Urban Reform, Participation and the Right to the City in Brazil
Leonardo Avritzer
Belo Horizonte,Brazil
Web Version
September, 2007
This paper was prepared for the project on Citizen Engagement and National Policy Change, coordinated by John Gaventa at the Institute of Development Studies and Gary Hawes, of the Ford Foundation.We are grateful to the Ford Foundation for its support. We anticipate that shorter versions of the papers will be forthcoming as a printed volume.
Other papers in the series include:
Cultural Adaptations: The Moroccan Women’s Campaign to Change the Moudawana
Is Knowledge Power? The Right to Information Campaign in India
Mexico Case Study: Civil Society and the Struggle to Reduce Maternal Mortality
Protecting the Child: Civil Society and the State in Chile
Reforming the Penal Code in Turkey: The Campaign for the Reform of the Turkish Penal Code from a Gender Perspective
The Extraordinary Ordinary: The Campaign for Comprehensive AIDS Treatment in South Africa
The National Campaign for Land Reform in the Philippines
Urban Reform, Participation and the Right to the City in Brazil
Brazil passed through a deep process of urbanization throughout the twentieth century. In the beginning of the century, more than 70 per cent of its population inhabited the countryside and at the end of the same century more than 70 per cent of its population were urban dwellers.In this process, Brazilian cities grew in an unfair, disorganized and illegal way.The unfairness was the result of a process of modernization without any kind of planning that even when proposing planned cities, did not reserve spaces for the poor population, as had been the case of Belo Horizonte and Brasília (Brasil, 2004; Caldeira,2000). In these planned cities, the poor population was ignored and had to occupy urban plots of land illegally. The disorganization was the result of an absurd process of land concession during the colonial and imperial periods that created a legal chaos in large cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (Holston,1993). Illegality was the result of a civil code written in 1916, crafted for a rural society and which did not provide adequate legal instruments for urban policies as the country modernized (Fernandes, 2002). The result was a process of urbanization completely out of control at the peak of Brazil’s process of economic growth during the 1970s.
The late seventies and early eighties in Brazil, the last period of the authoritarian regime, involved the process of constitution of a democratic civil society. Brazilian civil society re-organized itself claiming many public goods and policies, among them the accessto the property of urban land in large Brazilian cities(Gohn,1992). The issues of access to property and property legalization are at the origin of the housing movement in the city of Sao Paulo. In other parts of Brazil, such as Porto Alegre, the issue of the legalization of state land occupied in the fifties would be even more pressing (Baierle,1998). In both cases, as well as in the case of Belo Horizonte, the issue of the relationship between legal and illegal cities would come to the fore and would motivate the organization of hundreds of neighborhood associations in capitals of the South and Southeast of Brazil. The associative drive of the late seventies in Brazil was more selective in capitals of the Northeast. Recife was part of this drive whereas Salvador was not. I will show in this paper the consequences of the local context in the advancement of urban reform.
In this paper I will deal with the issue of the emergence of a national civil society movement in Brazil, the National Movement for Urban Reform (MNRU). This movement emerged during the National Constituent Assembly and it is still active in Brazilusing its new designation of FNRU, the National Forum for Urban Reform. It is one of the few cases in democratic Brazil of a national civil society movement. The MNRU was active in the Constitution making process and later the FNRU was able to approve the required infra-constitutional legislation on urban reform called the Statute of the City. Comparing the situation of the urban poor in Brazil20 years ago and its situation today it is possible to point out the following changes:
In 1984, the last year of authoritarianism in Brazil, 64per cent of Brazilians had access to treated water and 30.9per cent had access to sewage. In the wealthy southeastern region of Brazil the situation was better with 81.7per cent of the population having access to treated water and 55per cent to sewage. Today, the situation is much better due to actions of urban social movements and administrations by progressive politicians.According to the Brazilian Census Bureau (IBGE), in 2002, 82.3per cent of the Brazilian had access to treated water (in the southeastern region, 91.4per cent of the population) and 47.5per cent of the population had access to sewage systems (76.4per cent in the southeastern region). The urban reform movement gave legal instruments to local governments to implement these changes.
State capacity to curb speculation in large Brazilian cities was very low at the end of the authoritarian regime. At the same time, state capacity to legalize occupations made by the poor population was very low. Today, every large Brazilian city has a specific legislation allowing it to grant use rights of state soil to the poor. In the long-run this legislation will allow the reduction of the formation of new slums in Brazilian cities.
Last but not least, few Brazilian capitals, with the exception of Porto Alegre, had a plan for its medium term development. Today, all Brazilian cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants have such a plan called City Master Plans. All these changes cannot be underestimated. The poor population in Brazilian cities acquired access to public goods and increased its access to housing in the last 20 years. All these changes are linked to the movement for urban reform in Brazil and its actions at both the national and the local levels.
In spite of the deep changes unleashed by the urban reform movement, urban reform in Brazil was not a high mobilization case such as the movement for agrarian reform or for budget reform (Wright and Wolford, 2003). These movements brought about change in Brazilthrough road blockages, illegal invasion of lands and sharp mobilizations in the cities. In contrast with these movements, the urban reform movement is not a high mobilization movement. It used the influence of its most important partners to mobilize resources and influence at the political level, in particular at the National Congress. In thefirst part of this paper, I will show how informal movements at the public level constituted a movement for urban reform and which were the different organizational configurations assumed by the urban reform movement in Brazil from the early eighties to the year 2000. Secondly, I will show how legislation on urban reform emerged in Brazil during the Constitution-making process and after the Constituent Assembly as the need for infra-constitutional legislation became clear. I will show the legal and political dispute that took place in the Brazilian Congress for the approval of the Statute of the City. Last, but not least, I will show how the Statute of the City is being implemented in three different cities with different social movements trajectory:São Paulo, Salvador and Porto Alegre. Based on the different cases, I will propose a typology of the effectiveness of national civil society in local contexts. The overall claim of this paper is that civil society contributed in two capacities to the emergence of the new urban legislation in Brazil: firstly, in its capacity to gather popular actors and specialists creating an agenda for Brazilian political society; secondly, in its capacity to influence the Brazilian Congress in the long-run. Brazilian Congressmen do not stay for long in the house. The MNRU and the FNRU’s capacity to influence Congress from 1986 to 2002 is part of the success that led to the approval of the Statute of the City. I will also claim that civil society was helped by the success of the NMUR. The movement’s success helped urban reform to firmly establish itself in the hinterlands of Brazil and to help other local movements.
Social movements, constitution-making and legal change in Brazil
Urban reform was on the agenda of the Brazilian left and progressive sectors already at the end of the first democratic period in Brazil (1946-1964). In 1963, inPetropolis at the Quitandinha Hotel, a first national conference for urban reform took place. Urban reform would have to endure twenty years of authoritarianism,which emerged in 1964,before it would come back to the political agenda. The emergence of urban social movements was one of the novelties of the Brazilian democratization. In the first democratic period between 1946-1964, the associative pattern of the Brazilian urban poor was low. Very few neighborhood associations were created in the period (Avritzer, 2000; Boschi, 1987; Singer and Brandt, 1980) and the ones that were created were leisure associations. The only exception in the period was the city of Porto Alegre with the oldest tradition of neighborhood associations in Brazil (Baierle,1998). Brazilian democratization changed this picture. Associative patterns greatly increased in the period between 1975-1985. In the cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre there was a huge increase in the creation of associations during the democratization period. Recife, in the northeast, has also seen the creation of many new neighborhood associations (Silva,2003). These organizations claimed access to urban land and social services. Yet, they were bound to the local level and were not articulated with a broader movement for political change. Salvador is the city which diverted the most in the process of creation of voluntary associations in Brazil. Though associative patterns in the city have increased since the late seventies, neighborhood associations in the city did not increase at an equal pace with the other cities in the south and southeast of Brazil. In addition, ethnic associations play an important role in Salvador’s civil society (Ireland, 1999) but they are very disconnected from social policy demands in the city. I will show in the last part of this paper the implementation of urban reform legislation based on these different patterns.
The National Movement for Urban Reform (MNRU) was formed in 1982 with the aim of elaborating a proposal for urban reform during the National Constituent Assembly. The MNRU was formed originally by popular movements, neighborhood associations, NGOs and TradeUnions (Brasil, 2004). The MNRU shows in its composition that it has been a hybrid between a social movement and an organized lobby from its very beginning. During the eighties, it had the mobilization characteristics of urban social movements in Brazil such as the mobilization of diffuse social actors and the capacity to aggregate a broad spectrum of social actors. Yet, since its formation, the MNRU counted on the support of national professional associations located in Brasília and was involved in national politics. The MNRU composition (see table 1 below) was atypical vis-à-vis Brazilian civil society in the period, due to the weight of national and professional associations in its composition, at a time in which civil society in Brazil was mainly local. Thus, in its composition there were a few local institutions, such as Famerj (the Federation of Neighborhood Associations in Rio de Janeiro) and the Movement in the Defense of Favelados. Professional associations such as FNA (National Federation of Architects) and the FNE (National Federation of Engineers) constituted the bulk of the influence of the movement. In addition to that, the MNRU anticipated the strong presence of NGOs in the Brazilian political scene from the 1980s onwards. In spite of the small number of influential NGOs in Brazil during the eighties, these NGOs were part of the urban reform movement. Yet, the MNRU has also had a lobbying dimension in which it did not hesitate to establish connections with political parties in order to have a presence in Brasilia. Some of the most well known leaderships within the movement, such as Rachel Rolnik, were part of the PTdelegation to the National Constituent Assembly in the role of congressional consultant. The MNRU had excellent connections withleft-wing MP’s in Brasilia.This created an active, lobby-like movement, even when Brazilian civil society associations lacked the resources for it.
Table 1. MNRU (National Movement for Urban Reform)
Popular movements / MDF – Movimento de Defesa dos FaveladosNeighborhood associations / FAMERJ
NGOs / FASE, POLIS
Trade unions / Sindicatos Federação Nacional dos Engenheiros; Federação Nacional dos Arquitetos
Professional associations / ANSUR – Articulação Nacional do Solo Urbano
Source:(Brasil,2004)
The Brazilian National Constituent Assembly was a congressional assembly that accepted popular amendments. 1985 and 1986 were years of strong mobilization in Brazil. Two different issues were disputed between civil society and state actors during that phase of the process of democratization; the first issue was whether the Constituent Assembly should be congressional or an exclusive assembly, and the second question was on how social actors would influence the constitution-making process. In the political debate on the second question, Brazilian strong civil society actors – OAB(Brazilian Bar Association) and CNBB (National Conference of Bishops) – were successful in their proposal that the Constituent would accept popular amendments. Millions of people subscribed to popular amendment proposals between 1985 and 1986, the most likely number being around 12 million subscriptions (Whitaker, 2003). In this process, the MNRU proposed an amendment for urban reform based on the following principles:
..the idea of the right to the city. The right to the city had different dimensions. Its key meaning was a decent living for the urban poor in Brazil (Saule, 1995:23). It also has had the dimension of the unification of urban struggles in Brazil through the integration of health, transportation, sanitation and education demands. In the words of a social actor of the period, “…urban reform will make viable the unification..of the movements for transportation, health, housing and land allowing them to elaborate a unified platform to re-energize the city..”
(Teixeira Ferreira, 1988).
A second important point was the subordination of private property to the aims of urban policy. Brazilian cities, up to 1988, lacked the fiscal instruments to organize real estate interests and actions in large cities. The popular amendment on urban reform envisioned the following instruments: progressive taxation on urban property; taxation on the valorization of urban property; state preference in the acquisition of urban land; state prerogative to expropriate urban land. In the words of an important social actor of the period, urban reform “..politicized the debate on planning by bringing to the center of the debate the issue of the social function of property..” (Rolnik, 1997).
The popular amendment on urban reform brought a third issue to the Constituent agenda: the democratic governance of Brazilian cities. The popular amendment envisioned several devices for the exercise of democratic governance, among them, public audiences, popular initiative, popular veto of legislation with fiveper cent of electorate support and last but not least the possibility of the Ministério Público[1] to act in case of legal vacuum.
The popular amendment on urban reform was presented with 131,000 subscriptions and unleashed a lobby battle with conservative real state interests. The thematic committee on ‘Urban Issues and Transportation’ did not initially attract too many powerful Constituents due to the fact that conservative sectors had more pressing short-term issues, such as the duration of Sarney’s mandate or the renewal of television concessions or the blocking of agrarian reform. In this sense, conservative lobbies were not very active in nominating representatives to the thematic area of urban reform.
The Constituent Assembly procedures in regard to urban reform were the following. The popular amendment on urban reform was referred to the Thematic Commission on Urban Issues and Transportation. The committee ran a public audience on the proposal of popular amendment that was defended by the architect Ermínia Maricato.[2] The thematic sub-committee decided for the creation of a chapter on urban reform with the following devices: progressive taxation, expropriation of urban land with the use of public titles and state capacity to create urban soil (Antonucci,1999:18). From the thematic committee, the issue of urban reform went to the so called ‘systematization committee’ in which the pressure of conservative interests were stronger. Conservative interests in Brazil made the charge that the systematization committee has been taken by left-wing interests and in order to oppose that, they constituted a group called Centrão. Centrão was in charge of making amendments to the text that would transform it into a conservative charter. Real estate interests pursued inside the Constituent Assembly the strategy of transferring the final decision on urban issues to another arena outside the constitution making process in order to avoid the automatic application of a new legislation (Saule,1995:28). Most of the proposals of the sub-committee on urban issues were kept intact but were integrated with the requirement for the cities to have a ‘master plan’[3] proposed by Centrão. Thus, paragraph one of article 182 of the 1988 Constitution requires a‘city master plan approved by City Hall as mandatory to all cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants’ (Brasil,1988). All urban reform proposals were made dependent upon the fulfillment of this clause.