Territorial capabilities of planning. State and its influence on the Brazilian urbanization process

Abstract

The main objective is to problematize the Brazilian state planning by its territorial aspect and to understand some predominant characteristics of the urbanization process. This article presents research results on urban public policies from a planning perspective, taking as its main object the provision of sanitation, mobility and housing infrastructure. Methodologically, the analysis is based on empirical research on federal investments made between 1990 and 2019 and on the programs that promoted them; and for an interscalar vision from the spatialization of these data in the municipalities. It relies on institutional and public policy theories to understand the role of the State; and in the concepts of metropolization and urban dispersion to understand its capacity in territorial planning. The results reinforce the traditional findings about tensions and contradictions in this order. However, they bring evidence of new aspects related to the urban-regional dimension, to sectorialism, to the capillarity of these actions and to their new paradigms. The conclusions point to a cycle of investments whose results are related to the characteristics of decentralized federalism and the redemocratization process that undertook them and answer the main question of how the State intervenes in territorial planning and how it could intervene.