Planning scales and their discourses: sustainability im Macro metropolis documents
Brazilian literature in territorial planning, oriented by a critical perspective, points to the role of “smoke screen” that urban planning plays in the public debate, as it presents acceptable objectives to the population, but distant from the real interests of the dominant class. Conducting to a systematic increase of the differences in what is planned and what is done, as more mechanisms of public participation are created, but with reduced practical effects. Territorial planning on the scale of the São Paulo macro-metropolis, however, does not fit this tradition. As in the planning process on this scale the state dialogues more directly with the dominant class and less with the whole population, its documents presents a discourse that differs from the master plans of the local scale, and even contradictory with them, by exposing objectives closer to the real interests of the dominant class. This particular condition allows its documents to containing rhetorical devices to persuade civil society.
Given the centrality of the word “sustainability” in the public debate today, which is reflected in territorial planning, this research presents a comparative study between three scales of territorial planning (local, metropolitan and macro-metropolitan) by the critical analysis of the discourses in their respective documents. The objective is to relate how the specifics economic and institutional inputs of the macro-metropolitan scale relate to their discourses.