Multilevel urban policy mobilities through the City Statute: the spreading of Brazilian urban federal law

ABSTRACT

The City Statute is a legal framework that provides Brazilian urban policy with another dynamic. It guides urban policies across the national territory, and hasgained international prominence at a moment when Latin American countries became policy exporters. This paper takes the City Statute to discuss multilevel urban policy mobilities between international and subnational levels, analyzing how its guidelines and contents spread across Brazilian and Latin American territories. The findings suggest that the City Statute has been simultaneously disseminated and questioned at different levels. It is a significant case study for understanding multilevel and South-South policy mobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy transfer
• urban planning
• City Statute
• Brazil

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. According to Leite et al. (2019), social urbanism is a set of proposals and actions that aims to promote the improvement of urban life quality and territorial inclusion, especially by directing investments toward socially vulnerable areas and integrated solutions of social housing and urban support infrastructure. In that sense, social urbanism is a relevant part of the New Urban Agenda when it is contemplated as a city science of the twenty-first century, emphasising social inclusion. In Brazil, the concept of social urbanism is close to the meaning of Urban Reform.

2. The City Statute, also called the Urban Reform Law, is “an innovative national legal framework directed to strengthen local planning and land management towards more equitable and sustainable urban development, (…) as a result of political and legal reforms arising from the new Constitution of 1988 in the context of Brazilian democratization” (Rolnik, 2013, p. 54).

3. Related to the so-called social urbanism (Leite et al., 2019), Urban Reform is an expression linked to a set of ideas, proposals and expertise regarding changes in the way the cities in Brazil are developed and managed. According to Rolnik (2013), Urban Reform has three main pillars: recognizing tenure security for low-income squatters, struggling against real estate speculation, and democratizing the decision-making process related to urban policies. Máximo and Royer (2021) discuss the semantics of Urban Reform expression.

4. The City Statute was approved in 2001 and is the main result of a historical process of struggles led by civil society and social movements long before the Lula government, which began in 2003 and led to the so-called democratic and popular strategy. However, part of the ideas, tools and policies contained in that law are previous experiences of local governments of the Workers’ Party. Upon taking over the central government, this party began to seek to disseminate the content of the City Statute – such as law and urban policy – in local governments and internationally. One example was the World Urban Forum 5 - UN-Habitat in Rio de Janeiro in 2010. This event discussed “The right to the city: bridging the urban divide” and highlighted the City Statute as a model of national urban law.

5. The City Statute is a federal law that seeks to regulate urban policies within the complex Brazilian federative structure. Even though it is a law, it presents itself as a set of principles, guidelines and tools that several Brazilian scholars consider an actual urban policy (Rolnik, 2011; Maricato, 2017).

6. Policy transfer generally refers to the diffusion of a single policy or set of policies from one place to another. According to Evans (2009), studies on this subject follow “descriptive, explanatory and prescriptive” theories instead of a deep understanding of multilevel policy moving.

7. Participatory Budgeting, the Family Allowance Program, Slum upgrading, land regularization and the Bus Rapid Transit are prominent examples of policies transferred to some countries (Cabannes, 2004; Magalhães & Di Villarosa, 2012; Spada, 2010; Legard & Goldfrank, 2021; Denaldi & Cardoso, 2021).

8. The literature has given several names to the phenomenon: post-neoliberal governments (Aguiar & Santos, 2019), left turn (Balán & Montambeault, 2020), pink tidy (Hatala, 2018), and progressive wave (Vasconcelos, 2019).

9. Scholars started to use this term after the V Progressive Governance Summit, held in 2003 in London. There, political leaders met in a Progressive Governance seminar, with the then Brazilian President Lula as the leading participant (Moreira, 2019).

10. The City Statute contains almost 60 articles. The main content of the law is a set of principles and guidelines that rule national urban policy. The law also brings a set of tools that municipalities can use to seek Urban Reform. One of the City Statute’s contents is the obligation to prepare or review its master plan for cities with specific characteristics.

11. The are other two moments. The first one was during the performance of social movements that culminated in creating the National Urban Reform Movement throughout the 1970s and 1980s, until the period of the National Constituent Assembly, in 1987. The second one was after the creation and during the performance of the National Urban Reform Forum. It occurs from the 1988 Federal Constitution to the beginning of the 21st century, with the promulgation of the City Statute. Both moments are linked with the third one, representing a historical process.

12. FASE and Pólis are examples of institutions that disseminated local experiences.

13. Participatory Master plans, cities conferences and municipal housing plans are prominent examples that explain ideas, guidelines and practices from the City Statute implemented as urban policies throughout the Brazilian territory. They are case studies of the mobility of urban policies at a subnational level that this paper identifies. As stated before, this paper’s main objective is to present a brief overview of multilevel urban policy mobility, and it is impossible to analyze them in deep. That is the next stage of our research agenda.

14. The National Urban Reform Forum was organized after the Constituent Assembly. The immediate objective of that forum was to pressure Brazilian Congress to regulate the chapter on urban policy in the 1988 Constitution. For more than one decade, this was one of the National Urban Reform Forum’s main tasks until the enactment of the federal law known as the City Statute. That forum is still working actively with civil society to ensure that urban reform is carried out in Brazil. The fundamental principles that guide its actions are the right to the city and citizenship, the democratic management of the city, and the social function of property.

15. Rossbach and Montandon (2017) list eleven national urban development laws and land use in Latin America and the Caribbean, with temporal and content diversity.

16. In 2021, two decades after the enactment of the City Statute, a set of seminars took place in Brazil to discuss and evaluate that National Urban Law. Following the recent scenario of regressive urban policies, many scholars are analyzing the trajectory, advances and challenges of the backbone of Brazilian urban policy. Some criticisms are related to master plans, which did not automatically change urban and social realities. Another complaint is about the way some instruments of the City Statute were put into practice, contributing to aggravating historical problems of segregation, speculation and gentrification of Brazilian cities (Rossbach et al., 2021).