Volume 35.

2 March 2011 23955

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.01036.x

Democracy on the Edge: Limits and Possibilities in the Implementation of an Urban Reform Agenda in Brazil
RAQUEL ROLNIK

Abstract

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The 1990s in Brazil were a time of institutional advances in the areas of housing and urban rights following the signing of the new constitution in 1988 that incorporated the principles of the social function of cities and property, recognition of the right to ownership of informal urban squatters and the direct participation of citizens in urban policy decision processes. These propositions are the pillars of the urban reform agenda which, since the creation of the Ministry of Cities by the Lula government, has come under the federal executive branch. This article evaluates the limitations and opportunities involved in implementing this agenda on the basis of two policies proposed by the ministry the National Cities Council and the campaign for Participatory Master Plans focusing the analysis on government organization in the area of urban development in its relationship with the political system and the characteristics of Brazilian democracy.

Introduction
In Brazil, the 1990s were a period of intense debate by the general public, the political parties and the government on the role of citizens and their organizations in governing cities. In addition, there were institutional advances in the areas of housing and urban rights, including the signing of the new constitution in 1988 with a chapter on urban policies, structured around the concept of the social function of cities and property, recognition of the land rights of millions of inhabitants of shantytowns and informal settlements on the periphery of cities in Brazil, and the direct participation of citizens in urban policy decision-making processes. These have been the main items of the urban reform agenda since the 1980s, whose principal proponents are social movements, non-governmental organizations and professional and academic associations, whose purpose is to promote the right to the city (Santos, 2007: 297). It was also at this time that Brazil began to progressively implement decentralization from the federal government, and local government gained more autonomy. This decentralization was, however, limited by macroeconomic adjustments adopted in Brazil in the 1990s and by the high level of political continuity in Brazilian redemocratization, a continuing process (Avritzer, 2003: 572; Alston et al., 2005). In my view, it was the specic and perverse combination of elements presented above, and their relationship with the strong heritage of Brazilian political culture and an excluding predatory governance logic, that dictated the ebb and ow of the urban reform agenda in Brazil. If the latter did not obtain a sufcient political base to allow it to affect government dynamics or the relationship between politicians and the public broadly and deeply enough to promote government reform in the area of urban
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development, it has, nevertheless, been a permanent source of tension and cultural innovation introduced by these social actors, which has increased the impact of Brazilian democracy both geographically and politically (Silva, 2003; Santos, 2007). In this article I assess the obstacles to the implementation of the urban reform agenda, reecting on its incorporation into urban policies during Lulas mandate, especially through the Ministrio das Cidades (henceforth Ministry of Cities). Restricting the scope of the article to just one aspect of the policy implemented by the ministry, I reect on the challenges of urban policy in Brazil from the viewpoint of the fragile, but vigorous, Brazilian democracy.

The logic of urban disorder

In one of the quickest and most intense socio-geographic movements anywhere, the Brazilian population went from predominantly rural to principally urban in less than 40 years (19401980). This movement was driven by the migration of vast numbers of poor people and occurred under the aegis of an urban development model that essentially deprived the poorest classes of basic living conditions and effective integration into the city. Throughout Brazil, in regions with signicant urban growth and dynamism, urban qualities such as adequate housing and access to businesses and retail were reserved for a minority of the population. These market areas have hitherto been regulated by a vast system of rules, contracts and laws, which are almost always conditional on registered title deeds. They are thus restricted to a limited number of inhabitants. Urbanized land and credit are reserved for this limited circle. For most people only informal and irregular markets remain, on land where urban and environmental legislation prohibits construction or use by the formal market, or which is situated in non-urbanized areas in the suburbs, forcing inhabitants to make daily trips to the city. Although we do not have concrete statistics on the total number of families and homes located in shantytowns, irregular developments, irregular public housing and other types of settlements marked by some form of urban precariousness and administrative and nancial irregularity, we can afrm that the phenomenon is encountered in almost all Brazilian urban regions, affecting 40% of urban households, or 16 million families (IPEA and IBGE, 2004). In the vast, diverse universe of the 5,564 Brazilian municipalities, very few cities do not have a signicant portion of their population living in precarious settlements (IBGE, 2001). Excluded from the formal nancial and regulatory systems, these precarious settlements were self-produced by their inhabitants with the means available to them. Their low salaries were insufcient to pay for housing (Oliveira, 1988; Maricato, 1996), they were without access to technical and professional resources and they had to build on land rejected or considered unusable by the formal market, such as steep slopes and areas prone to ooding, in addition to large fringes of expansion on the outskirts of the city abutting rural regions. Thus, a city outside the city was created, eternally lacking the infrastructure, facilities and services that characterize urban areas. The government policies implemented during the more intense period of urbanization (196080) reinforced this model in a perverse way. Under the aegis of a military dictatorship that concentrated resources and power in the hands of the federal government, responsibility for the formulation and implementation of urban development policies was located in the Banco Nacional de Habitao (National Housing Bank) (BNH). Created after the military coup in 1964, it was the response by the military government to the large housing crisis in the country, seeking, on the one hand, to obtain support from poor city dwellers, and on the other hand to create a permanent nancing policy capable of structuring the housing construction sector along capitalist lines a policy which did indeed endure (Ministry of Cities, 2008). In 1967,
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the BNH assumed management of the resources of the Fundo de Garantia por Tempo de Servio (Unemployment Compensation Fund) (FGTS), obtained by compulsorily withholding contributions from the salaries of all working Brazilians, and became the largest second-tier bank in Brazil. BNH began to concentrate not only on nancing, but also on all urban development planning activities at the federal government level, consolidated in quantitative goals in the area of housing unit production and sanitation. BNH provided credit at subsidized interest rates to public sanitation and housing companies formed principally by the states and, in some cases, by municipalities to carry out projects to implement water and sewage networks and build low-cost housing, in addition to loans to construction companies and individuals to build homes and apartments for the middle and upper classes. These federally funded housing projects were built principally on the outskirts of cities, in regions without urban services and often under the same conditions of urban irregularity and precariousness that had marked the informal market. On the other hand, the middle-class market which represented two-thirds of the units nanced by the BNH expanded rapidly, verticalizing residential areas and creating new business centers in medium-sized and large cities throughout Brazil. Within the context of local urban planning, Urban Development Master Plans, which were mandatory for municipalities wanting federal funds for large public investments, were mere supplemental documents justifying sector investments that were dened and negotiated in arenas that had little or nothing to do with the planning process. Local plans also provided zoning strategies that reserved the rare urbanized areas in the city for middle-class residential housing and commercial enterprises. This situation remained unchanged, though it was impacted in the 1980s by the bankruptcy of the BNH and a drop in sector investments, and, from a political viewpoint, by the transition to democracy. The crisis of the economic model implemented by the military regime, beginning at the start of the 1980s, created a recession, ination, unemployment and a drop in salary levels. This process had enormous repercussions on the Sistema Financeiro de Habitao National Housing Financial System (SFH), with a reduction in its investment capacity due to the withdrawal of FGTS and savingsaccount balances and a large increase in defaults, creating a large mismatch between the increase in loans and the borrowers ability to pay. On the political front there was a struggle for direct presidential elections, and for a new constitution, with large popular participation. Opposition to the BNH formed part of the battle against the dictatorship (Melo, 1993). With the end of the military regime in 1985 it was expected that the SFH, including the BNH and its agents the state housing companies (COHABs), would be restructured in order to create a new housing policy for the country. However, for the political convenience of the new government, the BNH was simply closed in 1986 and its assets were assumed by another bank, the Caixa Econmica Federal, while urban housing, sanitation and transport policies became the responsibility of different ministries (Santos, 2004; Maricato, 2006).

The urban reform agenda and the ministry of cities

Since the Constituent Assembly period (198788), an urban reform movement has established connections between social movements focusing on housing and professionals in various areas, such as attorneys, architects and urban planners and engineers in city halls and universities, as part of the social movement that pressured the 1988 constitution in the direction of increasing housing and citizens rights. In the specic area of urban policy, the movement resulted in the insertion of an urban policy chapter in the constitution (articles 182 and 183), in which the social function of the city and property was reafrmed, along with the recognition and integration of informal settlements into the city, and the democratization of urban governance understood as
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increasing the scope of direct participation and social control over policies. In the negotiated text of the urban chapter adopted by the Congress, federal legislation was requested to regulate the instruments for urban land management and the sanctions for non-compliance with its social functions, as well as the preparation of local master plans to dene them within the scope of each municipality. From then on, the struggle to change the instruments of urban regulation, urban policies and land-use planning took two paths: local and national (Rolnik et al., 2008). In 2001, the federal government approved the City Statute, instituting the guidelines and instruments for fullling the social function of the city and urban property, the right to the city and democratic governance. At the local level, progressive slum upgrading and attempts to reform land use regulations began to penetrate the universe of urban management. Citizens participation and social control of public policies and local budgets increased, incorporating participatory budgeting, governance councils and self-governance programs, among other instruments (Avritzer, 2003; Dagnino el al., 2006). However, this movement towards inclusive urban policies was not immediately accompanied by institutional reform of the urban development sector at national level. In 2002, Lula, the Workers Party candidate, won the Brazilian presidential election. The president was born in the poor northeastern region of the country, migrated to So Paulo, lived in slums and rose to the leadership of the metalworkers union. The Workers Party, supported by the largest labor unions in the country, intellectuals, progressive members of the Church and social movements including the urban and rural landless, gained power on the Brazilian political scene through the 1990s, getting elected to local governments and increasing its number of seats in legislative bodies. One of the trademarks of this trajectory was the creation of a Workers Party Way of Governing, breaking with traditional Brazilian political culture and introducing new practices, such as direct participation by citizens in public administration. During the Workers Party presidential campaign, a platform for urban development policies was presented as the Housing Project which, among other things, included a proposal for creating a Ministry of Cities as the locus for designing and implementing urban policies, after almost 20 years of erratic policies scattered across different ministries. This proposal was implemented in 2003 with the appointment of Olivio Dutra, also a former union leader, former mayor of Porto Alegre and former governor of Rio Grande do Sul, and known for having introduced participatory budgeting during his terms as mayor and governor. For the actors linked to the social movement for urban reform, the creation of the ministry represented the chance to increase democratization of urban management, making this one of the institutional pillars of its agenda, promoting participatory democracy at a national level, until then attempted principally in the local arena. The response to this demand, during organization of the ministry, resulted in the creation of a National Cities Council as an integral part of its structure and a central element in the formulation and negotiation of policies, where government departments (from the three levels of government) and some segments of civil society (businesses, unions, professional associations, NGOs, academic and research entities and social movements) are represented, with representatives elected at sector meetings among delegates at national conferences. The rst National Conference, held in 2003, was attended by 2,500 delegates. With the exception of the 250 representatives of the federal government, nominated by the executive branch, the delegates were elected at state conferences (75%) or indicated by national entities and organizations (25%). This conference, which elected the National Cities Council, was preceded by 1,427 municipal, 185 regional and 27 state conferences, encompassing 3,457 out of the existing 5,500 Brazilian municipalities. The initial plan for the council conceived it as a eld for political interactions, an open arena where the conicting interests in urban policy could be expressed and negotiated, and where the principal actors could be represented in a signicant way: landless movements, homeless people, slum dwellers, and members of the professional classes
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responsible for the state machine at the various government levels, business communities, politicians, unions, professional organizations and NGOs. The ministrys structure and policies also added another item to the urban reform agenda actions and instruments to ensure the social function of the city and urban property, which the constitution and the City Statute had dened as local responsibilities, dependent on the approval of Master Plans by city councils. According to the constitution and the City Statute, the new instruments for land use management required preparation of Master Plans by all cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants 1,683 municipalities and needed to be approved by city councils by October 2006. Given that the Master Plan became a condition for the implementation of instruments to achieve the social function of urban properties, in 1989, when democratic-popular coalitions won elections in various Brazilian cities, a process of experimentation began, with a conceptual and methodological re-examination of urban planning. Based on the proposal prepared by the ministry, the National Cities Council decided to campaign to promote the implementation of Participatory Master Plans, managed by governments and civil society organizations in the cities obligated to comply with the law. The objective of the campaign was to disseminate the new content and the new methods that territorial planning and particularly the Master Plans should incorporate, given the new mission assigned to them by the City Statute, namely, to make explicit, given the socio-geographic realities of each municipality, the social function of each segment within its territorial jurisdiction through a participatory process of discussion and agreement that should occur openly in each city. Starting with the ministrys proposal, the National Cities Council dened a strategy to support the organization of a mobilization campaign, funding focal points in each of the 27 states, creating a network of partners throughout Brazil consisting of professional entities, academic and research institutions, state and municipal governments, social and popular movements and, in some states, the Ofce of the Prosecutor for the Public Interest. With the formation of campaign centers in all Brazilian states and preparation of promotional and training material in various media, using the municipal conferences process to this end, the campaign began to raise awareness, to train and monitor the municipalities obligated to prepare plans in each state and also, together with the ministry, to provide technical assistance and resources for preparing the Master Plans.1 Other important items on the urban reform agenda, such as the right to housing, were also incorporated into the ministrys policies through an increase in nancial resources for the construction of housing and slum upgrading, the recognition and regularization of land ownership in the informal settlements and, based on the approval of the federal law enacted due to popular initiative, the creation and implementation of the National System for Social Housing, in order to build connections between resources and subsidies from the budgets of the various levels of government and direct them into promoting social housing based on criteria dened by the housing councils elected at each federal level. However, due to limitations of space and scope, these, as with all other policies promoted by the Ministry of Cities in the areas of environmental sanitation and urban mobility will not be analyzed in this article (BRASIL MCIDADES, 2004b). I have chosen to analyze here the government reform proposals whose objectives were the pluralization of actors and diversication of arenas for representation in the denition and implementation of urban policies. (Lavalle et al., 2006). The experiment of dening policies in the National Cities Council, as well as participatory land planning processes,
1 In addition to support through the dissemination of didactic materials the Master Plan Kit with a video, booklets and technical reference material and the promotion of or support for organizers of training workshops throughout Brazil (more than 380 workshops with 22,000 participants, including professionals, local government members and social leaders), the ministry also provided funds from its own budget or the budgets of partners at the federal level to allow municipal governments to contract services, nancially supporting the creation of master plans by approximately one third of the municipalities that were obligated to do so.

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focused on creating public arenas as the location for the exercise of civil solidarity and the right to have rights of an important group of Brazilians only precariously included in cities and urban policies. The agenda challenged the public machine state bureaucracies, parties and political leaders to:
produce institutions capable of creating compromises between the different local actors with respect to the future of society, promote networks of actors working on public problems, encourage mobilization of citizens, create standards to guarantee implementation of these agreements, have strategic capabilities to act as a political liaison and, above all, gain the condence of the actors and reduce the uncertainties in the political system (Milani, 2006: 232).

In 2005, during the preparation for the Second National Conference and the campaign for the Participatory Master Plans, the minister and his ofcers were replaced by Marcio Fortes, a politician and professional from Rio de Janeiro connected with the PP party (a later incarnation of the ARENA party, which had held power during the dictatorship), who had held various high-level positions in the federal government since the 1980s. The appointment of Fortes to the Ministry of Cities was at the request of the president of the Brazilian House of Representatives, of the same party, during a political and institutional crisis that the Lula government was suffering due to accusations of corruption and vote-buying in parliament. Since the beginning of the Workers Partys term, a multi-party coalition had been required to create a majority in Congress (since the Workers Party had won only 91 of the 513 representative seats and only 14 of the 81 senatorial seats) and this pressured the government to mobilize resources traditionally used in Brazilian politics for this purpose: distribution of government positions in ministries, punctual compliance with investment requests in Representatives districts and, often, the purchase of votes. Despite the election of new legislative representatives committed to popular interests, and inclusive and redistributive policies, the powerful elite, including landowners, businesses and family oligarchies, continued to be well represented in Congress (Hunter, 2003; Hunter and Power, 2005). The change in direction for the ministry did not interrupt the Participatory Planning campaign, the conferences or the functioning of the national council. However, this showed more explicitly the limits and contradictions of a proposal to reform the Brazilian government in the area of urban development and the strong conservative inertia of its structure, despite the important change in political direction represented by the Workers Party. As we will see in the sections below, it is not by chance that precisely this area, of all areas of government, has been profoundly affected by the traditional political logic, strongly based on clientelism, patronage and control by business interests, reinvented in the Brazilian urban and metropolitan context. To understand it, we must analyze when and how these real urban investment decision processes took place and their relationship with the political system and the countrys federative model.

Urban policies public and private, actual and legal

In the prevailing Brazilian urban policy model, constitutive ambiguity reigns, and has been widely identied by historians and political scientists as a distinctive feature of Brazilian politics, an ambiguity that produces combinatory formulas between actual and legal, public and private, reinventing its borders but with the objective of maintaining it (Gomes, 1998: 502). In the case of urban policy, the legal world represents centralized power, concentrated in a modern state, based on impersonal, rational foundations and exercised by a professional bureaucracy. The opposite is the informality/illegality identied
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principally in the self-built settlements, the dominant model for the territorialization of the poor in Brazilian cities. Neither appearing on city land registry and utility company maps and registers, nor in property ownership records, informal settlements have an ambiguous position in cities. Consolidation of these settlements is progressive, eternally incomplete and completely dependent on a discretionary act of the government since they do not t the standards dened by urban regulations. However, combinations of public/private and legal/illegal reproduce themselves within the legal world under the shadow of the state. This observation is important because common sense attributes disorder in cities to the lack of government presence, especially with respect to informal settlements. This assertion is false to the extent that, if it is true that there is a lack of public goods, services and social facilities in informal settlements, these settlements are only created within and because of state presence:
we stress that these relegated neighborhoods are creatures of government policies on housing, urbanism and planning. At heart, then, their appearance and consolidation are, in essence, a political question (Wacquant, 2007: 179).

In the particular way in which the Brazilian government is structured in the area of urban development, the opposition between legal and illegal, as well as the delimitation between the public and private spheres, is never absolute. Both for businesses and for informal settlers, government investment in urbanization or in regulating land use is decisive. For the formal business sector involved in city construction, one possible relation with the state apparatus is through the production and supply of goods to the government itself. This is the case with contractors hired to build public buildings and infrastructure and with private companies providing garbage collection, transport, etc. (Marques, 2003). Furthermore, relations also come about through the establishment of regulations for economic and legal transactions in this market, via laws and bylaws established at the various levels of government that affect the competitiveness and protability of its products, from the tax policies on real estate to land use zoning, from real estate nancing policies to urban policy regulations in various sectors (Souza, 1999):
Real estate, like any other capitalist activity, includes a strong element of risk . . . a wellestablished publicprivate coalition that funnels public resources into prior modernization of specic real estate fronts could substantially reduce or even eliminate these risks (Ferreira, 2007: 221).

Businesses involved in formal urban production establish privileged connections with public agencies, who control the selection of urbanization projects and programs, as well as town planning, guaranteeing markets in certain urban areas for their products and protecting the protability of their investments. In the area of urban development, these decision processes take place within land management bureaucracies, which are highly permeated by networks of inuence that connect businesses with congressmen and political parties, since public works contractors, service providers and real estate developers and builders actively nance electoral campaigns. In Brazil, land management is structured by sector (such as housing, sanitation, transport, environment, urbanism, historic and public sites, etc.) with their respective verticalized laws and bureaucracies situated in agencies, public companies, autarchies and direct administration agencies linked to the municipal, state and federal governments. Institutional fragmentation, constantly blamed for inefciency and low management capacity, excessive bureaucratization and disorder in cities, is actually part of a strategy to maximize the individual interests of bureaucrats, congressmen and businessmen involved in contracts and service provision to the state as well as real estate developers, reproducing a rubber-stamped privatization of public policies. . . . In this
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network of inuence processes, the interference of political forces supporting the governing coalition must be considered. They control the appointment of personnel to key operational positions in the programs (Silva, 2003: 368). While the Brazilian government in its capacity as investor and rule-maker has been the principal reference for promoting or obstructing expansion in the sector for the formal market, government actions are also of central importance for the self-builders of informal settlements. This relationship, steeped in ambiguity, is measured by the degree of tolerance on the part of the state apparatus in relation to squatting and other legal infractions and the degree of access to public assets provided by the government, such as infrastructure and urban services. Although the actions of the government on the urban environment are essential for the existence and survival of both businesses and informal settlers, these relationships are marked by asymmetry and different rules. For businesses, the mobilization of a vast, formal regulation apparatus is part of the strategy for privatization of control of the city by capital, which employs an imperial epistemology to construct its discourse, disqualifying and humiliating the knowledge of other social groups in the name of science and technology (Boaventura, 2003: 14). We can take the language of urban planning as an example, among many others and more specically that of zoning regulations in the city to illustrate what has just been said. Not by chance is it a highly complex and opaque code, structured by the economic and nancial logic of protability and appreciation of real estate investments. Its opacity, in itself, would already be sufcient to privatize the interlocutory space for those professionals directly involved in the networks of inuence of the political-bureaucratic apparatus. Given that the regulation of land use and occupation is intended precisely to attribute land to certain social economic segments, one of the principal functions of mobilization of this specic language is to protect real estate values, guaranteeing them even in the context of cities inhabited by a disadvantaged majority. To clarify: in the regulated city with infrastructure, where businesses operate an area corresponding to less than half of urban land (Maricato, 2006) the land and building prices are very high if we take into account GDP and the income levels of the urban population (Smolka, 2003). These markets, fed by the scarcity of urban resources in most regions of the city, include in their value all the surplus value generated by public investments, maintaining high prices and exclusive products. On the other hand, these increments are not highly taxed, since the taxes on land and buildings charged are, in most cities, rather low, protecting real estate appreciation.2 Areas appropriate for urbanization have rules for land use and occupation that dene the type of real estate product that can be produced there. The typologies provided for in urban and building regulations correspond fully to products available in this market (multi-story residential, horizontal single-family, etc.), and the best locations with the greatest potential for taking advantage of the Master Plans and land use and occupation laws are reserved for them. In this way, a signicant portion of the demand in each city is unmet, due to blocking of access to urbanized land, generating revenues almost totally appropriated by private agents. In informal settlements, the government is present principally through political mediation in the distribution of public goods (Graham, 1990). Given that most investments in urbanization occur a posteriori, when the neighborhoods are already occupied, and that this demand is very difcult to satisfy, the dispute over access to investments is bitter and has great importance in local politics and elections. The informal and/or illegal status of settlements creates impasses within bureaucratic agencies when settlements attempt to be recognized as consolidatable, creating the possibility of political negotiation through discretionary intermediation by politicians and their political networks. The combination of a very intense and rapid process of urbanization of the poor and their precarious insertion into the cities, opened the way for
2 According to Smolka (2003), in Latin America taxes on real estate represent less than 0.5% of GDP, whereas in countries like Canada and the United States, they account for between 3% and 4% of GDP.
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the rise of massive mobilizations for housing, transport, health care, sanitation, etc. These protests, active on the urban political scene since the end of the 1970s, resulted in the organization of so-called urban social movements that, in addition to being forms of pressure to obtain public goods and services for the settlements, created new forms of collective organization beyond the existing classic ones such as political parties and unions (Paoli, 1995: 32; see also Sader, 1988). During the 1980s, with the return of democratic liberties free political parties and social organizations, direct elections and universal voting for executive and legislative positions the relationship between the political electoral system and these movements became more complex. On the one hand, the emergence of parties especially the Workers Party self-identied as social movement parties, brought the agendas of these actors into the sphere of formal democratic institutions and the state apparatus. On the other hand, the logic of competition between political parties also penetrated the universe of the movements, transforming their culture. This equation becomes even more complex if we consider that the democratic transition in Brazil took place via a restricted pact between the elites, which preserved the rules of the game as regards the representation of interests, reproducing the tradition of seats held by powerful individuals, rather than parties, in networks and politicoelectoral machines strongly enmeshed in the state machinery (Avritzer, 2003). On both the left and right of the political party spectrum, both the rookies new to politics, who emerged from union and social movements, and the old political bosses had to compete for the popular vote and thus, in some way, relate to the claims for insertion in the city by both the population organized in movements and the wider, unorganized settlers. This is how investments in the urban milieu, along with tolerance, authorization or even promotion of precarious settlements have become a potent electoral device, with great possible political returns for promoters, either through the popular vote or through access to campaign funding. As mentioned above, the political world always invests in informal settlements and poor neighborhoods in the hopes of receiving support from those selectively beneted by public resources through their intermediation (Avelino, 1994; Carvalho, 1997). The degree of control local governments have over resources for these investments both those related to opening real estate fronts and those for upgrading informal settlements upgrading is rather limited. In the current Brazilian federative model, despite urban land management being a local competence, the federal government and, to a lesser extent, state governments control a good part of the decision making with respect to it.

Investments in urbanization who decides?

In the constitution enacted on October 1988, the autonomy of municipal governments was reinforced, and they came to have a larger role in providing local services. The approved constitution strengthened the municipalities nancially, which was due much more to their increased share in transfers of resources based on constitutional apportionment than in the increase in their ability to levy taxes. Indeed, the constitution was not very innovative in terms of the scope of municipal taxes, basically maintaining the same taxes dened in previous constitutions. The municipalities can levy taxes on typical urban activities: the Municipal Real Estate Tax (IPTU) and the Services Tax (ISS). However, the great majority of municipalities in Brazil have a rural economic base (Bremaeker, 2006: 5). Even those with a signicant urban economic dynamic, as seen in the section above, tax urban real estate surplus value very lightly. Thus, more than 70% of Brazilian municipalities obtain 90% of their revenues through transfer from other government levels. Not even the two most populous municipalities in the country So Paulo and Rio de Janeiro obtain more than 40% from their own revenues (Bremaeker, 2008: 25) (see Table 1).
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Table 1 Municipal revenues by type of municipality
Total Municipalities per Group No. % 1,267 1,290 1,385 1,037 319 229 37 5,564 22.77 23.18 24.89 18.64 5.73 4.12 0.66 100.00

Raquel Rolnik

Size of Municipalities (population) Up to 5,000 5,00010,000 10,00020,000 20,00050,000 50,000100,000 100,000500,000 Over 500,000 Total for Brazil

Transfer Revenues % 91.10 88.88 87.78 81.43 73.54 60.20 39.25

Tax Revenues % 2.49 4.31 5.18 7.86 11.34 19.77 39.89

Other Revenues % 6.42 6.81 7.04 10.71 15.12 20.03 20.86

Sources: IBGE (2006); Bremaeker (2008)

Considering that most of the automatic transfer revenues basically cover the cost of the municipal machine, including provision of the basic constitutional social services, most municipalities depend on what are called voluntary transfers and/or access to credit to invest in urban infrastructure. Contrary to what occurred in education and health, the constitution did not establish any governance hierarchies between the different government levels for urban development. According to the constitution, implementation of programs in this area falls within the jurisdiction of any level of government. Throughout the period studied, the federal government kept resources credit or budget resources centralized and managed by a precariously insulated bureaucracy (Arretche, 2000). The credit options for municipalities were thus rather restricted by the structural adjustment policies, which established greater control over ex-ante and ex-post expenditures, drastically limiting the possibility of municipal indebtedness (Alston et al., 2005: 40). With credit possibilities restricted and limited revenues of their own, municipalities can only turn to voluntary transfers. These occur through agreements between municipalities and state or federal governments, originating in selection processes conducted by the executive branch (called the programmable budget) or by the legislative branch (parliamentary amendments). Parliamentary amendments are rubber-stamped budget items, with prior determination not only of the program or action, but even the precise location. They can be collective regional or state blocks or individual. In the case of individual amendments, normally a pre-set annual amount is allowed per congressman or woman, which he or she can allocate to a project in any sector. Although the process of dening and allocating the budget is permeated by political transactions, the literature (and common sense) tends to attribute the role of amending the budget to congressional prerogative, and more specically in the case of individual amendments, to the central gears of a process founded on the individualism of the politicians, leading to a distribution of public resources based on clientelism and localism (Limongi and Figueiredo, 2005: 737). However, the authors cited above, among others, have demonstrated that the executive branch maintains rigid control over the entire process of budget denition and implementation through institutional rules and procedures that do not allow changes by the legislature (Alston et al., 2005):
individual amendments are not privileged by the Legislature . . . When disbursing resources allocated by congressmen through individual amendments, the executive is not ceding to pressures and failing to follow its agenda. The allocation of resources by individual congressmen is complementary, and not contrary to allocation by the Executive branch (Limongi and Figueiredo, 2005: 776).
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In fact, the portion of the federal budget spent on individual amendments has remained constant, at least since 1997, at about 2% of the total, with small positive variations in 2001 and 2004. The total number of amendments about 8,000 has also remained relatively stable, as has the proportion of individual amendments compared to collective amendments about 90% (2007). The continuity more or less under the same terms of the prole of individual amendments and their role in the public budget through presidential terms with very different agendas demonstrates, in addition to its lack of relevancy for the main agenda, the high political functionality of this mechanism that, at low cost, may, in specic situations, create high protability from the point of view of governability (Pereira and Mueller, 2002). Although small amounts are involved, the rubber-stamped individual amendment may have positive impacts on the electoral success and political survival of congressmen and women. If the amendments are of little importance from the point of view of the overall objectives of the governing coalition, we must stress that, at the municipal political level, this mechanism can be of great signicance as a fundamental base in a congressional re-election campaign.
taking on the political command of a municipality is a vital task in the attempt to control political options and reduce insecurity. This right corresponds to some obligations, principally in those municipalities which cannot collect enough taxes to cover their expenses. The appeal to voters is based precisely on the candidates ability to obtain public resources for the community (Avelino, 1994: 238).

Considering the current rules for party organization and electoral competition and the increasing cost of electoral campaigns, congressmen and women not only need mechanisms for distributing public resources but also campaign nancing alternatives to ensure their political survival. The control of key posts in the state machine could fulll this double function, since politicians in these positions can interfere in the rules for selecting contractors and service providers, and guarantee a ow of funds to feed the machine. This, in turn, can have positive electoral effects in the form of votes from those directly beneting from the services and projects and in the form of campaign contributions from the contractors. It is not by chance that urban development currently managed by the Ministry of Cities and health are the areas on which most congressional amendments focus (see Table 2). If the percentage represented by the amendments (including collective amendments) is small in relation to the total federal budget, they represent more than 50% of the approved budget of the Ministry of Cities and more than 80% of the implemented budget (SIAFI, 200407). This includes funds to build houses, pave streets, provide running water and improve public spaces in short, urbanization work normally undertaken to consolidate precarious settlements in a program of individual amendments created annually by the Congress. Several of the collective amendments due to state blocks and thus destined generically to municipalities in the state in question are actually combinations of individual amendments created to accommodate the requests for urbanization projects by congress members who have surpassed the limits established for the total number of individual amendments. Finally, rubber-stamped federal funds for large urbanization projects such as highways and collective transport, including subways which are often dened as amendments are normally collective. It is, therefore, within the political and electoral game that most of the decisionmaking on urban policy takes place, especially with respect to investments in public facilities and the broadening of urban services. Access to credit, and to budgetary funds, whether in the form of parliamentary amendments or in the form of agreements with ministry programs, depends essentially on the relationships that local politicians establish with the federal government, with intense participation of congress members and networks.
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Table 2 Parliamentary amendments by federal government ministries

Individual

Individual

Individual

Individual

Individual

QTY QTY QTY 2,889 1,386 468 631 194 2,744 1,218 465 732 186 74.2 117 1,333.7 258.5 28 498.7 94.7 221 1,834.4 582.5 122 1,194.6 1,121.9 266 4,127.8 571.8 515.3 72.5 201.0 86.2 115 1,404.7 20 143.5 47 948.1 115 1,396.0 83 1,261.1

2004 Collective + Rapporteur Final Final Appr. Appr. Amount. QTY Amount. 1,242.4 740.2 145.4 266.3 125.3 113 106 250 15 109

QTY

2005 Collective + Rapporteur Final Final Appr. Appr. Amount. QTY Amount.

2006 Collective + Rapporteur Final Final Appr. Appr. Amount. QTY Amount.

2007 Collective + Rapporteur Final Final Appr. Appr. Amount. QTY Amount. 2,573.4 1,794.9 2,104.7 217.0 1,633.6

QTY 2,889 1,386 468 631 194

2008 Collective + Rapporteur Final Final Appr. Appr. Amount. QTY Amount. 1,242.4 740.2 145.4 266.3 125.3 113 106 250 15 109 2,573.4 1,794.9 2,104.7 217.0 1,633.6

Ministry of Health

3,171

733.6

882

9,660.1

2,261

Ministry of Cities

859

188.9

132

677.3

1,468

Ministry of Education

418

68.4

93

1,570.7

388

Ministry of Sports

534

95.5

31

143.2

736

Ministry of National Integration

292

77.0

184

864.8

242

Note: Final approved amounts are in million BRL Source: SIAFI (200407)

Raquel Rolnik

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Final notes
At the request of the Ministry of Cities, more than 4,000 Brazilian municipalities engaged in local discussions on urban development policies through municipal conferences, the preparation of Participatory Master Plans, or participation in councils created through these processes. People involved in these spaces have had a large variety of experiences, since they were spread throughout the country, generating links between actors and operating under very diverse territorial political congurations. In many cities public debates on urban policy topics occurred for the rst time. In others, it was merely a formal procedure convocation of a public hearing and publication of minutes so that the local political authorities could not be accused of, and possibly punished for, not complying with the law. Most local elected leaders chose to promote these processes in the hopes of obtaining approval, through compliance with legal requirements, for access to federal resources for urbanization projects since, as we have seen, the current federative model of revenue distribution and land management does not satisfy the basic local need for urbanization. Decentralizing land use management and promoting participatory planning without establishing a government organization to coordinate policies at different levels of government and in different sectors, and a local installed capacity to make feasible the implementation of a long-term urban strategy is to condemn the practice of local urban planning to a rhetorical exercise that, as with various other norms, works at the same level as constitutional ambiguity: that is, a law that could be implemented or not, depending on the will and capabilities of the local government to implement it within the vast intermediation structure of the political system. In fact, even if the City Statute established the requirement to tie subsequent budget cycles to the approved Master Plans and their denitions and proposals in the area of urban development, local government has little real autonomy over these investments, whether participatory or not. This is because urban planning in Brazil continues to be the domain of highly sectorized, centralized bureaucracies that rely on decision-making processes strongly inuenced by the interests of the economic and political actors that depend on them to survive. This fact helps us understand some characteristics of urban policies that block the attempts at implementing a reform agenda based on cities planned democratically in the public sphere. A complex network of political brokerage ranging from the highest to local levels intermediates the transfer of funds to municipalities, both through amendments and through agreements and access to credit.
The Governments material resources play a crucial role in the operation of the system; political parties that is, those that support the government or participate in the government coalition have access to innumerable privileges through the State machine (Nunes, 1997: 32).

The area of urban development is particularly susceptible to these practices. Since resource allocation is geographically specic, micro-investments in the peripheries contribute to sustaining political seats in successive elections. The small budget amounts involved, insufcient to ensure basic urban conditions, do, however, show visible shortterm results and thus the possibility of reciprocation in the form of votes. Political actors, especially those involved in the political-party game, are generally more interested in the short-term consequences of their actions due to the timing of electoral politics. As Pierson (2000: 254) notes: Complex agendas and large institutional reforms, with effects that are necessarily felt only over longer timeframes, only gain support from those actors that have a strong following, or do not feel threatened, in the short term, by the withholding of votes. On the one hand, a popular base was ensured through selective, individual distribution of benets; on the other, investments were made in projects and urban regulations. Together they open new fronts for real estate expansion and contribute to ensuring the
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Raquel Rolnik

political survival of government coalitions together with the elite and large businesses, while simultaneously supported by the popular vote. This government model and political system, put into action in the urban-industrial phase of Brazilian urban development and created within its democratic transition, still prevails, even under the command of a government with worker origins and a high social agenda. However, I do not want to claim that a tax reform and the development of the federative model, capable of sustaining local governments with administrative and technical capacity and resources to govern their territories, would be a necessary and sufcient condition for potentializing planning processes conducted in the public sphere. The political rules that regulate governmentsociety relations in Brazil cross the federative scope through an intricate set of relationships that involve municipal, state and federal groups, based on a hierarchy of connections and favors that include government jobs, access to resources and supply of goods and services. Political parties play a crucial role in the connection between these rules and the universal norms of representative democracy installed in Brazil, to such an extent that brokers in the vote market (who ensure positions in the government market of goods and services) are often party members or employees of congressional ofces. These practices are not restricted to the government apparatus and its relations with society but penetrate and structure power relations in civil society as well. On examining the political relationships created when dening and implementing the National Cities Council, and its relationship with the ministry and the government as a whole, we can clearly identify that, in addition to political and cultural innovation, clientelism and corporatism, an elitist technocracy and ambiguity were also present and vigorous. In this way, we refute a simplistic and apologetic vision of civil society as a source of democratizing virtues while the state is seen as the incarnation of evil (Dagnino et al., 2006: 16). In the councils, as within the government and in the vast arena of power relations in Brazilian society, there are multiple political, democratic and national projects in constant competition. Thus, in the experiences of dening Master Plans and the Conferences and National Cities Council, we can identify the conservative force of a political culture strongly embroiled in the statesocial actors relationship. However, at the same time, we can also point to the elements of innovation and rupture that these processes have engendered. The content of the debates taking place in the cities despite being guided by the ministry and, since the election of the council, with a negotiated prior agenda incorporates local issues and projects, producing new Agenciamentos at the local level and giving rise to new items on the urban policy agenda.3 The idea of a public and collective construction of a city plan, based on the denition of its social function stated in the Cities Statute and present in the Master Plans campaign, collided with the semantic armor used by urban planning language. However, in quite a few cities, movements and civil society organizations intervened, proposing other directions and succeeding in obtaining the inclusion of instruments democratizing governance and land, together with or in opposition to representatives from the executive and legislation branches, and often mobilizing the judicial branch, especially the Ofce of the Prosecutor for the Public Interest. Now, even for those who were able to create generally agreed-upon plans, the great challenge will be implementation. More than a supposed political desire to follow a master plan, local governments clearly lack incentives to do so, since, as we demonstrated, the decision-making processes on investments and the future of the city are, under the current Brazilian federative model and political system, based on a different logic.

3 Among the innumerable subjects added to the urban policy agenda due to this process, I believe the most important is the full regularization of the land ownership of informal settlements.
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The advance of urban reform in Brazil thus needs not only the structure of a new political grammar based on strengthening of spaces for direct exercise of democracy and social control, traditional themes on its agenda, but also a plan for political reform and development of the current model for federative government and urban governance, fundamental elements in the full consolidation of democracy in the country.
Raquel Rolnik (raquelrolnik@usp.br), School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of So Paulo, Rua Floralia 89, So Paulo 05451-130, Brazil.

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Rsum
Au Brsil, les annes 1990 ont t marques par des progrs institutionnels en matire de logement et de droits urbains, dans le sillage de la Constitution de 1988 qui intgre les principes dune fonction sociale de la ville et de la proprit urbaine, ainsi que la reconnaissance du droit la proprit pour les squatters urbains et la participation directe des citoyens aux processus dlaboration des politiques urbaines. Ce sont galement les piliers du programme de rforme urbaine qui relve de lexcutif fdral depuis la cration dun ministre des Villes par le gouvernement Lula. Pour valuer les limites et potentiels lis la mise en place de ce programme, cet article sappuie sur deux politiques publiques proposes par le ministre, le Conseil national des villes et la campagne en faveur des Plans directeurs participatifs, en analysant plus particulirement lorganisation gouvernementale en matire durbanisme par rapport au systme politique et aux caractristiques de la dmocratie brsilienne.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.2 2011 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2011 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.