The bureaucratic urban management tools used in the implementation of the onerous right to build in the municipality of São Paulo

Abstract

The current Strategic Master Plan of the Municipality of São Paulo (MP-MSP) (Municipal Law 16,050/2014) redefined the legal bases of the Onerous Right to Build (ORB). This text tries to understand how the implementation of this instrument, as part of the "urban policies" discussed by Eduardo Marques (2018), impacts the institutional operations of São Paulo city government. This question expresses the problem which guides the studies about: (i) the insertion of the collection of financial revenues related to the ORB as part of the urban licensing processes of the real estate developments; (ii) the monitoring of these processes and the performance of the financial resources collections obtained from the implementation of the ORB for public accountability and (iii) the Management Board of FUNDURB in whose bank account the funds of those financial resources are deposited. The hypothesis asserts that the implementation of ORB requests the inclusion of routinized proceedings and instruments into the public administration. In order to verify that hypothesis, we address analyses about those proceedings and instruments following the neoinstitutional methodologies mentioned by Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Galé (2012). The data and information used in this work come from the interviews with civil servants, internet sites kept by the São Paulo city government institutions and municipal legislations. The descriptions and examinations presented in the article show the ORB as part of the routinized processes and relationships of urban management whose instruments and bureaucratic practices, operated within institutional structures and administrative procedures, mediate the interactions between governmental and nongovernmental actors.