Movimentos sociais

Este artigo propõe analisar a articulação entre as esferas de poder local e o poder público, a partir de uma descrição etnográfica da organização social e de como, nesta, se estrutura a autoridade política local. Nesse processo de construção da autori­dade local, na praia do Aventureiro, Ilha Grande - RJ, o poder político e a autoridade le­gitimada pelos moradores estão diretamente ligados à posse dos barcos e dos campings mais prósperos. Os donos de barco no Aventureiro assumem, nesse contexto, o papel de representantes legítimos do povoado na negociação com órgãos da Prefeitura e do Esta­do, na defesa dos direitos dos moradores, assumindo um papel de representação da or­ganização doméstica (em famílias e grupos vicinais) nas relações políticas com o Estado.

A realidade dos movimentos sociais é bastante dinâmica e nem sempre as teorizações têm acompanhado esse dinamismo. Com a globalização e a informatização da sociedade, os movimentos sociais em muitos países, inclusive no Brasil e em outros países da América Latina, tenderam a se diversificar e se complexificar. Por isso, muitas das explicações paradigmáticas ou hegemônicas nos estudos da segunda metade do século XX necessitam de revisões ou atualizações ante a emergência de novos sujeitos sociais ou cenários políticos. Este estudo busca, inicialmente, uma compreensão acerca da nova configuração da sociedade civil organizada, explicitando os múltiplos tipos de ações coletivas do novo milênio. A partir desta compreensão, busca-se explorar a diversidade identitária dos sujeitos, a transversalidade nas demandas por direitos, as formas de ativismo e de empoderamento através de articulações em rede e, finalmente, a participação política das organizações em rede.

On the same October day in 2009 that the International Olympic Committee announced the 2016 Summer Olympics would be held in Rio de Janeiro, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro announced that Vila Autódromo — a fairly small favela in the west part of the city, crowded between a lagoon, an automobile racetrack, and a busy highway, and ultimately the Olympic Park — would be removed as part of the infrastructure plan designed to prepare the city for the Games. This article examines the case of Vila Autódromo, and the resistance of favela residents to being forcibly removed from their community, to provide insight into the sources of opposition and resistance to urban development. The practice of force devictions in the name of urban development will be explored as a manifest form of marginalization in the context of Olympic development. Rather than concealing urban problems, urban spectacles such as the Olympics serve to highlight social inequalities and display highly contradictory urban representations that can spawn agendas of resistance that serve to complicate elite redevelopment agendas and divide progrowth coalitions.

This paper evaluates the compatibility of public–private partnerships (PPP) for housing in Brazil with the notion of the right to the city, enshrined in the Constitution. A 3-year investigation of the country’s first housing PPP, Casa Paulista, located in downtown São Paulo city, informs the analysis. Drawing from the international debate on the right to the city and its application in Brazil, I offer a definition of the term that transcends the notion of rights-based policy, and implies urban dwellers’ appropriation of urban production and city space. While failing to scale up centrally located housing delivery, the PPP facilitates a new housing regime marked by the decreased ability of citizens, particularly grassroots movements, to appropriate housing production, directly contradicting the right to the city ideal. Finally, I describe an outcome from this new regime—an ad hoc and opaque system of public land allocation for PPP housing developments.

Rights-based urban social movements have proliferated since the mid-1970s, but our understanding of their real impacts remains insufficient. Using the housing movements in São Paulo as an example, the article demonstrates both the limits and the strengths of the rights-based approach. It argues that housing movements in São Paulo must be understood in the global context of the coexistence of two contradictory trajectories: the neoliberal urbanism and the rights-based movements. While the rights-based approach has yet to bring fundamental changes to the unequal housing distribution in Brazil, it provides the housing movements with new legal and institutional devices to justify their actions and influence the policy process, thus contributing to the unusual resilience and scale of the movements. The article reveals that the gap between rights promised and rights delivered can be utilized as a political opportunity for facilitating collective mobilization, contesting neoliberalism, and advancing new conceptions of citizenship.

A process is recognized as collaborative when it demonstrates the involvement of multiple stakeholders who are mobilized to interact and negotiate horizontally in order to achieve common objectives. Although efforts can be made to make a process collaborative, a governance process is situated in particular histories and geographies, and collectively shared cultures, norms, and behaviors can help or hinder the emergence of inclusive democratic practices. As a result of broader urban reforms that have been occurring in Brazil over the last 20 years, and particularly a shift in the institutional arrangement of planning in Curitiba, the 2014 Curitiba Master Plan was developed within a more democratic framework, with the engagement of several governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders. Despite adopting a more collaborative approach to planning, this plan is as generic as the 2004 Curitiba Master Plan it replaced, which was proposed within a technocratic framework. If the 2004 and 2014 institutional arrangements and processes were so different, why did they achieve similar results? To answer this question, this study investigates which elements influence the endurance of established practices in urban planning processes. The basic assumption is that the final product of a planning process is heavily influenced by existing and long-lasting institutions, which carry internal beliefs and procedures into new planning approaches. The evidence pre-sented in this study shows that path dependence on ideas, behaviors, and actions has been perpetuating planning practices that have been established in Curitiba for decades.

Despite the broad celebration of Brazil’s urban reform movement, recent events in Brazil have called attention to a paradox focused on the disappointing results of this movement to deal with Brazil’s complex urban context.Taking this “impasse” as a starting point, this article focuses on the role of politics and its relationship to economic interests in urban development in which much decision making around urban policy takes place to understand why Brazil’s progressive legislation has not succeeded in creating a more just and equitable urban environment. Using a case study of the city of Niterói, I show that patterns of state and nonstate actors are connected through both formal and informal relationships, and connections between public and private actors have a considerable impact on urban politics and policies. Focusing on the limits of participatory processes in Niterói, I call attention to the contradictions of participatory planning in Brazil.