Abstract
Salvador da Bahia, third largest city in Brazil, is still waiting
for its new Urban Development Master Plan - the "PDDU2000".
This waiting has become a tense situation, not only because more
than 10 years has passed since the preceding plan (thus overcoming
the original legal limits), but also because of successive delays
in presenting the new plan proposals. Furthermore, a lot of expectation
has been brought to the scene, due to the creation of new "Ministerio
das Cidades" ("Ministry of Cities"), whose real objectives
are still unclear, as well as the recently approved "Estatuto
das Cidades", a federal law that creates and regulates a lot
of new urban management tools. At the moment, the plan presentation
is expected to happen in the first semester 2003. After that presentation,
legal procedures include a public discussion and further approval,
which could eventually include changes to the plan. After that,
a new cycle of urban planning would begin. At least this is what
is expected to happen. In the meantime, two main questions have
arisen: the first one is related to the current city situation,
characterized by urban and architectural illegality rates around
60%; the second question regards the "new plan's city",
a city supposedly based on two main issues: social equality and
environmental sustainability. The tension posed by these two questions
(present versus future) has increased day after day, up to a point
in which a rift has been created between the real city and the desired
one, perpetuating the same problem that has marked Salvador urban
planning history.
In this paper, we intend to go beyond this dichotomy, towards a
new perspective of urban management and transformations research,
focusing on an issue that is not particularly restricted to any
of these two questions: the urban vacant land. An issue that, until
now, has had a completely marginal role inside the new plan's elaboration,
a situation which has been reinforced by the lack of interest of
the local government. Besides, this issue is conditioned by the
common sense (in Salvador) that considers urban vacant land to be
a "dated problem" that belonged to the seventies, with
too little consequences in the current urban structure. Therefore,
the analysis we propose here turns inside-out this common sense,
taking in consideration those areas that have remained available
inside the city macro-zone with the highest levels of infrastructure
and urbanization, the so-called AUC - "Area Urbanizada Contínua"
("Continuous Urban Area"). In fact, the hypothesis on
which this analysis is founded can be put in a negative form: how
far can these vacant lands NOT be considered relevant or even strategic,
since they are inside a zone that, although representing only 26%
of urban area, concentrates 58% of population and 64% of jobs? After
studying the production, management, conditions and potentialities
of that urban vacant land, we propose two new complementary management
tools that could provide a basis to start a renewed discussion about
urban land regularization: the iVUC - "Inventario dos Vazios
Urbanos Controlados" ("Controlled Vacant Land Inventory")
and the aVUC - "Agência de Operação Consorciada
para a Gestão dos Grandes Vazios Controlados da AUC"
("Operational Management Consortium Agency for AUC Controlled
Vacant Lands").
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