Ten years of the City Statute in Brazil: from the struggle for urban reform to the World Cup cities

Abstract

The City Statute, an innovative national legal framework directed to strengthen local planning and land management towards more equitable and sustainable urban development, was approved by Brazilian Congress in 2001 as a result of political and legal reforms arising from the new Constitution of 1988 in the context of Brazilian democratisation. A decade later, we examine if, where and how this legal framework has been implemented in the country. This assessment must consider the political and social dimensions of the process that resulted in the Statute, as well as the ways those dimensions were transformed in Brazil throughout the 10 years since the Statute's approval by the National Congress. The hypothesis presented by this article is that the entire process of formulation, approval, enforcement and interpretation of the City Statute has been a history of disputes between different urban reform projects in the country, particularly between a rights-based approach of the urban reform movement and a market-driven competitive cities spatial regime paradigm.