Post-Constitutional Urban Policy: the experience of the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro

Angela Moulin S Penalva Santos

doi:10.22296/2317-1529.2017v19n1p48

Angela Moulin S Penalva Santos

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.22296/2317-1529.2017v19n1p48

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Abstract

The aim of this article is to reflect on the ill-fated expectations of Brazilian urban policy, much identified with the regulation of urban land use. The present work is based on the premise that urban policy is the dimension of social policy that provides effectiveness to urban planning. Thus, it is fitting that it should be evaluated within a context in which it began to interact with a set of social rights included in the 1988 Constitution. These were the underlying reflections resulting from research, which was conducted through interviews with urban planners who had worked with urban policy in the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro during the 1980s, 1990s and into the 2000s. The main transformations in urban policy and the challenges faced in managing this policy were used as a reference to reflect on the directions taken by Brazilian urban policy.

Highlights

Almost three decades have passed since the celebrated 1988 Constitution came into force, with all its innovations in terms of urban planning instruments, and yet urban policies have not proved effective in coping with the crisis in Brazilian cities
The regulation of almost all the new instruments of urban control in the 1992 Master Plan was not used by the municipal government, which preferred to support its actions in a strategic plan, abandoning the vision of macroplanning in favor of the “urban acupuncture”
This option is explicitly stated when considering that the 2011 Master Plan, currently in force, failed to regulate urban planning instruments, such as the progressive IPTU, and removed the single IAT for the city

Summary

Introduction

Almost three decades have passed since the celebrated 1988 Constitution came into force, with all its innovations in terms of urban planning instruments, and yet urban policies have not proved effective in coping with the crisis in Brazilian cities. Housing and mobility policies have a great impact on city planning, and may stimulate new courses of expansion and/or intensification of land use in urban areas with a greater supply of services It should be considered, that they are policies that demand sustainable sources of funding over time, which introduces the challenge of discovering manners with which to include them in the public budget over a number of years while they are in force. The impact on the living conditions of the population, loses the potentiality that urban policy could possess since investments in housing and mobility are guided towards business profitability, thereby reducing any positive impact on public interest, which should overlap with private interests in order to conform with the constitutional principles that guide urban policy It is not the objective of this article to analyze the evolution of urban policy in Brazil in any depth, but rather to put the criticism of analyzes on the effectiveness of this policy into a perspective according to which it becomes part of social policies. It is not an unknown fact, that new generations of technicians may develop another view of urban policies, especially because the context in which it takes place is always undergoing modifications

Urban planners interviewed were

17 Due to the dispute in the mayoral elections of 2000

Findings

Conclusions