Poder local e gestão urbana

Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs) are increasing in size, scope and number on the global arena. They reflect a tendency for city governments to coordinate environmental action through networked forms of governance. In this article, we argue that a new generation of TMNs has entered the global scene to help cities steer their efforts to handle environmental issues. In contrast to the characteristics of older TMNs as public, inclusive, and self-governed, new-generation TMNs are influenced by private actors, they are exclusive, and employ enforcement mechanisms to secure the fulfilment of network goals. To underline the diversity of TMNs and thus better understand urban networked governance, we present a case study of the 100 Resilient Cities initiative covering its conduct in 2013–2019. Looking at its actor composition and membership terms, we identify a hybrid nature different from the one described in earlier literature on European TMNs primarily. This subscription to a hybrid form of governance calls for a larger discussion on the implications of this shift in governance type and on the extent to which hybridisation implies a shift of power from the public to the private sphere.

Nowadays there is an imperative for governments to be more responsive to community needs, and public sector modernisation programmes are introducing opportunities for citizen participation. We look at citizen participation initiatives through the lenses of institutional and stakeholder theories. Using survey data and exogenous variables we analyse experiences in thirty OECD and MERCOSUR local governments. We find that the possible gains in legitimacy and trust explain the efforts made towards citizen participation. In addition, the different levels of commitment towards meaningful citizen participation suggest that factors such as power and urgency can be complementary to legitimacy when analysing citizen participation.

In cities of the Global South, universal physical access to networked infrastructures, such as electricity and water, is often presented as enabling the reduction of social and spatial divisions. Whereas most of the discussions in these cities have focused on the obstacles to networked infrastructure expansion, little attention has been paid to the increased universalization of the physical electricity network in several Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian cities. This article unpacks the discussions around the modern infrastructural ideal and its local reshaping by building on the case of Rio de Janeiro, which has achieved universal grid electricity coverage, but where strong urban inequalities remain. By focusing on electricity grid management in favelas, this article analyzes how infrastructural inequalities emerge within the network. It suggests that, in order to understand how urban inequalities are reproduced or mitigated through networked infrastructure, it is important to consider the governance aspects of managing infrastructure. It develops this argument by focusing on the multi-level and heterogeneous spaces of infrastructure governance, including both national and institutionalized arenas, and local everyday practices between local actors on the ground. This analysis shows how networked infrastructural inequalities emerge from negotiation processes in which the fragmented nature of the urban environment is embedded. Through this analysis, the article contributes to current discussions on the urban geography and techno-politics of infrastructure by highlighting the negotiated nature of infrastructural inequalities beyond the modern infrastructural ideal.

This paper interrogates and expands understandings of agency in processes of knowledge circulation by focusing on actors switching their position from the demand-side to the supply side of policy knowledge. In doing so, we contribute to recent debates about the importance of accounting to other scales beyond the local–global binary that dominates the policy mobility literature and to the politics of policy translation and dissemination. Emphasis is given to the performative role of domestic actors and their practices in localising mobile policies of urban regeneration in ‘gateway cities’ while leveraging and recirculating knowledge within their national contexts. Conceptualised as policy brokers and policy entrepreneurs, such actors are attuned to the local dynamics and able to distil context-specific lessons that are sensitive to national regulatory frameworks, funding and political contingencies. We focus on two urban megaprojects of waterfront regeneration in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro that introduced new practices of land monetisation while making use of inter-referencing, drawing on in-depth interviews with policy actors and archival material. We argue that an attention to ‘follow the reformatted model’ reveals how policy models mutate as they conform to contextual factors and to particular interests. The analysis of such processes allows us to transcend the local–global dichotomy and to trace multiscalar connections between multiple projects.

In this article we explore the idea of public accountability in the contemporary entrepreneurial governance of cities, which are influenced by market dependency and private sector involvement. We specifically focus on the fragmentation of public accountability through hybrid contractual landscapes of governance, in which the public and private sector actors interactively produce a diversity of instruments to ensure performance in service. This is in sharp contrast to the traditional vague norms and values appealed to by urban planning institutions, to safeguard the public interest. We argue that within these complex contractual governance environments public accountability is produced by public and private sector actors, through highly diverse sets of contractual relations and diverse control instruments that define responsibilities of diverse actors who are involved in a project within a market-dependent planning and policy making environment, which contains context-specific characteristics set by the specific rules of public-private collaboration. These complexities mean public accountability has become fragmented and largely reduced to performance control. Moreover, our understanding of contractual urban governance remains vague and unclear due to very limited empirical studies focusing on the actual technologies of contractual urban development. By deciphering the complex hybrid landscapes of contractual governance, with comparative empirical evidence from The Netherlands, UK and Brazil, we demonstrate how public accountability is assuming a more ‘contractual’ and unpredictable meaning in policy and plan implementation process.

As relações cidade/natureza a partir da abordagem sociopolítica da gestão ambiental são tema deste artigo. Tendo o Distrito Federal como recorte, e, em especial, a área compreendida pela sub-bacia do Riacho Fundo, a partir de uma abordagem sócio-histórica do processo de urbanização de Brasília, enfatizam-se os impasses gerados pelo impacto urbano sobre os recursos hídricos locais e o papel desempenhado pela sociedade civil e poder público, na regulação da dinâmica socioambiental urbana. É apontada a necessidade de se construir um saber ambiental que integre e ultrapasse a racionalidade instrumental e disjuntiva da visão moderna e acione as possibilidades de emergência de novas formas de construção de conhecimento e estratégias de ação. Nessa perspectiva, a integração da dimensão educativa no espaço político é condição de um efetivo surgimento de alternativas viáveis às questões ambientais concretas. A experiência de formação de redes solidárias é discutida como possibilidade de emergência de novos sujeitos coletivos e como prática de articulação entre saberes locais e científicos orientados a uma práxis responsável.

Cities are promising machines always holding out prospects for better lives, always attempting to guarantee that things will not remain the same and that whatever changes do ensue are for the better. We propose a notion of “promise” not as simply another descriptor in a long line of adjectives about the city. Rather, we argue that the urban institutional landscape constantly generates new promises as way of anticipation, which in turn allows residents to write themselves into select urban operations. This article engages two central districts in Rio de Janeiro and Jakarta to explore how residents “stand by” the promise, not of passive waiting, but as maneuvers of either staying tuned to or as way of tactical detachment from the multiple trajectories which have been conjured up in the here and now. We understand these maneuvers as acts of “minor” future making that rely upon practices and materials that may seem of little use, but which enable a process of incremental small adjustments and collective subversion of urban trajectories of the transitory.

This paper examines the increased visibility of urban infrastructures occurring through a close coupling of information technologies and the selective integration of urban services. It asks how circulatory flow is managed in the contemporary city, by focusing on the emergence of new forms of governmentality associated with “smart” technologies. Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality, and based on a case study of Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Centre (COR), the paper argues that new understandings of the city are being developed, representing a new mode of urban infrastructure based on the partial and selective rebundling of splintered networks and fragmented urban space. The COR operates through a “un-black boxing” of urban infrastructures, where the extension of control room logics to the totality of the city points to their fragility and the continuous effort involved in their operational accomplishment. It also functions through a collapse in relations of control—of the everyday and the emergency—, which, enabled by the incorporation of the public in operational control, further raise public awareness of urban infrastructures. These characteristics point to a specific form of urban governmentality based on the operationalisation of infrastructural flows and the development of novel ways of seeing and engaging with the city.

O artigo baseia-se em duas pesquisas qualitativas em favelas cariocas, especialmente em uma de suas atividades, aproximadamente 50 horas de dinâmica com 15 grupos focais (envolvendo 150 moradores de mais de 40 favelas). Designou-se de “coletivos de confiança” os grupos focais compostos a partir de relacionamento anterior dos participantes com algum dos pesquisadores, capaz de, através do conhecimento pessoal, gerar alguma confiança prévia. Pensada com vistas a minimizar os prováveis efeitos de uma “lei do silêncio” imposta pelos agentes da violência nessas localidades, esta forma de recrutamento demonstrou ter sido adequada. O texto analisa os enunciados colhidos durante os debates, claramente concentrados nas diferentes modalidades de presença e atuação dos bandos de criminosos e das forças policiais nas favelas cariocas. Sustenta que, menos que questionar a violência criminal e policial como um todo, eles expressam intensa preocupação com algumas de suas manifestações, aquelas que impedem o prosseguimento das rotinas diárias. Sem ser diretamente tematizado, este é o horizonte de atenção que organiza todo o discurso crítico “para fora” das favelas, bem como as atitudes e condutas nos locais de moradia. Os autores avançam um pouco mais, argumentando que, em suas descrições e denúncias, os moradores demonstram não lidar da mesma maneira com todas as formas de desestabilização de suas rotinas, evitando homogeneizar os responsáveis. Assim é que, de um lado, a violência deflagrada durante as famosas “operações” policiais e sempre presente na arbitrariedade da conduta regular desses agentes aparece associada ao seu caráter quase totalmente imprevisível. De outro lado, quando se trata da violência envolvida nas práticas dos traficantes, com os quais os moradores são obrigados a compartilhar o mesmo território, há muitos relatos de tentativas (bem e mal/sucedidas) de redução da imprevisibilidade do fluxo da vida local. Isto ocorre por meio do ajustamento das condutas a um cálculo – inviável e/ou ineficaz no caso da ação policial – dos riscos envolvidos nesta convivência forçada. Este, tornando “administrável” uma pequena porção da violência na localidade, permite reabsorvê-la como a parte “extraordinária” das rotinas “ordinárias”.

Este  estudo  compara  certas  características  básicas  da cultura  política  nas  cidades  de  Curitiba  e  Porto  Alegre,  analisando  as suas  diferenças  e  convergências  como  formas  locais  complementares de  manifestação  da  conquista  da  cidadania,  em  distintos  contextos histórico-sociais,  durante  o  processo  de  democratização  da  esfera pública.  Este  trabalho  se  opõe  aos  estudos  empíricos  convencionais da  cultura  política,  inspirados  nas  teorias  da  modernização, argumentando  contra  o  viés  determinista  desses  estudos,  e  os procedimentos  de  hipergeneralização  por  eles  geralmente  adotados. O  estudo  argumenta  por  uma  abordagem  que  retrate  e  interprete  o pluralismo  constitutivo  da  cultura  política,  expresso  no  exercício  da cidadania  durante  os  processos  de  democratização.