Municipalismo e política urbana: a Influência da União na Política Urbana Municipal

Abstract

Urban policy, as it pertains to regulation, public services and development, is the set of principles, guidelines and activities that orient the economic activities involved in urbanization. As such, urban policy can draw on the concept of the social role of property to shape the conduct of the private sector. Urban policy is essentially municipal in nature because it directly affects the lives of people and the conformation of property in cities. Being a tradition dating back to the empire in Brazil, although it has occasionally been suppressed, the municipalist movement did manage to achieve federative status for municipalities under the 1988 Constitution, which guaranteed municipal autonomy and set forth municipal responsibilities, such as the implementation of urban policies outlined by general guidelines enacted in domestic legislation. The national guidelines of Urban Policy, prepared in a participatory process, should be followed by the Federal government, the states, and municipalities. Nevertheless, in light of the noticeable and almost complete absence of participation by the states, it has been notice that the Federal government has broken ranks with the planning ideology that was crafted by the very same Lula Administration when it created the Ministry for Cities. The Administration, after riding roughshod over the timeframe for the preparation of national urban policy guidelines, began to launch programs to promote housing and basic sanitation, which implementation is meant to be organized by municipalities, that do not even have enough technical expertise or resources to implement their own urban policies. By taking this thematic approach the author can focus on the Federal Government's most recent efforts in terms of urban policy. Although such efforts attempt to deal with historic vices in Brazil, they ultimately do not stray far from the highly centralized urban policies formulated under the military dictatorship. The influence of the Federal Government on municipal urban policy is therefore analyzed within a framework of municipalism and urban policy.