Dismantling of Public Policies: The New Reurb LAW and Its Impacts on Brazilian Social LAND Regularization Policies

The unplanned expansion of the urban fabric is the primary factor leading to land tenure irregularities, giving rise to informal urban settlements (such as slums and shantytowns), which can be easily identified across Latin America due to their non-compliance with urban, legal, social, environmental, and/or infrastructural standards. For this reason, in the 1980s, several Latin American countries began investing in land tenure regularization policies as an attempt to extend the benefits and services found in formal cities to informal urban settlements. Two main models were adopted, leading to a narrative debate on the most appropriate strategies to fully achieve land regularization. Initially, Brazil, by adopting the integrated socio-spatial regularization model, implemented effective tools to carry out land tenure regularization through interventions in various sectors within informal communities. However, the introduction of a new tool focused solely on land titling—land tenure legitimation—seems to have sparked a new trend: the dismantling of previously established urban policies. The literature addressing this subject, through an analysis of the legal framework (Law No. 13,465/2017), has speculated that the introduction of this new tool has led to a reduction in interventions; however, empirical evidence has yet to confirm this claim. Therefore, this research aims to analyze the impacts of the new regularization tool on the various dimensions of Brazil's social land regularization policies (in terms of density and intensity), focusing on the regularization processes established at Federal, State, and Municipal levels in the states of Rio Grande do Norte (RN) and Rio Grande do Sul (RS) between 2010 and 2023.