Planejamento estratégico 2020: o avanço neoliberal e o processo de continuidade do urbanismo

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the main urban planning guidelines of the 2017 Strategic Plan for Rio de Janeiro city, entitled "Rio 2020: More Solidary and More Human", developed by the current management of mayor Marcelo Crivella, considering the current process of neoliberalization and the transformations (in space and discourse) engendered by the successive strategic plans implemented in Rio de Janeiro from the 1990s onwards. It seeks to investigate how the Plan reinforces the hegemonic directives of urban development in the city of Rio de Janeiro, responding to the demands of the current conjuncture and to a specific local dynamic. It starts from the hypothesis that urban plans – understood as State instruments to plan and control the production of space – follow, on the one hand, a process of continuity in the political and ideological orientation of urbanization, reinforcing certain socio-spatial patterns and, on the other hand, respond to local specificity and path dependent contexts, relying on the economic agents involved and the (historical) political arrangements. This process leads to the advancement of the commodification of urban and social politics - and political space - leading to an urban practice in which inequality becomes naturalized and, therefore, stimulated. It is believed that the typical lack of definition of spatial and territorial structures of "strategic planning" and the carry out of consensus as a method of political formulation have served to make the disputes under urban policies invisible, suppressing them, while adapting urban development to the dynamics and interests of real estate and financial market. After a brief history of the strategic plans elaborated for the city of Rio de Janeiro since its first version in 1993, this article enters a more detailed study of the Urban Operation Consortium announced in the studied Plan for Rio das Pedras. Based on the concept of "real existing neoliberalism”, it is intended to problematize the advance of the "strategic" conception of urban planning within its political, economic, social, methodological and spatial dimensions.