invited to participate. These mechanisms offer a logic of collective action different from what has been the usual fare in cities — one based on proposal rather than demand. As a result, urban social movements need to transform their own dynamics in order to make room for a new political subject (the citizenry and the non-organized participant) and to act upon a stage where deliberative dynamics now apply. This article aims to analyse this conflict in three different cities that set up participatory budgeting at different times: Porto Alegre, Cordova and Paris. The associations in the three cities took up a position against the new participatory mechanisms and demanded a bigger role in the political arena. Through a piece of ethnographic research, we shall see that the responses of the agents involved (politicians, associations and citizens) in the three cities share some arguments, although the conflict was resolved differently in each of them. The article concludes with reflections on the consequences this conflict could have for contemporary political theory, especially with respect to the role of associations in the processes of democratization and the setting forth of a new way of doing politics by means of deliberative procedures.

Social Forums, modeled on the World Social Forums, are not social movements in the classic sense. They are not, and do not purport to be, the organizational form through which basic social change will be achieved, or can best be pursued. But they do bring together elements of many social movements, afford an opportunity for coalition-building among them, frequently around urban issues, and thus make a significant contribution to achieving such change. Conceivably they may be the foundation for an international social movement for change, but if so it is likely to coalesce about a specifically political program. Some concrete suggestions are made which might enhance their effectiveness.

One of the largest urban centers in the world, the Brazilian city of São Paulo is characterized by high levels of socio-economic inequality and political polarization, significantly complicating issues of urban governance. Despite being designed to partially address these problems, São Paulo's participatory budget (PB) was bounded by its urban context, institutional design and the relative strength of the political actors involved. The article analyzes a mechanism created within the PB to incorporate historically disadvantaged groups, or ‘socially vulnerable segments’, during the Workers' Party administration of 2001–04. The segments methodology constitutes an intriguing example of how affirmative action can be used to improve decision-making processes and address social exclusion in urban contexts. In particular, the segments served as a ‘counterpublic’ within the PB, helping activists representing the segments to develop strategies influencing the city's urban and social policy.

The following article identifies two different urban policy regimes in Latin America —neoliberal and socialist — and traces their origins to the distinct interests and capacities of local elites and activists in the region’s cities in the mid-to-late twentieth century. While agricultural and commercial interests paid a high price for the growth ofimport-substituting industrialization, and therefore deployed free trade zones (andsimilar institutions) in traditional export centers in the 1960s and 1970s, their industrialrivals bore the brunt of austerity and adjustment in the free market era, and therefore adopted compensatory measures designed to increase the ‘social wage’ in the 1980s and1990s. Examples are drawn from municipalities in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela, and call the conventional portrait of impotent LatinAmerican cities — and omnipotent central governments — into question.

Given the growing importance of populism in cities both empirically and in scholarly discourse, planning is increasingly grappling with this ‘unsettling era’, focusing on how to respond to these times. This opening provides an opportunity to re-engage with the idea of insurgent planning—practices that are counter-hegemonic, transgressive, and imaginative—within populist contexts. I explore the case of mobilizations by community communicators in Complexo da Maré, a set of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the spread of COVID-19 in 2020. In contrast to these mobilizations, Brazil's federal right-wing populist government failed to attend to the needs of favela residents. Through the case of Maré's communicators, I highlight the need for planning to account for the role of insurgent planning as a response to populist contexts in cities of the global South.

Using the experience of metropolitan Rio de Janeiro, this article contributes to the broader debate on development regimes, rescaling and state spatial restructuring in Brazil, and its specificities in relation to the international discussion on the transformations in Atlantic Fordism. I argue that the transition from a (peripheral) development state to a competitive and rescaled regime has been accompanied by important continuities. Legitimized through discourses around development poles and trickle-down effects, the national-developmental regime has systematically promoted some spaces as opposed to others, without much emphasis on the social and environmental dimensions of spatial policies. The emerging competitive state spatial regime, whether in its neoliberalized, or its more recent ‘rolled-out’ national-developmental version, is merely expected to aggravate the historical socio-environmental contradictions in the production of space. Moreover, scale has proven contested and strategic-relational, both molding and being influenced by actors that seek to use scalar politics to reach their interests. My analysis suggests that, within this scenario, neither economic growth, nor regulatory and institutional strengthening, nor financial resources are likely to produce structural transformation in the inherited spaces of Greater Rio de Janeiro.

This essay demonstrates how mediations (called Dialogues) between the University of Belo Horizonte and the residents of the Eliana Silva Occupation in that city have secured not only the right to urban land and constitutional rights that have been historically violated in Brazil, but also the right to that which is of common interest. The essays peaks to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s contention that what is common goes far beyond the provision of public services. This starting point allows us to see that urban occupations are politically empowered, to the extent that poor people consciously violate the Brazilian law governing the right of possession and ownership over urban land through creative and cooperative actions that are undertaken and extended across networks.This essay will focus on the centrality of the struggle to build a common communication platform serving to nourish social ties and sociability among those social actors who share the same human deprivation –– lack of access to what should be widely available to all citizens. On the theoretical side, the essay takes Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour and Milton Santos as its guides to understanding how social actors act in the struggle for socio-spatial coexistence and urbanity.

Over the last two decades, numerous international conferences and organizations have espoused managing water as an economic good, involving participatory forums in systems of decentralized management at the river-basin level. In the 1990s, Brazil adopted such a model. More than a simple transfer of power from the national to the local level or from bureaucratic to deliberative decision-making, however, this process requires multi-directional power transfers among a variety of policy arenas and actors and among national, state, municipal and river-basin institutions, as well as a complex — and ongoing — negotiation over the meanings of both water pricing and participation. Focusing on the politics of reform legislation in the state of São Paulo and nationally, the article examines how political-institutional features of federalism and executive-legislative relations constrained the passage of reform legislation, and how pro-reform actors attempted to surmount such institutional limitations with networking strategies and by fostering incremental changes in practices on the ground.

This article deals with the state policies of urban infrastructure in São Paulo, Brazil, from 1975 to 2000. Working with primary information about the investments made by the state in public works, we discuss a series of arguments present in the urban studies literature about the patterns of state investment in urban spaces and propose an alternative explanation for state action in Brazilian urban spaces in recent decades. We analyze the main elements that have influenced the overall pattern of investments, describe the main characteristics of this policy over time and in each of the municipal governments of the period, as well as develop an evaluation of the spatial distribution of the resources among each of the main social groups in the city.