by BRIAN MIER
Erminia Maricato PHOTO/FAU
This interview was originally conducted in Portuguese, and translated by the author.
Erminia Maricato is one of Brazil’s most renowned urban planners. In addition to having published 11 books and contributed nearly 40 book chapters, her lectures, often in public forums and protests, regularly draw large crowds of young people. But she is not merely an academic. Maricato was a key player in four of the most important moments in the last 30 years of Brazilian urban reform.
Maricato was an actor in the movement that created and ratified, through popular petition, articles 182 and 183 of the 1988 Brazilian constitution These articles declare that the social function of property overrides the profit motive and set guidelines for radical urban reform. From 1989-1992, she served as São Paulo’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development within one of the most progressive big-city governments of all time, working alongside Education Secretary Paulo Freire. In this position, Maricato helped create innovative policies that provided technical support for urban social movements to appropriate abandoned buildings and vacant land and convert the properties to self-managed social housing in accordance with the constitution—policies that were later replicated in hundreds of cities across Brazil. She was active in helping create and ratify the landmark Statute of the City in 2001, which creates guidelines for adherence to constitutional articles 182 and 183 and mandates that every city with a population over 20,000 has to facilitate a regular participatory development plan with full budget transparency. From 2003 to 2005, while serving under former Porto Alegre Mayor Olivio Dutra in the Federal Ministry of Cities, Maricato acted as the technical coordinator of President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva’s national urban development policy.
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What was PT’s model of urban governance during the time you worked with Mayor Luiza Erundina in São Paulo and how how do you think this differs from the strategies used by the government of Fernando Haddad [Mayor of São Paulo, 2012-2016]?
During the recuperation of democracy after the military dictatorship, the social forces in Brazil, that were academic, labor, professional and social movements, built a proposal that we called “urban reform.” When the Worker’s Party took over the São Paulo mayor’s office we had a platform that had been collectively built with the social movements. As we recuperated democracy in Brazil, several political parties and labor union federations sprung up as well as the Central de Movimentos Populares (People’s Movements Central). We won some mayoral elections together and we started what I call a “virtuous cycle” of urban policy. A large part of it was based on direct democracy. I think the most important program of this period was participatory budgeting. We were living in a period of low investment—there was no money. It was a period of crisis and IMF structural adjustments. We didn’t have many resources for public policies, but we deliberated democratically on the allocation of what resources we did have. In addition to participatory budgeting, we created a housing policy that generated a lot of positive results based on technical support from architects, engineers and social workers, so that the social movements could build their own houses. The mayor’s office donated the land and provided financing. This was one of our most successful programs and there is a legacy in that it has been continued in cities across Brazil up to this day. We also started a very important strategy of urbanization in precarious areas and favelas.
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