Paradigm or paradox? The ‘cumbersome impasse’ of the participatory turn in Brazilian urban planning

Abstract

The Brazilian urban reform movement expanded citizen participation in decision-making processes through a policy environment motivated by a right to the city (RTC), a collective development strategy for political transformation. Yet recent events evidence that social exclusion and spatial segregation remain dominant features of the Brazilian city. These contradictions have led planning scholars and practitioners to grapple with misalignment between the reform movement’s paradigmatic goals and its paradoxical failures. We build upon this genre of thinking to assess critical areas of paradigm and paradox in Brazilian planning – insurgent urbanism, informality and knowledge – each of which is rooted in the lesser-understood concept of autogestão for improving the equity of land division through urban planning.¹ Although not all inclusive of the issues faced by Brazilian cities, these three categories were selected for best representing how Brazil’s participatory turn established a range of paradigmatic and paradoxical conditions that can help us to understand cities in Brazil and beyond and might better leverage autogestão in the future.

Introduction

Brazil’s recent political-economic malaise has challenged confidence in radical, rights-based programmes for overcoming spatial segregation and social exclusion across the Latin Global South. In response, cities are emerging as sites of conflict between the idealisation of a right to the city (RTC) and its differentiated implementation within urban planning (Caldeira, 2017; Friendly, 2013; Holston, 1998; Maricato, 2017). These conflicts arise from an historical struggle for collective urban management or autogestão, which coalesced long before the RTC was introduced in Brazil to ensure greater equity in urban land distribution and organisation (Huchzermeyer, 2015). Although Brazil’s planning experience has undoubtedly resulted in a transformative policy environment, gains in access to planning processes have been maligned by gaps in the quality of participation. As a result, urban change has occurred amid an evolving relationship between autogestão and a right to the city, whereby they are in transition, or ‘not merely two adjacent rights, rather they imply one another’ (Purcell, 2013: 150).

In this article we examine the interaction between policy areas established by RTC but realised through ongoing practices of autogestão. We first introduce these two concepts within Brazilian planning, and argue that RTC’s achievements have fallen short of enhancing how people meaningfully influence the structural patterns of urbanisation. We theorise that in emphasising the everyday, differentiated experience of urban development, the idealisation of the RTC has led to its own fragmentation and dilution, recently cited by Brazilian scholars (Klink and Denaldi, 2016; Maricato, 2011). On this basis, we draw upon recent literature to distinguish autogestão as an important mechanism for understanding why the urban reform movement came about, and how the RTC’s dilution has resulted in novel conditions. Although embedded with old challenges, we argue that these conditions have significant potential for advancing new directions in planning for the Latin Global South. RTC can still be a mobilising force for Latin American cities moving forward, but only insofar as it is recast into something that reconfigures difference into a common scaffold of decision-making processes (Sanyal, 2011).

Although we are not Brazilian, our experience and scholarship in Brazil form a unique perspective grounded in Harding’s (1995) notion of ‘strong objectivity’, which emphasises the researcher’s positionality as a precursor to any inquiry within contexts historically marginalised from global knowledge production. It is from this exploratory and external position that we consider Brazil and autogestão as one way to understand how its planning experience can guide peer cities in the Latin Global South. We begin by situating autogestão within the urban reform movement, highlighting the decline of its focus on equity and the rise of new modes of participation. We explore how this is happening, through the themes of insurgent urbanism, informality and knowledge, and conclude with implications for planning in the Latin Global South.

Context: Urban reform, social movements and the left agenda

In the early 1980s, an urban reform movement restored proposals of the 1960s, responding to a ‘logic of disorder’ (Kowarick, 1980) marked by unregulated capitalist development and inadequate access to housing and land for low-income urban populations (Monte-Mór, 2007). ² The National Movement for Urban Reform (Movimento Nacional de Reforma Urbana, MNRU) was formed by popular cooperatives, neighbourhood associations, NGOs, trade unions and professional organisations, which united to develop a proposal for a rights-based approach to urban development, recognising that urban reform cannot happen without legal protections for citizen rights (Fernandes, 2007). This push for democracy evolved into claims for social justice against infringements of the military dictatorship (Dagnino, 1994, 2003). ³ These claims coalesced into a popular ‘democratic forum’ designed to reconfigure inequitable land structures with participatory forms of planning formed around three axes: 1) tenure security for low-income residents; 2) intervention in real estate speculation; and 3) democratisation of policy decision-making processes, which fuelled the opposition that weakened the dictatorship, and culminated in the 1986–1987 National Constituent Assembly and its 1988 democratic constitution (Rolnik, 2013).

During these early phases of Brazil’s democratic emergence, Marie Huchzermeyer (2015: 22) highlights the importance of Lefebvre’s (1968) writings for – and even visits to – Brazil between the late 1960s and early 1980s, which ‘inspired a rights and legal emphasis in the work of the social movements that later aligned to the newly formed Workers Party’. While others highlight the influence of the RTC in Brazil at this time (Fernandes, 2007), Huchzermeyer (Omena De Mello, 2017) references a movement to realise other concepts that Lefebvre was writing about, for example autogestão for housing (Rodrigues, 2013). Holston (2008: 349–350) as well highlights Lefebvre’s influence ‘for the “rights turn” in the[se] urban social movements’, noting that this ‘framed the broad coalition against dictatorship and helped to legitimate rights as a currency of a national project of democratization’. As Latin American cities exposed modernism’s failure to respond to citizen needs, they catalysed grassroots movements uniquely tied to the experience of peripheral urban growth and the struggle for land. The prevalence of uneven geographic development meant that the reform movement was not only about democratic re-emergence for the masses, but also concerned who influenced the shape and form of cities, and how.

The 1986–1987 Constituent Assembly institutionalised an urban reform that expanded housing and environmental movements to encompass an insurgency that focused on the city as ‘a collective use value’ (Klink and Denaldi, 2016: 405). Organised movements contributed to the Assembly in unprecedented numbers, transforming residents from the urban peripheries into key players in a national advocacy for a new Brazilian social charter (Holston, 2008). Although movements lost out on key demands, articles 182 and 183 of the 1988 Constitution reaffirm the social function of property (the obligation for land uses that contribute to the common good), and recognise democratic urban governance, the integration of informal settlements into the city and direct participation in urban policy-making (Ondetti, 2016). ⁴ Although dramatic in scope, Brazil’s transition to democracy was gradual, given the military government’s slow withdrawal from rule, and it created political space for opposition groups to organise. It was at the municipal level that opposition parties were first elected – even before control of the national executive passed into civilian hands (1985). ⁵ In 1988, the Worker’s Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) won local elections in over 40 municipalities, crowned by the unexpected victory of Luiza Erundina (PT) in São Paulo (1989–1992). ⁶ A range of cities readily experimented with progressive local planning practices and Brazil soon became a ‘laboratory’ for new local governance and direct democracy strategies (Fernandes, 2007).

Yet it was not until 2001 that cities were provided with the tools to regulate the Constitution’s articles on urban policy and its commitment to reducing urban inequality (182 and 183). ⁷ Brazil’s Statute of the City sets out a legal framework for requiring participation in the planning process through master planning, and provides a range of legal, urban and fiscal instruments that cities may use to ensure urban land markets function relative to social welfare and use (Caldeira and Holston, 2015; Fernandes, 2011; Friendly, 2013). These local tools were bolstered in 2002, when Lula of PT won the Brazilian presidential election. His campaign ran on a platform for a Ministry of Cities ‘as the locus for designing and implementing urban policies’ that were previously mismatched across different ministries (Rolnik, 2011: 242). The former governor of Rio Grande do Sul State Olivio Dutra was elected the first minister in 2003, and appointed prominent planners and architects from the urban reform movement to key positions. Ministry policies and Statute enforcement was undertaken by the National Council of Cities, established in 2003 and comprised of actors from all scales of government and civil society.

Post-urban reform: Neoliberal management

In the years following the reform movement, democratised policy environments across the Latin Global South were heavily influenced by neoliberal, new urban management approaches designed to enable market expansion (Maricato, 2001; Ward, 2012). Collective management projects were supported, but only insofar as they were compatible with private enterprise. As an example, collaborative, community-based housing (mutirão) was outsourced to private developers in the 1990s. Although physical housing outcomes looked the same, the process was markedly different, and had qualitative impacts on long-term community development (Stiphany, 2016). Market deregulation and the widespread reduction in State oversight created a vacuum, which opened up new roles, and responsibilities, for civil society actors (Harvey, 2006; Peck and Tickell, 2002). Yet efforts to increase participation also created competition among communities, which began to rival one another for resources they once aspired to share (Sader, 1988).

These dynamics created a chasm between urban planning and land structures, which for some represents the greatest impediment to the reform’s widespread success (Fernandes, 2018). As Dos Santos Júnior and Montandon (2011) have pointed out, many Brazilian cities with master plans have not effectively applied land-market instruments in a distributive way. Although master plans are technical and regulatory instruments, the majority have failed to intervene in land structure and real estate market dynamics, a disjuncture that explains ‘the state’s structural inability to provide accessible, adequate, sufficient, well-located and affordable access to serviced urban land and housing’ (Fernandes, 2018: 54). ⁸ As a result, urban planning in Brazil remains disassociated from land and property markets, despite the fact that the regulations they create often have socioeconomic implications that determine access to land and housing. As Flavio Villaça (2005) has long argued, master plans are a technical smokescreen that do little beyond upholding the status quo. Similarly, Freitas (2017) calls for a more structural understanding of the RTC’s capacity to intervene in uneven urban development processes.

Therefore, although the reform movement has not dismantled any core barriers, it has catalysed important counter movements. For insurgent planners, the conflict between neoliberalism and urban peripheries has created social infrastructures that ‘confront the entrenched regimes of citizen inequality that the urban centers use to segregate them’ (Holston, 2009: 245). This confrontation exists between what Miraftab (2004) calls ‘invited spaces’ of participation, which appear to be inclusive yet reproduce hegemonic forms of engagement, and those that people create as ‘invented spaces’ to challenge the conditions and constraints of the neoliberal city (also see Miraftab, 2009; Miraftab and Wills, 2005; Sletto, 2012). Although diverse, this tension has played out among both left and right agendas, which have embedded logics of participation that ultimately dismantle political, social and material contexts designed to expand participation. That the PT introduced a housing policy (Minha Casa Minha Vida, MCMV) that expands social segregation in perpetuity emphasises just how much the RTC’s outcomes betrayed its own legacy. These perversions normalise the notion that neoliberalism and its corollaries – gentrification, displacement and inequitable access – are unavoidable outcomes, rather than choices that citizens make with their governments (Caldeira, 2005; Caldeira and Holston, 2015).

However, some are seeking alternatives, to become less reliant on policies that were established originally for greater choice yet were sustained by contradictory conditions (Caldeira, 2017; Klink and Denaldi, 2016). We observe alternatives emerging in the areas of insurgency, informality and knowledge. Insurgent movements are those that manage to innovate amid the necessity of coping with urban inequalities. Informality has become a locus for rethinking urban space, with more than 200 urbanisation or upgrading projects implemented in São Paulo since 2006. And although Brazil is very low on the global scale of educational performance, it has one of the most widespread and transparent information infrastructures in Latin America. These categories are important for distinguishing insurgency, which involves practices of collective action amid uneven development, from informality, which refers to ‘an organizing logic, a system of norms that governs the process of urban transformation itself’ (Roy, 2005: 148). Although not all-encompassing, these planning areas reflect how the RTC has expanded access to governance opportunities, yet also required that people transform them to operate differently – a process that we argue is contemporary autogestão. In the following, we consider how the old concept of autogestão is operating within Brazil’s contemporary situation.

Three areas at the intersection of RTC and autogestão

The right to the city’s political persuasiveness derives from enhanced access to decision-making processes. This claim is most clearly articulated by David Harvey (2008: 23), who writes that ‘the right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources; it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city’. For Harvey, city building goes beyond the construction of more housing, and establishes a scaffolding through which people can maintain long-term engagement in urban affairs. Yet there is nothing particularly measurable about the RTC, which is why its concrete impacts remain a major area of concern – and lacunae of understanding – across a range of disciplines.

Beginning in the late 2000s, advocates of the reform movement began to more critically assess its ‘ebb and flow’ which, for Rolnik, had become a ‘permanent source of tension and cultural innovation … which has increased the impact of Brazilian democracy both geographically and politically’ (Rolnik, 2011: 240). Many began to see, for example, that the RTC suffered from significant gaps in implementation, and lacked empirics for understanding the efficacy of its operationalisation amid increasingly complex urban conditions. Klink and Denaldi (2016: 403) suggest that such revisioning is evidence of the reform project’s dilution, and that despite improvements in income distribution and access to services, Brazilian cities still feature ‘persisting contradictions in urban and regional spaces’. Given this paradox, they argue that an alternative to structural explanations can help to better understand the reform movement’s selective orchestration, spatialisation and expansion by a range of actors over time.

The widespread dilution of RTC has been explained by Teresa Caldeira (2017: 7) as transversal logics, where ‘inequalities cannot always be mapped out in simplistic dualistic oppositions’ because they are more nuanced in their operationalisation. Caldeira (2017: 7) critiques the binary of community–state for neglecting how ‘citizens and governments interact in complex ways’, arguing instead for analyses of the ways in which contingencies, uncertainties and transformation articulate in everyday life. Given that the reform movement has been strained in its implementation yet has also logged unprecedented achievements, it is reasonable to once again explore the micro-conditions within which practices of autogestão are flourishing. We are certainly not the first to resuscitate the concept of autogestão, and grapple with its relevance for contemporary times and contexts beyond Brazil. As others have done, we use the concept of autogestão in the following sections to examine the interface between structural conditions and their experience in particular places, institutions and governance arrangements (Healy, 2012). The selected areas are by no means comprehensive of Brazil’s spectrum of planning experiences. Rather, we contend that they best represent the most timely (or persistent) tensions that are prominent across the Latin Global South, yet are exemplary for understanding autogestão in its contemporary formats in Brazil.

Insurgent urbanism

Insurgent urbanism concerns transformation among people within the unique context of neoliberalism and the political infrastructures it creates (Purcell, 2002). In this case, autogestão relates to how the experience of uneven development generates innovative processes or outcomes, and how associated relationships generate a unique proclivity towards provisional, contingent and place-based forms of urbanism (Caldeira, 2017; Holston, 1991, 1998; Miraftab, 2009). Insurgent urbanism is relevant for exploring how neoliberal economics continually restructures the interface between communities and their governments. This restructuring creates a shift from binary conditions, within which a collective movement resists authoritarian rule, to more plural, fleeting, shape-shifting and intermittent activities (Miraftab, 2018). Such actions cope with the aftermath of those movements, their achievements and, most significantly, limitations in coping with a widespread rollback of government support (Miraftab, 2009; Miraftab and Wills, 2005). Insurgent urbanism initially formed around the poor conditions of peripheral urban areas, but it has evolved into ‘problem spaces’ for making sense of the interrelated processes that expand political reach for the marginalised communities even as they continue to result in highly inequitable and uneven cities (Caldeira, 2017).

Insurgent urbanism is useful for understanding how alternative modes of political action evolve in contexts historically peripheral to urban development, and that exist ‘in spite of planning, not because of it’ (Sletto, 2012: 228). Insurgency gained currency in planning through Holston’s (1998) work on insurgent citizenship, referring to new sources of legitimacy in opposition to a modernist political project. This new paradigm of citizenship suggests that urban theory may help to distinguish ‘new sites of creativity’ and identify ‘possibilities for alternative futures’ (Holston, 2009: 28) The idea of differentiated citizenship thus produces new inequalities, vulnerabilities and destabilisations, but also the means to challenge them through insurgence (Holston, 2009). An inherently Brazilian idea, insurgence frames:

a planning response in cities which had become destination points for global economic migrants from a range of cultural backgrounds, and hence less likely to be in agreement either with each other, or the state, in terms of urban interventions. (Watson, 2009: 86).

This response is not only a frame of action, but reflects a powerful framework for understanding how people operate outside formal planning practices and with a focus upon resistance and the formation of counter-hegemony (Gramsci, 1995; Tilly and Tarrow, 2007).

From these perspectives, autogestão is not a singular entity but is at a crossroads of insurgent practices that have been moving away from the ideology of the RTC to encompass ‘a productive insurgent counter-planning against a state which has failed to deliver, or to deliver effectively, on various fronts’ (Meth, 2010: 242). Although in reference to South Africa, this comment applies to the Brazilian context, where autogestão reiterates the importance of inclusion and how people influence urbanisation processes. In Brazil, this paradox is most evidenced by the June 2013 protests, a manifestation and critique ‘of forgotten promises and important demands for basic social rights’ (Friendly, 2017: 138). These insurgencies call into question whether the idea of the RTC has been translated into practice, given the many challenges apparent in Brazil’s cities. Although emergent from critiques about the quality of urban life, insurgent urbanism is broadly focused upon the material inequalities associated with informal urban development.

Overall, three characteristics are typical of the way insurgent urbanism has occurred recently in Brazil. First, these insurgencies are contingent and shape-shifting (Miraftab, 2018). The June 2013 protests began with the Movimento Passe Zero to decrease the cost of public transportation, yet quickly expanded to include demands for more equitable spending in the areas of health, education and the planning of mega events. This range has not only revealed new planning issues, but resuscitated old ones to once again challenge ‘the existing emptied out top-down spaces of participation’ (Braathen et al., 2016: 266). Continuing in 2014, the protests included protesters from various classes and groups, and their diverse voices; however, these protests depleted considerably (Friendly, 2017). In 2015 and 2016, protests by the Brazilian right demanded the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the apex of conservative backlash against years of PT-directed resource redistribution (Baiocchi and Silva, 2015). The appointment of Michel Temer to replace her resulted in a new suite of claims around issues such as water rationing, fuel costs, pension reform and austerity measures, among others. If the protests starting in 2013 had a somewhat more common voice, later actions have been more fleeting, and can be understood within a perspective of changing repertoires and cycles of protest (Alonso and Mische, 2017; Tilly and Tarrow, 2007).

Second, within the heterogeneous movements that have emerged, surprising actors have united in unexpected ways. Brazilians across race, class, gender and age have protested a range of grievances, and notably ‘a “fed-up-ness” with the state of the country’ since 2013 (Alonso and Mische, 2017: 144). Indeed, a key characteristic of insurgency’s evolving genre of thinking is that social mobilisation at local levels evolves as new actors come onto broader political scenes (Sader, 1988). Student movements, the middle classes and school protests all evidence that since 2015, the protests have been comprised of both the left and right, though not necessarily at the same time. From the right, protests were directed against Dilma surrounding the ‘Lava Jato’ corruption scandal, in contrast to a more disorganised left, bereft of both aspirations and leadership for the first time since the 1970s (Saad-Filho and Boito, 2016). These changing cycles and scales of protest have led to the highly heterogeneous nature of political action that increasingly characterises the Brazilian political landscape.

Finally, insurgent movements of Brazil have keenly deployed social media in new ways. As Joia (2016: 430) notes, the 2013 movements created a virtual environment resulting in a ‘meaning-construction process’ related to the need for change in Brazil, proliferated with the general hashtag #MUDABRASIL (#CHANGEBRAZIL). MediaNinja (a collective of citizen journalists) and the Black Block used livestream technology to broadcast the protests in real time. Social media continues to play a key role, and its use by a range of actors highlights the changing nature of the protests and political mobilisation. Although not the only ingredient necessary for widespread mobilisation, social media is emerging as a key player in revealing how, and where, people experience urban development through collective self-management.

Informality

Examining autogestão through informality involves policies that challenge the notion that some places lack the organisation and structure typically ascribed to the traditional city. It refers to situations in which people transform their involvement in urban affairs to work within the existing city fabric in community, academic and institutional settings (Watson, 2012). Although informality is often considered to be a peripheral condition, which created people who threaten societal norms and security, it is evident that informality is a core feature of thousands of cities across the globe, that manifests unevenly. If insurgent urbanism involves everyday and ad hoc practices of collectivity, informality refers to the specific structural platforms that cultivate ‘a differentiated process embodying varying degrees of power and exclusion’ (Roy, 2005: 148).

From the late 1970s onwards, this process was most clearly articulated through informal settlement upgrading. At the time, user-based, collective forms of housing and land use were advanced to ostensibly support the exchange of technique and expertise among residents, architects and engineers (Ward, 2012). Upgrading worked within the grain of informal settlements and, by improving the self-built housing stock that communities had constructed for themselves, picked upon the idea that people could build the city by building their own homes. When upgrading was supplanted by turn-key, infill development housing approaches in the mid-1990s, it not only shifted discourse away from collective community management, but decoupled visions for social emancipation from neighbourhood change. This led self-building to become a different practice, whereby the poor could achieve an aesthetic commensurate with middle-class neighbourhoods, rather than achieve structural change (Taschner, 1995).

Even so, self-building continued to be used to create a local politics of planning, which Caldeira (2017: 3) describes as peripheral urbanisation, a worldview that operates inside formal modes of planning, but in transversal ways through which people ‘make themselves into citizens and political agents, become fluent in rights talk, and claim the cities as their own’ (see also Kentor, 1981; Walton, 1982). Peripheral urbanisation results in innovative strategies (such as self-building), yet Caldeira (2017: 4) stresses that it also results in ‘highly unequal and heterogeneous cities’.

One of the most pronounced examples of peripheral urbanisation in Brazil today is the Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) housing programme, introduced to expand access to credit for low-income housing, and stimulate the economy amid global financial uncertainty (Maricato, 2017). ⁹ By 2015, 3.5 million units had been constructed for very low-, low- and middle-income ranges. Even so, and as Rolnik (2014) has recently affirmed, MCMV improves access to low-income housing, yet it does so by reproducing an old pattern of social segregation and peripheral sprawl. This pattern extends to MCMV’s community programme, Minha Casa Minha Vida Entidades (MCMVE), which claims to embody autogestão, yet involves predatory lending and exploitative practices (Stiphany and Ward, n.d.; Rizek et al., 2014). Beginning in 2010, MCMVE was launched to enable community associations to become their own MCMV developers whereby they are tasked with finding an inexpensive plot of land, inscribing participants and managing project implementation. Yet as Rizek et al. (2014) and others argue, what is being constructed is little more than a false demand, within which associations are hastily formed and then disbanded for the sole purpose of project development (Rizek et al., 2014: 542). In this case, empirical evidence suggests that associations are using the familiar concept of autogestão to lure neighbours away from well-serviced communities they have collectively constructed over decades (Stiphany and Ward, n.d.).

Yet others argue that MCMV can lead to positive outcomes, and that in some cases it has ‘incorporated the improved spaces of the peripheries into the regularized city and expanded the home ownership of the poor’ (Caldeira, 2017: 14). Although unevidenced on a broad scale, this claim is supported by Brasilia’s housing agency CODHAB, where public design competitions are being used to adapt MCMV to the existing conditions of its satellite cities. ¹⁰ In another example, the Brazilian ‘our cities network’ encourages residents to track household and neighbourhood energy use and performance through smart phones. ¹¹ These small innovations suggest how policy has changed relative to the real challenges of informality. Further research is needed to understand the extent to which projects are implemented as designed, limit displacement and expand participation in meaningful ways.

Knowledge

Knowledge emphasises the reform movement’s quest to dismantle the divisions between local and expert experience. It focuses upon planning as a platform that people construct to advance new communities of learning as they challenge the neoliberal city (Bonduki, 1992; Miraftab, 2009). While the previous two analytical themes examined how autogestão reveals actual practices and policy, knowledge emphasises the ways in which citizens have sought not only to reveal urbanisation’s various contradictions, but also to empower people to transform them.

Following the 2001 Statute of the City, people began to participate through initiatives such as participatory budgeting, municipal councils and town hall housing meetings. Established to augment the exchange of information from communities to governments, these participatory platforms provided limited opportunities for knowledge co-production (Rolnik, 2011). Recently, interactive, web-based tools within planning processes permit citizens to determine how, where and when they participate. These tools and the data they generate improve the transparency of planning processes, and form the basis of new, evolving forms of practice, research, and legal protection for effectively managing difference within urban development (Stiphany et al., 2017).

In 2011, Brazil enacted the ‘Lei de acesso à informação/2011’, which mandates public access to all state-produced data, resulting in municipal portals for citizen monitoring of local government activity. ¹² São Paulo was the first Brazilian city to mobilise open web mapping for improved government administration, with the HABISP tool designed by the Secretariat of Housing in 2007 to describe where and how informal settlements were being improved. HABISP catalysed an innovative tech cluster within government, challenging the historically opaque and clientelistic urban development processes with increased transparency and expanded data accessibility (Coelho, 2013). While SEHAB’s housing outcomes featured mixed results, the HABISP tool was replicated by peer cities such as São Bernardo, Recife, Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba. ¹³ The open data movement within municipal agencies paralleled the expansion of the INDE (Infraestrutura Nacional de Dados Espaciais), and ad hoc initiatives through which individuals are using access to information to enhance citizen participation in community affairs.

The reasons for the data movement are both practical and philosophical. Open data gives government institutions the option to defer information sourcing to citizens rather than undertake the laborious task of data mining for every public request. Prior to the 2011 law, for example, requesting a Shapefile reflective of political affiliations required a three-month approval period from one of Brazil’s ministries. Yet the movement also reflects the incorporation of academics and intellectuals into the centre of national and urban development. While these positions rarely rise to the status of ministers, projects such as Rolnik’s (2014) geospatial analysis of MCMV in São Paulo are pioneering key links between knowledge production and the dissemination of innovation for urban issues related to the RTC. The data movement is one to be closely monitored: a recent study shows no correlation between the transparency of a municipality’s data practices and the quality of the data (Araújo et al., 2016).

A second instance of knowledge production beyond the boundaries of RTC’s participatory platforms involves governance innovations. During the 1990s, Brazil became a laboratory for new strategies of local governance, and has since been referred to as a country that undertakes ‘urban management with the people’ (Mattheaus, 1995, cited in Souza, 2001: 176; Fernandes, 2007). This reference is most immediately apparent in participatory budgets, which involve citizens in the prioritisation of budget demands, providing possibilities to democratise local administrations and break with the clientelistic power structures characteristic in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s (Abers, 2000). Porto Alegre’s participatory budget, introduced by the PT in 1990, is the most celebrated example. In the late 1970s and 1980s, a number of cities – such as Lages in Santa Catarina state – began trying out small-scale experiments in participatory democracy, even without adopting the name ‘participatory budget’ (Baiocchi et al., 2011).

More recently, the smart city has provided a new conduit for collective decision-making to improve accountability and innovation, and provide incentives for citizen engagement. In 2012, the city of Rio de Janeiro formed a partnership with IBM to establish an urban data centre (Centro de Operações Rio) to monitor and manage infrastructural performance and, ostensibly, citizen safety and wellbeing. Although the centre has succeeded in coordinating fire, health, and policy agency activity, its technological determinist underpinnings – and the smart city broadly – have been criticised for failing to address deep structural inequalities (Batty, 2014). Since then, the centre has coordinated the efforts of health, fire and police agencies to optimise city function in real time, despite criticism that its technological determinist underpinnings fail to address underlying social challenges (Batty, 2014).

Yet some have questioned the extent to which remote sensing, digital monitoring and big data create a more sophisticated interface between people and cities. Goodspeed (2015: 86) emphasises the fundamentally uneven nature of IT development; because ‘a sufficient market may not exist, implementing them requires government action or private companies may lack knowledge or creativity to create locally-useful IT’. Although social media have fuelled new forms of mobilisation, initiatives that empower community groups with data development to address familiar issues such as regularisation and informality are forming new paradigms of participation. ¹⁴ Examples include in-person and online surveys for urban mobility (PLAMUS), ¹⁵ mapping platforms that support social housing redevelopment (HABITASAMPA), ¹⁶ low-cost geospatial platforms for small towns (Perez et al., 2017) and community-based data collection and visualisation tools (Stiphany et al., 2017). These emerging efforts hold the potential to improve the efficacy of familiar participatory platforms, such as meetings. Time will tell if this is indeed the case, and further research is needed to understand whether increased computing power can concretely enhance urban livability across the range of conditions that characterise the contemporary Brazilian city.

What planning can learn from autogestão

The use of autogestão within these three categories raises the question as to whether the RTC’s prolific decline might catalyse something of greater consequence. Although it is impossible to predict how Brazil will fare in the coming years, a close reading of the RTC’s evolutionary trajectory suggests that its so-called dilution – what Clarissa Freitas (2017: 953) calls ‘undoing the right to the city’ – could consolidate into core domains of planning research and action that mobilise autogestão for addressing uncertainty across peer Latin American cities, if not the Global Urban South. We understand the following three areas as potential domains within which collective urban management could flourish. If we extract the core mechanism of autogestão – which is collective decision-making processes – then these areas might look slightly different than they have in the past.

Local politics of planning

Given the local nature of claims at the dawn of Brazil’s participatory turn, its focus upon improving the living conditions of low-income communities with housing and infrastructure was reasonable. Yet cities are not just shaped by the needs of individual communities. While incremental upgrading has enhanced the quality of life across the city, it has done so unevenly, such that some communities have benefited significantly more than others. This is the case not just between central and peripheral neighbourhoods, but also among peripheral neighbourhoods. Recent research by Stiphany et al. (2017) suggests that the success of informal settlement upgrading is linked to its association with both local movements and broader urban initiatives. Moving forward, autogestão’s legacy of horizontal governance must assimilate the territorial expanse and site specific conditions that have co-evolved contemporary processes of urbanisation. Along this line of thinking, the use of scenario planning is one way forward, whereby citizens with various allegiances plan for growth around emergent issues – such as school nutrition and employment – to make decisions about alternative futures. Scenario planning councils can build upon familiar forms of once-used mobilisation such as participatory budgeting, yet can potentially challenge what has become a habit of presenting one development option for consensus with enhanced citizen representation, and real time and interactive knowledge-sourcing, and focus upon land management (Dooling, 2015). For example, the Chapa Project (www.chapa.io) utilises democratic forms of data collection, analysis, and visualisation to guide scenario planning for the redevelopment of informal settlements. Although the use of scenario planning for such purposes would require governments to cede control of informal land use decision-making processes, doing so could catalyse forms of collective land management that more effectively link local civic infrastructures to broader flows of planning ideas and action.

The urban data movement

The global shift towards data driven development is hardly new; however, inclusive forms of data collection, analysis and visualisation are. Although many municipalities have improved the transparency of data resources, technological innovations remain largely concentrated within city agencies. As a result, there are few opportunities for citizens to interact with and contribute to urban data systems. If the idea of the data movement is to truly transform cities, it must provide people with tools to incorporate local knowledge and concretely improve resource distribution. For example, communities are held to the same regulatory standards as the large metro regions of which they are a part, but lack the tools – sometimes basic maps – to comply. These limitations emphasise the hidden barriers to the reform movement’s relevance for places that are peripheral, and embedded within territories and land use processes about which very little is known.

More work is required to expand the data movement beyond just mapping, and into the realm of improving decision-making processes among citizens and their governments. The rise of low cost tools such as Google Street View and My Maps evidences a demand for self-reporting, and an interest in community projects that move beyond just bricks and mortar. If linked to public programmes, these tools hold the potential to transform data systems in ways that align with true forms of autogestão. Technology alone is not a substitute for technical assistance, nor the expertise required to design housing or engineer infrastructure. Yet as our analysis suggests, the 2013 movements spurred a technological turn within Brazil’s participatory movement. Such a shift emphasises the power of computing to not only map more territory, but transform it.

Metropolitan planning

Owing to the RTC’s local focus, most now understand how issues like housing and transportation will impact their own neighbourhoods, yet not the broader metropolitan region. Indeed, while in Brazil the RTC has been integrated into local planning processes to some extent through both the 1988 Constitution and later the Statute, metropolitan governance fell into disuse during the 1990s, only re-emerging in the mid-2000s as a key issue based on perceived deficiencies of the Statute in dealing with the metropolitan scale. This is surprising, especially given that Brazil is highly metropolitan in nature. The Statute of the Metropolis was finally approved in January 2015, requiring cities and states to ‘scale up’ urban reform, collectively elaborating an integrated urban development plan at the metropolitan level including land market tools included in the Statute (Klink and Denaldi, 2016). Though the results of these changes are as yet unknown, what is necessary is to more fully understand the role of collective self-management within the new planning institutions of metropolitan governance in Brazil and, in particular, how the urban reform project may be extended to metropolitan governance. In this way, autogestão can play a key role in mediating new spaces of metropolitan governance in Brazil.

Conclusion

Since the 1960s, the urban reform movement and the associated changes within urban planning practices in Brazilian cities have helped to establish the RTC framework that brought Brazil considerable recognition as a democratic project to change the role of planning, the state and social actors in governing cities based on social justice. Evolving conditions in Brazil, however, have required a revision of this enigmatic paradigm. In this article, we argue that this so-called dilution more accurately reflects the uncertainty that many cities in Brazil seem to be facing, presenting an opportunity to recalibrate planning processes to work within change, not against it. Building upon a genre of thinking that critically assesses paradigmatic goals and paradoxical failures in Brazilian planning processes, we highlight three conditions – insurgent urbanism, informality and knowledge – that clearly connect urban reform to a right to the city approach, revealing how autogestão processes rooted in ‘actually existing urbanisms’ based on ‘alternative social dynamics’ provide promising directions (Watson, 2012: 83).

To leverage autogestão for the future, we draw on Watson’s (2012) call for new directions in planning grounded on old ideas by developing new ways of understanding the material reality, governance and forms of state–community engagement of cities in the Latin Global South. Although autogestão has been somewhat marginalised within planning literature, its importance in Brazil since the 1970s makes the Brazilian context an ideal starting point to consider its relevance at a broader level. As Purcell (2013: 152) notes, Lefebvre’s social contract was ‘a political awakening, a catalyst for a movement toward autogestion’. Despite a fragmentation of RTC in some contexts, bringing autogestão back in helps to better account for how such processes may ensure greater equity in urban land distribution and organisation. Overall, we propose three future openings – the local politics of planning, the data revolution and metropolitan planning – that could, perhaps, provide great hope for planning in the Latin Global South. It is from this admittedly exploratory step that we move beyond the dilution of the RTC towards planning rooted in collective management practices based on autogestão.