Desenvolvimento urbano integrado: fundamentos, experiências e caminhos para a transformação das cidades brasileiras através de projetos urbanos

Abstract

This study investigates Integrated Urban Development (IUD) as a strategy capable of addressing the fragmentation that has historically characterized Brazilian urbanization and of promoting urban interventions with greater capacity for territorial and institutional articulation. The research is grounded in a critical analysis of the limitations of sectoral urban responses and of the institutional fragility of urban planning in Brazil, understood as a continuous and adaptive state discipline. It highlights the need for territorially integrated approaches capable of articulating public policies, sectors, and actors, and of producing more consistent outcomes in the physical and territorial organization of cities. To this end, the research adopts a qualitative and exploratory methodology structured around two complementary analytical fronts. The first consists of the analysis of international and national experiences that incorporate the principles of Integrated Urban Development as a guiding framework for urban policies, seeking to identify patterns, attributes, and institutional conditions associated with the promotion of territorial integration. The second consists of an in-depth examination of urban projects implemented in Medellín, Colombia, analyzed as concrete expressions of the territorial materialization of these principles within the scope of urban projects. The analysis is therefore structured through a dual approach, considering IUD both as a reference for urban policy—based on the genealogy of the concept in international frameworks such as the Leipzig Charter (European Commission, 2007) and in national initiatives such as the Brazilian Framework for Integrated Urban Development—and as a practice of territorial intervention, observed in the implementation of integrated urban projects in the city of Medellín. The results show that the analyzed experiences incorporate, in different ways, key principles associated with IUD, such as state coordination, multilevel governance, and the structuring role of urban projects in articulating policies, sectors, and scales of intervention. Based on these findings, the study systematizes a set of strategies, mechanisms, instruments, and institutional practices that demonstrate both the potential, as well as the limits and conditions of application, of Integrated Urban Development as an approach capable of contributing to the improvement of urban planning and to the structuring of integrated urban projects in the Brazilian context.