Democracia, Estado e espaço: elementos para uma crítica materialista do planejamento urbano

• Ano de defesa: 2014
• Autor(a) principal: Marcos Gustavo Pires de Melo
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; UFMG
• Palavras-chave em Português: Forma-política; Crítica materialista; Democraci; Planejamento urbano; Estado; Geografia
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/IGCC-9SYNB9

This research seeks to reflect on the necessity of building a materialist critique of urban planning. To do so, we make a rescue of recent changes in the theory and practice of planning since the fall of the modernist paradigm in the 1970s highlighting the contemporary attempts to build a democratic planning. At the beginning we identified the main contradiction that animates this research: although built upon the spirit of urban reform and guided increasingly by popular participation, planning in Brazil has reproduced the same segregated, informal and repressive pattern of urban space. Democratic advances in planning seem to have no endorsement in the actual production of space. We purpose that this situation is due to two idealistic illusions: one that takes modern democracy as a panacea, without reflecting on its nature; and other that takes the reform of the State as a possibility of representing a real public interest. In the first two chapters we deconstruct these two idealistic visions through a critical view that seeks to show how much modern democracy and the state are the result of a specific social formation and are, as such, constrained by its limits. As soon as this deconstruction of the faith in a reformed democratic state as a mean of emancipation is finished, another proposal appears on the horizon: the possibility that planning itself (by its form and not only by its contents) serves the reproduction of the contradictory process of the capitalist production of urban space and class domination. The last chapter is dedicated to explore this possibility in an attempt to overflow the previous discussions also for the critique of planning. Finally, we seek to defend the construction of this materialist critique of planning helps us to envision a new line of research and the possibility of renewal of the political project of emancipation. The major contribution of this research is point out the possibility of new perspectives for the critique of urban planning