International workshop Venice - March 11-12 1999 Concepts and Paradigms of Urban Management in the Context of Developing Countries
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LOPES DE SOUZA Marcelo (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Urban Management and citizen Participation in Brazil:
Experiences in the 1990s

Nowadays there are some important experiences in participatory urban management in Brazil, from Porto Alegre (in the South) to Recife (in the Northeast). They have their roots in the movement for urban reform which has been active since the 1980s.

In the contemporary parlance of Brazilian progressive scholars, 'urban reform' possesses a quite particular meaning: It does not mean just a reshaping of the space, whatever its ideological contents can be, but a transformation of some aspects of city life itself, in order to reach more social justice and more equity. It is above all a social reform which encompasses a spatial dimension and which scope is a reform of the institutions which regulate power and the production of space, and not primarily a reform of the city's physical design.

'Alternative urban planning/management' is, in contrast to conventional planning/management, 'bottom-up' and participatory. It is oriented towards social justice; modernisation is not a priority in its own right. While conventional planning aims at a well-ordered and efficient city, alternative planning aims at a city in which residential segregation decreases, where the state and the people can fight successfully against land speculation and in which city management becomes more and more democratic. Conventional urban planning deals with projections towards an ideal city, from which the illegal and informal parts of the actual city (shanty-towns and irregular working class settlements) were banned; alternative urban planning deals with the actual, concrete city, and its priority is not to establish 'projected futures', but to conceive tools for tackling the urban problems in a democratic way. Conventional planners work with a kind of functional zoning as a tool for reaching order and efficiency, whereas alternative planners give planning another priority: That is to identify and classify spaces according to their social situation and public interest (both zones of special interest regarding social promotion and integration of their inhabitants fully in the sphere of citizenship, i.e. zones demanding slum-upgrading and/or legal regularisation, and zones of special interest regarding environmental protection). Last, but not least, alternative planners stress the importance of popular participation: planning is viewed as a political-technical process, not just as a technical product (the master plan) or even as a technical process (in the sense of systems planning). During this process, the aim of the planner is not to build harmony through technical rationality (technocratic-authoritarian viewpoint), conceiving disharmony as a fully avoidable and pathological thing, but to make explicit the conflicts and to try to regulate them with help of political transparency and political participation of the people, in order to reach more social justice in the city.

Although it can be understood as pertaining to the realm of alternative urban planning and management, 'participatory budgeting' has both distinctive features and an specific history behind it. Generally spoken, 'participatory budgeting' means the direct participation of civil society - through legitime groups like neighbourhood associations - in the election of priorities regarding the municipal budget, which is no longer a privilege of the traditional agents in the context of representative democracy (mayor and municipal deputies). 'Participatory budgeting' is an interesting experience which stretches the boundaries of democracy (which has several limits in the case of representative democracy in general and in a country like Brazil, in particular) and gives the question of 'empowerment' and participation a real importance. Nowadays there are important experiences of 'participatory budgeting' (as well as of alternative planning at large) in some municipalities in Brazil.