Neighborhood planning experiences in Northeast Brazil: articulating insurgent planning and the right to the city

Abstract

This paper analyzes recent experiences of insurgent planning on the neighborhood scale in the Northeast region of Brazil. These experiences have emerged in an urban context characterized by its inhabitants’ progressive loss of rights and by the resumption of these rights through alternative planning practices. The paper discusses the configuration of different relations between the State, the university and communities, types of knowledge and languages used, and the possibility of social change that insurgent planning enables as a reactive and constructive process. The results show that the struggle for the right to the city is an integral part of the insurgent character of the Neighborhood Plans in Northeast Brazil, a contribution to the planning theory from/for the Global South.