Planejamento e gestão urbanos na escala microlocal: reflexões a partir das Regionais de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

The main theme of the research is urban planning and management practices that seek to understand and act in the city within the microlocal scale. The main objective was to analyze the Belo Horizonte Regional Offices, in order to understand whether they currently contribute or have contributed at some point in their history to participatory urban planning and management, in view of their greater proximity to the daily lives of citizens. “Regional” is the popular name given to the nine administrative regions of the city, as well as to their respective headquarters, whose official name is currently “Coordenadorias de Atendimento Regional”, where citizens are served for various matters. Three specific objectives were listed, originating the three chapters of the research development: (i) understand the concept of popular participation and its insertion in the context of urban planning and management in Brazil, (ii) structure a temporal and contextual panorama of the functioning of the Regional Offices of Belo Horizonte, from its creation in the 1970s to the present day and (iii) analyze the recent contributions of the West Regional Office to popular participation, from the point of view of community leaders. Different methods were adopted throughout the research, such as documental and historical investigation and semi-structured interviews. In general, it was possible to verify that the Regionals are important institutions for the structuring and mobilization of participatory processes in the city, although they function only as a support for the realization of such processes. On the other hand, it was possible to identify a recent weakening of the participatory potential of these institutions, in view of their loss of autonomy from the Administrative Reform of 2017 and the paralysis of the voting rounds of the “Orçamento Participativo”, one of the most relevant participatory mechanisms in the city.