Urban-environmental transformation in metropolitan areas: Challenges to social and environmental justice, planning and politics

The paper discusses research results related to the implementation of urban-environmental policies in metropolitan Brazil. The underlying idea is that during the last two decades, there has been a steady movement towards building an institutional framework to deal with urban-environmental issues in different spatial scales, from national to local policies, based on principles of participation, sustainability and urban reform. Although such concepts area usually loosely defined and generally adopted as progressive discourse, the paper argues that there is an effective attempt from social movements and public policies to move towards social-environmental justice. This is not unproblematic and often raises conflicts around their conception, implementation and mechanisms of social control. In recent years, the discourse of climate change and mitigation/adaptation strategies became widely adopted in planning and public policies. Are they new forms of visioning a scenario in which socio-environmental justice plays an important role or are they contemporary strategies to deal with longstanding social and environmental shortcomings?

The paper will address such questions in the empirical context of Belo Horizonte, a five million inhabitants metropolitan area in southeast Brazil. The region is undergoing a process of intense growth as a response to recent public and private investments, with important social and environment implications. At the same time, an interesting planning experiment took place in the region as a Metropolitan Master Plan was developed by our university. Notions of social justice, environmental change and citizen´s mobilization were considered central to the process of discussion of the plan. Proposed policies are discussed, particularly those related to environmental and climate change, as an attempt to understand the relationship between policy implementation, governance structure, social forces supporting them, implications in terms of spatial restructuring and the need for change required from social agents associated to industrial capital, landed property or provision of economic infrastructure.