THEME – CHALLENGES IN ARTICULATING THE URBAN AND THE
ENVIRONMENTAL AGENDA – SOME INITIAL REFLECTIONS ON THE
BRAZILIAN SCENARIO
Rosana Denaldi, Sandra Momm, Jeroen Klink (UFABC)
1. Setting the stage
In much of the debates on the reshaping of economic geographies under
globalization, it has become common to stress the ambiguous role of cities, cityregions and metropolitan areas in contemporary capitalist development. While
concentrating a series of opportunities that come with economic agglomeration
(particularly in light of the clustering of employment, income and creativity), the
(post)-metropolis also represents a privileged arena where a group of
interconnected contradictions and conflicts are played out, and which have lead to
increasing levels of environmental degradation, socio-spatial exclusion and
violence.
More specifically in relation to the Brazilian setting, city regions and
metropolitan areas continue to mobilize the more dynamic production and
innovation networks within the overall territory. Approximately 30% of the
national population of around 170 million inhabitants is concentrated in nine
metropolises, while the three largest metropolitan areas in the southeastern
states (Rio, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte) make up some 20% of total population.
At the same time, however, the census date of the year 2000 show that the 11
largest metropolitan areas concentrate a third of the national housing deficit in
general, and 90% of the deficit among the so-called poorest of the poor in
particular.1 Moreover, the lack of effective leverage of local governments over
speculative real estate markets, the consequent crowding out of low income
segments to the worst locations in environmentally sensitive and risk areas, the
proliferation of private cars ownership2 and the gradual collapse of public mobility
and transportation systems have all combined to created a scenario whereby cities
and metropolitan areas are characterized as motors behind socially and
environmentally unsustainable development patterns. Territorial dynamics of
social spatial exclusion and environmental degradation have mutually reinforced a
vicious urban development cycle.
A number of (Brazilian) authors have pointed out that this is not exactly a new
picture, and it should be interpreted as part of a broader geo-historical
development trajectory whereby Brazilian cities have traditionally performed the
role of internationally oriented and resource intensive platforms for economic
development opportunities, subordinating social and environmental sustainability
1
According to the national Standards, this segments earns up to three minumum salaries, that is,
earning up to USD 800/month.
2
See the position paper on environmental justice elaborated by Prof. Ricardo Moretti.
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to the logics of profit maximization (Prado, 1994). The recent stage in the process
of globalization and productive restructuring has only accelerated the space-time
dimensions of this intrinsically unsustainable process. Likewise, while in the
context of the industrialized world, the role of urban and regional policy is to
mitigate this unsustainable development path through the use of regulation and
investment, in emerging countries the state (at the local, provincial and national
scale) has by and large proven incapable of doing so. As a matter of fact, in Brazil
several authors have pointed out that the state has been either emissive or coresponsible in re-producing a highly disparate, but nevertheless articulated
development path (Maricato, 1996; Vilaça, 1998).
Consequently, the planning and management of Brazilian cities and
metropolitan areas has become increasingly complex in light of the interrelated
nature of the challenges involved. It is in this context that some of the dilemmas
associated with the integration between the urban and the environmental agenda
should also be looked upon. On the one hand, the planning for the “formal” city
has increasingly lost its grip over urban development trajectories, particularly
considering the fact that it has become progressively embedded within more neolocalist and competitive economic development strategies, aimed at the
generation of income and employment opportunities, irrespective of the social
and environmental costs involved with some of these strategies. On the other
hand, the social structures, actors and interests that both influence and are
shaped by cities have been proliferating the production of informal spaces.
Brazilian mainstream planning discourse, still heavily influenced by technocratic
and modernist traditions, has looked upon the growth of slums and irregular
settlements in watershed and environmental risk areas as temporary deviations of
an otherwise ideally planned and functional evolution of the urban fabric towards
a steady and sustainable stage. Nevertheless, it could be argued that an
epistemological framework that incorporates the socio-spatial and historical
complexities of cities and metropolitan areas in developing countries would both
recognize the sheer size of the “informal city”, as well as the fact that its
continuous proliferation is intrinsically embedded within the broader forces
behind the production of urban and regional space. Additionally, the obvious but
nevertheless painful recognition that planning and management in Brazilian cities
takes place within the context of historically accumulated environmental and
social deficits that, to some extent, have already compromised the range of
available policy options for the future only adds up to the complexity of integrating
the urban and environmental agenda. To illustrate, while most planners,
environmental engineers and applied researchers working in the field would both
agree on the strategic role of the preservation of watersheds in metropolitan
areas, and the need to come up with more integrated strategies aimed at stopping
further degradation of water basins through illegal subdivisions, land invasions and
the development of new slums, it has proven to be more cumbersome to establish
a clear analysis, or let alone workable strategies and guidelines, aimed at the
improvement of the living conditions of the millions of low income families that
already live in environmental sensitive areas and watersheds in metropolitan cities.
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2. Tensions and complementarities in setting the urban and
environmental agenda – Some observation on Brazilian cities
and metropolitan areas
As mentioned in the position paper elaborated by Adriana Allen available on
the site of UK-Brazil urban network, it would an exaggeration to argue that no
progress has been established in terms of integrating the urban and
environmental agendas. Particularly considering the discourse at the international
level, an articulation between the environment-focused Agenda 21 and the urbancentered Habitat Agenda has indeed emerged. The main results of the Agenda 21
summits increasingly recognized that environmental concerns are inextricably
linked to social and economic development processes. Likewise, work on the
Habitat Agenda gradually acknowledged that while performing the role of engines
of growth, cities were also generating a series of critical social and environmental
challenges (Allen and You, 2002).
Along the same lines, and referring more specifically to the articulation of the
two agendas in Brazil, in the last two decades we have also witnessed
considerable progress. At least three illustrations of the achievements are in
place.
First, a more consolidated regulatory framework has evolved which, at least
theoretically, can deal with the urban and environmental agenda, and which has
triggered a series of new laws, norms, decrees and plans. For example, a national
environmental legislation, a national policy on water supply resources, a national
code on forests and specific resolutions and decrees elaborated by the pro-active
national council on environmental have gradually led to the establishment of
parameters that guide environmental planning and management. Additionally,
the national law no. 10.257, which was approved in 2001 after more than a
decade of societal mobilization as the so-called statute on the city, represented a
similar advance for the urban sector. The statute provides broad guidelines and
parameters for the participatory elaboration of local master plans that enable
more leverage of city governments over real estate markets through instruments
such as low income zoning, development exactions and progressive property and
real estate taxes.
Second, the tendency towards decentralization and democratization has also
stimulated the emergence of innovative institutional and managerial approaches
towards urban and environmental management, such as the tri-partite water
shed committees (with participation from civil society, local and state
governments) and, more recently, the tripartite deliberative urban development
councils that have been established at both municipal, state and federal level.
These councils elaborate inputs for the housing and urban development policies
at the various scales.
Finally, particularly in the second term of president Lula´s administration, the
issue of sustainable urban and metropolitan development has received
considerable financial resources and policy attention. While the ministry for cities
was already established in the first term (2003), the so-called national growth
acceleration plan led to a substantial increase in financial resources to housing
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and urban development in general, and program aimed at the upgrading and
integration of informal neighborhoods and slums into the urban fabric in
particular. To a certain extent, the creation of the ministry, and its policy stance
towards sustainable and integrated upgrading, signaled that the “informal city”
had moved out of the shadows into the mainstream of the policy agenda at the
federal level.
Despite of the above mentioned advances, articulation between the two
agendas has been disappointing, looking both at the effective integration that is
occurring “in the field” of environmental and urban planning, as well evaluating
the evolution of academic research and (post-)graduate teaching that is actually
being undertaken in Brazilian universities.
More in depth research will be required –and some of it might be triggered
through the Brazil-UK urban research network - to shed light on why this has been
so difficult. In what follows, we put forward two broad initial observations to
stimulate the debate around a common agenda.
First, and starting perhaps from a more conceptual and epistemological
perspective, authors such as Costa (2008) have pointed out that the “rationales”
underpinning urban and environmental planning have been different, generating
a series of complementarities and conflicts between specific instruments of
environmental and urban planning. The leitmotiv behind the bulk of urban
planning thought and practice has been the provision of guidelines for land use
and development, and the (social) return on public investments. As such, urban
planning evolved around the central idea of establishing general (regulatory)
framework conditions that would guide the capitalist production of urban and
regional space. The approach has tended to underestimate the environmental
dimensions of the proliferation of slums and irregular settlements; urban
challenges were not simultaneously analyzed in terms of environmental risks,
threats and irreversibilities. On the other hand, the logical framework that has
driven much of the construction of both theory and praxis on environmental
planning can be characterized in terms of the concept of preservation or, more
recently, the (economic) valorization of natural assets. Both in its classical
discourse, which originated within the environmental movement of the 1960s,
and which contested the instrumental view on the environment, and through its
more recent narratives, which have stressed the requirement of a sustainable use
of natural assets within the market system (eco-efficiency, environmental
accounting, fine-tuning of economic and command and control instruments of
environmental policy making etc.), the trajectory of the environmental agenda
has been characterized by a rather a-political and physical view on the
environment. Thus, considering the above, it can be expected that the various
discourses on environmental and urban planning, which have also influenced both
academic communities (and, subsequently, activities on research, teaching and
community extension services) and social movements (with the habitat agenda
being largely driven by the housing movements, and the environmental agenda
predominantly being pushed by the environmental NGOs and associations), will
continue to provide a series of tensions and conflicts.
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Second, and more specifically in relation to the regulatory framework that has
been built up over time, there are still considerable gaps in fleshing out the urban
agenda through complementary regulation. Simultaneously, the work on the
environmental regulatory agenda, which has led to the consolidation of a
reasonably detailed set of complementary norms and regulations, has effectively
opened the perspective of conflicts, duplications and unnecessary restrictions on
the broader framework that guides urban development. To illustrate, the legal
instruments of the statute of the city represent a necessary but not a sufficient
step towards “the social function of the city”; it requires detailed and contested
negotiations at city level in order to approve local master plans, and associated
specific land use and zoning laws. It goes without saying that, considering the
relative weak leverage of local governments and social movements over real
estate markets and the production of urban space, it has shown to be difficult to
advance towards the generation of master and land use plans that are compatible
with the objectives of the statute. At the same time, the frequently restrictive
nature and interpretation of much of the environmental legislation has created
bottlenecks on the sustainable upgrading and integration of existing slum
settlements into the urban fabric of the city.3 As a paradox, considering the fact
that complete relocation of slums out of the environmental sensitive areas is
often financially and socially not viable, and frequently unnecessary, in many
metropolitan areas this restrictive, and often arbitrary interpretation, of the “ideal
city” has created a social and environmental impasse around the future of existing
slums and informal settlements in environmental risk areas.
Third, disarticulation between the agendas also has to be seen in the context
of the increasing difficulty to guide overall development patterns of the “formal
city-region”, and the effects of this lack of leverage on the evolution of slums and
informal settlements. Even those city regions that have traditionally been inserted
into the internationally acclaimed list of best practices seem to adhere to this
tendency. To take the international show case of Curitiba, according to the
metropolitan master plan of the 1970s, which was updated more recently,
development was not supposed to occur in the eastern zones, where most of the
watersheds are located. Nevertheless, and also stimulated by an aggressive and
boosterish strategy driven by the state and local governments (São José dos
Pinhais, located in the southeastern area of the metropolitan region) aimed at
attracting the car manufacturers Renault and Audi in the 1990s, this was exactly
where growth did occur. Empirical research has also shown that during the 1990s,
slums and informal subdivisions in the districts close the watersheds have grown
exponentially, thereby not only threatening the metropolitan water supply, but
exposing and replicating beyond city level the incapacity of the state (at its various
territorial scales) to effectively articulate to the more vulnerable segments of
society a right to the city.
3
And, in the case of a partial slum upgrading and relocation project in the neighborhood of Jardim
Cristiane, located in the city of Santo André in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, the interpretation
of the state environmental agency CETESB for informal settlements was actually more rigid than for
formal neighborhoods in the city, leading to a situation whereby the city was actually refused to obtain a
an environmental license for the project.
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3. Implications for the research agenda of the UK-Brazil urban
Network
The previous observations provide three broad entrance points for an (applied)
research agenda within the UK-Brazil urban network:
(i) What are the socio-economic, political and epistemological dynamics behind
the formation of diverging/converging urban and environmental
discourses, narratives and rationales of specific actors, social movements,
and communities? How have these rationales influenced the formation
and setting of the environmentaland urban agenda? This entrance point
can be linked to analyze the broader tension and convergence between
the agendas within specific research communities, social movements and
the urban and environmental planning communities, among others;
(ii) What are the specificities of planning and management for an integrated
agenda in the geo-political context of city regions and metropolitan area in
emerging economies vis a vis the UK? (For example, considering the scale
and embedded profile of unequal development patterns; the presence of
path dependency and irreversible effects of unsustainable and excluding
development trajectories; the characteristics of both the state, and state
spatial strategies in emerging economies etc. 4);
(iii) What are the limits and potentials of reaching integration between the
agendas within the context of specific case cities, to be selected along the
project, preferably in different geo-economic settings within Brazil and the
UK? In that respect, comparative analytical and empirical work could also
be undertaken on the effectiveness of a range of instruments used in
urban and environmental planning (zoning, command and control,
economic instruments, mobilization and education, mixes of instruments
etc.) in bringing about more integration between the agendas.
4
In that respect, also see the position paper elaborated by Klink, Zimerman and Oliveira on multi-level
governance.
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4. Selected references
Allen, A. and You, N. (eds) (2002). Sustainable Urbanization: Bridging the 9.
Environmentaland Urban Agendas. London: UCL Development Planning Unit in
collaboration with DFID and UN-Habitat.
Acselrad, H. (2001). A duração das cidades: sustentabilidade e risco nas políticas urbanas.
Rio de Janeiro: DP&A.
Costa, G.M. e Mendonça J. G. (Org) (2008). Planejamento urbano no Brasil: trajetória,
avanços e perspectivas. Belo Horizonte: C/Arte.
Ferreira, J.S.W. and Motisuke (2007). A efetividade da implantação de Zonas Especiais de
interesse social no quadro habitacional brasileiro: uma avaliação inicial. In: Bueno, L.M. de
M. and Cymbalista, R. (Orgs.) Planos Diretores Municipais. Novos conceitos de
planejamento territorial. São Paulo: Annablume, pp. 33-58.
Maricato, E. (1996). Metrópole na periferia do capitalismo: ilegalidade, desigualdade e
violência. São Paulo: HUCITEC.
Martins, M.L.R. (2006). Moradia e Mananciais: tensão e dialogo na metrópole. São Paulo:
FAUUSP/FAPESP, 2006.
Prado, Junior, C. (1994). História econômica do Brasil. São Paulo: Brasiliense.
Steinberger, M. (Org). (2006). Território e ambiente em políticas públicas territoriais.
Brasília: Paralelo 15 e LGE Editora.
Villaça, F. (1998) Espaço intra-urbano no Brasil. São Paulo: Nobel.
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