9 - Participatory planning and the insurgent city: the challenges of the right to the city in Belo Horizonte

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Transformative planning practices able to confront the reproduction of inequalities in Brazilian cities have, in recent decades, been characterized by two interrelated processes. On the one hand, the relatively cohesive and enduring broad coalition under the banner of the “urban reform agenda” has, since the 1980s, been able to shape and influence legislation, policy and planning education. Moved by the ideal of translating the right to the city into material changes, there has been an institutionalization of planning instruments designed to promote social justice, policy innovations and social participation at different government scales. On the other hand, despite a period of intense investment in housing, transport and large-scale projects during the late 2000s and early 2010s, the countrywide insurgent protests of June 2013 and an increasing number of urban occupations of land and empty buildings have shown that the horizon for more socially just cities is still elusive in Brazil. Experimenting with practices of direct action, deliberation and tactical engagements with the state, new urban actors are bringing changes to the dynamics of urban politics. This process is analysed through the case of the city of Belo Horizonte, the centre of Brazil's third largest urban agglomeration, where urban insurgencies have exposed the limits of an institutionalized right to the city, while at same time strategically mobilizing acquired rights and channels of participation to push the state to act and fulfil the goals of the urban reform.

An analysis of housing and planning policies in Belo Horizonte offers privileged insights about the dynamics of institutional reform and urban insurgency. The city has been at the vanguard of progressive urban policies since the early 1980s, experimenting with inclusionary practices of favela upgrading and participatory budgeting. Left-wing coalitions have sustained extended periods of electoral success but with varied degrees of effective social transformation. However, in the last decade new social movements broke away from the institutionalization of participatory channels to forge new practices of urban change within an increasingly hostile neoliberal political environment. This chapter examines this development trajectory, based on interviews held in August 2019 with municipal and grassroots planners acting within two distinct but connected spheres: the city government and social movements.