Entre as dunas e o morro: a governança de grandes projetos urbanos em Natal/RN

Abstract

The Large Urban Projects (LUPs) are a theme that, since the advance of neoliberalism between the 1980s and 1990s, has gained prominence around the world, especially in the North West. As the logic of modernist urban planning constitutes an exceptionality, they develop an urban governance structure that is part of the city as a whole. In Brazil, in the recent context, mega-events have made medium-sized cities carry out LUPs and all their disruptive effects in various dimensions of urban management, as in the case of Natal, capital of the state of Rio Grande do Norte. In 2014, a unique event occurred in the recent history of Natal, which was the inauguration of two urban projects that are unique examples of an implementation based on public-private articulation, to a greater or lesser degree, namely: Arena das Dunas, stadium built in the neighborhood of Lagoa Nova, to be the central square for the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil events in the city; and, simultaneously, Arena do Morro, a multi-sport gymnasium, built in the popular informal neighborhood of Mãe Luiza. The framing of these characteristics leads to the need to research the governance of collective facilities at the time of formulation and implementation. Thus, the following question was asked in this research: What are the characteristics of the governance of these two projects in the formulation and implementation phases? And how could Natal, an average city of less than 900 thousand inhabitants, be able to produce equipment so similar and so different in a short period of time? We start from the premise that the public-private arrangements of the studied equipment in Natal produced, in the formulation and implementation phases, independent governance standards. In the case of Arena das Dunas, a pattern of urban entrepreneurial governance was forged (RIBEIRO; SANTOS JÚNIOR, 2015) having as characteristics of insulated formulation and implementation, and for Arena do Morro a corporatist pattern (RIBEIRO; SANTOS JÚNIOR, 2015) of characteristics of participatory formulation and implementation and collective functioning. Thus, this research aims to understand the patterns of governance structured in the projects of Arena das Dunas and Arena do Morro, in Natal/RN. For this purpose, we adopted the Collaborative Governance proposal by Ansell and Gash (2007) as an analysis model. As a result, we identified in the case of Arena das Dunas an insulated entrepreneurialpatrimonialist governance pattern that implements a LUP considering the physicalterritorial effects observed in the surroundings from its insertion. As for Arena do Morro, we verified a pattern of deinstitutionalized corporatist governance of a community urban project. We concluded that what makes Natal manage to implement these two equipments with such similar and different characteristics in the same time frame is the independence that each has from the other.