LASA 2020

Friday May 15, 2020 | 3 - 5pm (preliminary date/time)

Organizer: Jessica Pineda-Zumarán

Chair: Lara Furtado

Discussant: Clara Irazábal-Zurita

Decolonial thinking in Latin America unfolded from Anibal Quijano’s concept of coloniality – the darker side of Western modernity, postmodernity, and globalization. Decoloniality centers the vocabulary and logics of other knowing praxis and knowledge systems. The pressing demand for planning and policymaking in Latin America is to ‘catch up’ with this growing movement in the continent. This four-part panel series engages with this discussion from multiple perspectives.

Part 1 of this four-part panel series examines the structural barriers that can be deemed as intrinsic and as constraining for the adoption of decolonizing thinking and acting within Latin American planning systems. As many scholars have pointed out, these are still significant in the region and manifest at both the national policymaking and local planning practice levels. These barriers include, but are not limited to, policymakers’ and practitioners attachment to outdated planning approaches and policy ideas, the maintenance of old institutional arrangements even after policies or approaches adjust or change, the continuation of routine practices even if they do not yield the expected results, and the limited capacity of institutions to trigger learning and knowledge-generation within higher and lower level public officials.

The papers included in this 1/4 panel series discuss concrete examples of these barriers as they unfold in Peru, Mexico and Brazil. Their analysis disentangles the relationships between the many factors shaping these stumbling blocks, and offer some reflections of what it might take to address them in the search for ways toward planning decolonization.

Priscila Coli Rocha, University of California, Berkeley (City and Regional Planning)

Cities in the Global South have primarily developed through urban informality, a mode of urbanization that produces spaces straddling legality/approval and illegality/criminalization. Those in-between spaces are defined as ‘gray spaces.’ While the on-the-ground knowledges emerging from them are often unaccounted for in planning mandates, they are a critical source of urban innovation and hold the potential for social transformations like the emergence of a more politically empowered citizenry. In Brazil, they have created opportunities for direct participation in the planning process and given rise to inclusive urban policies. However, at the same time that 'gray spaces' make it possible for communities to raise their voices, they allow for new actors to emerge and become empowered. Among them are milícias, drug cartels, and evangelical churches. Gradually, they are taking control not only over neighborhood associations, basic services provision, and local real estate markets, but have also come to occupy political positions, as proven by election results over the last decades. As such, they undermine or use to their benefit planning instruments that were originally intended to shape more democratic decision-making. Drawing from interviews and participant observation conducted in Duque de Caxias, in Brazil, this paper briefly describes disputes between the milícias and the local community over occupied public land, the APA São Bento. It aims to illustrate how one of these new actors emerged through the same processes that empowered local communities, and to explore the ways in which they may undermine participatory mechanisms prescribed by planning legislation in Brazil.

Giselle Mendonça Abreu, University of California, Berkeley (City and Regional Planning)

In 2014, mayor Fernando Haddad sanctioned a new master plan for the city of São Paulo, celebrated by municipal staff, social movements, and civil society organizations as the legitimate outcome of a broad participatory process. In this paper, I analyze specific procedures and mechanisms aimed at including non-expert knowledge into this planning process, reflecting on the extent that they can be deemed “democratic.” In the first section of this paper, I retrace the institutionalization of the “participatory master plan” as the key tool for the right to the city in Brazil, and describe the process for developing it in the case of São Paulo’s 2014 master plan. In the second section, I analyze more closely two specific procedures: participatory workshops (“oficinas participativas”), a series of face-to-face activities for proposal-making involving citizens, and the participatory draft bill (“minuta participativa”), an online tool where citizens could engage with the proposed text for the master plan’s law. I identify a particular genealogy of each of these methods of participation based on earlier experiments: I connect participatory workshops to experiences of architectural technical assistance from the 1970–80s, and the participatory draft bill to the process of elaborating the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet a few years before the master plan. Finally, in the third section, I engage with the Athenian archive of democratic procedures to develop a critique of São Paulo’s participatory planning process.

Why Planning Approaches Do Not Change? An Ideational Analysis of the Peruvian Planning Approach and the Absence of Mechanisms for Learning and Innovation

Jessica Pineda-Zumarán

Ciudad desde Abajo, Governance from Above: Struggling Over Neighborhood Improvement in Mexico City

Jill Wigle, Lucy Luccisano, and Paula Maurutto

Insurgent Data Building by Informal Settlements

Lara Furtado