Urban territories : A multi-scale analysis of public policies (Brazil, São Paulo)

Doing fieldwork about the so called new social politics (health and assistance) in Brazil during, and after the « Lula » era (second half of the last decade) by an ethnographic approach (participant observations and biographical interviews) within urban outskirts in one of the most important metropolitain areas (São Paulo), with a population of about about 20 Million people, we met with the notion of urban territory in various and miscellaneous ways. In this paper, we will try to make ends meet, and to confront the ways in which this category is defined by different groups of actors and how these often contradictory meanings (trickle-down, bottom-up) make public policies work in practice. We will try to show how the multi-facetaded category of territory allows to mediate between forms of state governance, as well as other forms of market administration, and forms of appropriation and spacial uses of the local population. What may be the social and political outcomes of these processes of negotiation, and on the handling of social conflicts?

To do so, we will analyze the different levels of the social construction of two different public programs, one in the health sector (PSF-Programa Saúde Familia) and the other in the sector of assistance (PAF-Programa Ação Família) whose putting into practise we have accompagnied during several years in two different outskirts of São Paulo. Within each program, we will show the ways in which the territory is shaped by the different levels of public governance which define these politics, from its legal and administrative definitions to the forms they are locally negociated by subcontracted intermediates and professionals – nearly always in interaction with concurrent markets - as well as by the use of the population of public equipment, forms of participation and sociability.