A gestão democrática da cidade e a efetividade jurídica da participação popular acerca dos recursos naturais: uso de indicador avaliativo sobre o processo revisor do Plano Diretor do município de Natal

Abstract

Democratic city management, based on popular participation, concentrates several interdisciplinary relationships to guarantee the right to sustainable and smart cities that depend on natural resources, especially water and energy. In these ways, doubt arises about the possibility of concretely measuring the legal effectiveness of popular participation from the perspective of natural resources in the master plans drafting or reviewing process. The general objective of this research aims to discuss democratic city management from the perspective of the legal effectiveness of popular participation in the master plans drafting or reviewing process considering natural resources. The specific objectives are as follows: to understand the meaning of the right to the city in the context of sustainable smart cities under the international legal order; to discuss the normativity of the SDGs for Brazilian cities under a constitutional perspective; to understand the relationship between the democratic management of sustainable smart cities and natural resources, like water and energy; to develop an appropriate tool to evaluate the legal effectiveness of popular participation about natural resources, water and energy, in the master plan; to examine the Master Plan of the Municipality of Natal resulting from the last review process, through the usage of the designed tool. The present work is a case study designed to analyze the latest reviewing process of the Master Plan for the Municipality of Natal and its participatory processes from the perspective of natural resources, based on the Plan-ProcessResults (PPR) method, enriching the bibliographic and documentary review basis of the research with more details throughout each chapter. The importance of this work relies on the Democratic Rule of Law and the principle of sustainability in tackling urban problems related to the exhaustion of natural resources essential for human life. The results obtained from the usage of the designed index tool, called Index of Effectiveness of Popular Participation on Natural Resources (IEPOP-RN), demonstrate a scenario of weaknesses according to the delimitations proposed in this research, which require the strengthening of democratic spaces with the appropriate use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and openings to other perspectives and solutions in terms of urban sustainability.