Lines of Action

Instruments to improve urban areas through integrated planning, multi-level governance and socio-environmental justice

Urbanization

It proposes an analytical lens on the dynamics of planning and operationalization of urban policies, based on a multilevel understanding of territories.

We focus our attention on the major challenges of sustainable urbanization in the Brazilian context:

The articulation between municipalities based on regional and metropolitan dynamics and the role played by the federal government and state governments in these coordination attempts;
The effort to integrate urban planning and sectoral proposals, such as mobility, housing, waste, green areas and the growing strategies for local climate action;
The intramunicipal perspective and the need to develop analysis tools sensitive to socio-spatial inequalities within the same urban context.

Restoration

It articulates a proposal to rethink the relationship between the natural environment and the built environment based on strategies to promote ecosystem services from a territorial perspective, through the expansion of green-blue infrastructure and nature-based solutions.

The research and proposal formulation work considers the need to consider interventions from the size of the lot and building to their network articulation at the neighborhood, municipal, and regional levels, seeking to document their impacts and benefits, develop scenarios and projections, and identify possible legislative, regulatory, and public policy design advances.

Governance

Positions the dynamics of interaction between actors and institutions as key elements for the success of planning strategies, public policies, and action and advocacy initiatives.

To this end, it seeks to reflect on and outline proposals for multilevel networking that can leverage existing resources and skills and broaden the dissemination of knowledge, data, and recommendations from both the top-down and bottom-up perspectives. It also highlights the need to create and strengthen information, monitoring, and evaluation systems, working with open data, transparency, and publicity.

Participation

It highlights the need to expand democratic social participation by identifying the intrinsic value of mobilizing organized civil society, citizens, and social actors, recognizing the importance of an intersectional approach that pays attention to markers of race, gender, income, territorial origin, among others.

It proposes the expansion of articulation strategies between community initiatives and planning strategies and public policies, through tools such as citizen deliberation, the multiplication of spaces for dialogue, the development of active and playful methodologies, the qualification of presence in forums for the formulation and monitoring of state initiatives, and the formalization of demands through strategic litigation.