DA TRAGÉDIA URBANA À FARSA DO URBANISMO REFORMISTA: a fetichização dos planos diretores participativos

Abstract

In the eighties, as a reaction to social-spatial inequity in Brazilian cities, the Urban Reform program sought to unify academy intellectuals and organized community entities in a movement for egalitarian and distributive urban policies. Partially recognized by the Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988, the ideas of the Urban Reform movement were subjected to those of urban planning, since the Urban Master Plan was declared the municipality s major instrument of urban policy. Initially disputed by the Urban Reform movement, due to its technocratic and segregationist character during the Brazilian military government, however regularized by the City Statute, the Urban Master Plan proposes to insure, since 2005, urbanized and well located land for the poorest in thousands of Brazilian cities. Despite the diminished popular participation, low rates of legislation approval and almost null implementation of its proposals, the Master Plan affirms itself as instrument of the Urban Reform and the Movement condenses itself in the Urban Planning Law as a way to achieve the city of all . By the means of a historical analysis of the twenty years that separate the criticism from the adhesion to the Urban Master Plan, supported by a theoretical study and field research on significant experiences of participative planning in Brazil, the present study shows that, by partaking the values of the bourgeoisie democracy and submitting the urban rights struggle to the institutional procedures of city planning, the Urban Reform Movement compromises the autonomy of social organizations and contributes to the capitalist accumulation and reproduction in the urban space, aggravating the tragedy of the cities. In this way, under the leadership of a technocratic elite and heavily influenced by the political and economic changes that have occurred in Brazil conservative democratic consolidation, neoliberalism s offensive and hegemony, political access of the Labor Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores PT) to federal government -, the institutionalization process of the Urban Reform project, through the fetishism of Participative Urban Master Plans, turns into sham the purposes of reformist urbanism.