AHI EXCHANGE SERIES AHI Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

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AHI EXCHANGE SERIESAHI Lincoln Institute of
Land Policy

• Exchange 4
• Thursday, June 18, 2009
•  
• Local Autonomy vs. State Controls in Urban
  Planning in search of balance in the US and in
  Brazil
•  
• Presenters Edesio Fernandes (Visiting Fellow at
  the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy), and Gerald
  Frug (Harvard Law School)

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Argument

• Institutional design matters!
• It impacts urban/land/housing policy and
  determines its efficiency and fairness
• It should not be taken for granted need for
  critical re-thinking
• It needs to evolve over time and with changing
  political processes

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A matter of governance

• It establishes the rules of the political game
  and the goalposts who plays, and how
• Institutional design should relate to territorial
  order created by urban development sociospatial
  expression of sociopolitical pact

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A new federative pact

• An inclusive and sustainable territorial order
  requires revised federative pact
• intergovernmental articulation rather than rigid
  distribution of powers
• broader approach of public sphere through
  participatory decision-making
• redefined relations between government, markets,
  and organized society

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Three Brazilian stories

• The two most ambitious social programs in Latin
  America The Plan to Accelerate Growth (PAC) and
  the My House, My Life Housing Program (MCMV)
• The Amazon question
• The metropolitan question

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PAC

• Record investment in infrastructure 2007-2010
  R503.9 bi (US250 bi)
• Social and urban R170.8 bi
• Transportation logistics R58.3 bi
• Energy R274.8 bi

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MCMV

• 2009-2010
• R 34 bi (US17 bi)
• 1 million houses

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Main shortcomings so far

• Few projects
• Bad projects technical solutions, materials,
  reinforces urban segregation, ad hoc projects,
  lack of master planning
• Inefficient management waste of resources,
  escalating costs, precarious monitoring
• Limited social control transparency, fraud,
  corruption
• Political uses elections, patronage
• Waste of a unique opportunity to make a
  difference?

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Some underlying causes

• Programs with federal resources to be promoted
  through municipalities
• Supporting role of federal government constrained
  by extreme decentralization
• Municipalism at all costs (decentralization as
  democratization)
• Lack of capacity to act formal isonomy poor
  fiscal management exclusionary urban planning
  distorted use of PPPs weak representative
  democracy and limited involvement of organized
  society

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The Amazon question
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Main problems so far

• New economic frontier logging, cattle, mining,
  soya beans, land development, biotechnological
  piracy
• Highest urban development rates 20 m people
• Escalating deforestation (and desertification)
• Land grabbing and land conflicts

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Some underlying causes

• Limited municipal laws
• Lack of territorial planning/regional planning
• Lack of enforcement of (federal) environmental
  legislation
• No social function of property recent
  privatization of public land
• Lack of capacity to act
• Omission and tolerance
• Political pressure from landowners at Congress
  (distorted representation system)

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The metropolitan question
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Main problems so far

• Informal land markets and growth of precarious
  peripheries
• Sociospatial segregation
• Environmental impact
• Fragmented infrastructure and services provision
• Irrational and costly urban management
• Economic inefficiency and high costs of
  transactions

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Some underlying causes

• Political-institutional federal system does not
  reflect urban-territorial order 5.550 vs. 23
• Municipal territorial control and no metropolitan
  territorial order
• Lack of integrated decision-making process
• No distribution of costs/compensation mechanisms
• Lack of popular representation
• Local is metropolitan, not municipal
• What is the state government for?

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No national and/or regional territorial planning
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Questions

• Why create institutions without clearly defined
  authority or resources?
• Who benefits, and how, from the maintenance of an
  institutional design that does not express the
  socioeconomic and political realities that it
  addresses?
• Who benefits, and how, from the maintenance of an
  institutional design that does not express the
  territorial order that it proposes to regulate?

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Challenges

• Accommodate differences within a universal legal
  system formal equality generates distortions
• Think more in terms of processes rather than in
  products
• Avoid Manichean, dichotomy approaches -
  regulation vs. deregulation, central vs. local,
  public vs. private regulate that which needs to
  be regulated, promote intergovernmental
  articulation, form partnerships within new
  participatory federative pact