“THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW GENERATION OF REDEVELOPMENT PROJECTS”: EXPLORING THE “URBAN INTERVENTION” SCHEME.
Considering the current configuration of urban planning in São Paulo, and especially the dispute in pursuit of control and direction of urban policy, this research explores the multiple interests that surround the Urban Intervention Projects (UIPs), as well as their possible effects on the urban redevelopment process. The emergence of UIP will be analyzed as a new stage in the trajectory of urban planning in the city of São Paulo, which deepens and provides greater discretionary powers and flexibility in the finance, physical intervention and regulation of the built environment through urban projects. The epistemology of UIPs will be explored – their meanings, limits and new opportunities – in light of their formal objectives, in the sense of providing greater instrumental-communicative rationality to the urban project, on the one hand, and the contradictory trajectory, marked by the socio-spatial selectivity of previous experiences, on the other. The trajectory of the new instrument will be addressed, mainly to contribute to a critical reflection regarding the new urban policy agendas, as well as the transformation of planning praxis in Brazilian cities.
In order to understand the complex socio-spatial dynamics involving the current configuration of UIPs in the city of São Paulo, documentary research and an investigation of specialized media, interviews and systematization of ongoing processes were carried out.
On the basis of this exploratory analysis, we conclude that there is a continuity in the urban policy framework based on spatial selectivity, in which planning is implemented in spaces of exception, and even though there have been changes in the specific context and the role of agents, it is still a process commanded and driven by private interests. In summary, we argue that the UIP emerges from a sequence of instruments based on permissive logics, with the normalization of the exception, linked to the generalization of the concession of urban space itself as a new planning device, with an incessant conflict between public and private interests: a new format, based on an old logic.