The production of consensus public urban policies: between the administrative and the judicial

• Grant number: 04/07734-0
• Support Opportunities: Research Projects - Thematic Grants
• Duration: October 01, 2004 - September 30, 2008
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Eni de Lourdes Pulcinelli Orlandi
• Grantee: Eni de Lourdes Pulcinelli Orlandi
• Host Institution: Núcleo de Desenvolvimento da Criatividade (NUDECRI). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Pesquisadores principais: Eduardo Roberto Junqueira Guimarães
• Associated scholarship(s): 08/05417-9 - The Nation's colour: a discoursive study of articles on the 'new' place of the 'negro' in Brazil put into circulation by the printed media, BP.DR; 07/02189-2 - The historic process of the "citizenship" and "liberty" notions in the political educational discourse: subject-of-right(s), BP.MS

Abstract

The production of a consensus, sustained by the practice of public opinion, is considered an ideal for the satisfactory solution of social conflicts, presuming the existence of a common region of aspirations and necessities of the social groups, that would have to be distinguished in order to establish adequate public policies. The present urban policies considered democratic are based on this consensual logic: their objective is the constitution of a "majority" through the greatest possible degree of social "participation" in the different institutional instances of the city. The objective of this work is to analyze the production of the consensus by the urban public policies, based on the theoretical-methodological postulate of discourse analysis. Our hypothesis is that this process is associated to the production of segregation, since, in presupposing a homogenous social vinculum, it does not permit the (political) difference to be subjectivized. Through the analysis of documents relative to the institutional, educational, cultural, linguistic, technological, sportive and communication policies, we attempt to comprehend in what way the notions of citizenship, sociability, civility, among others, are signified. Initiating with a critical vision of the consensus, we take into consideration its definitions in the social sciences that remit us to the founding formulation of Auguste Comte. Through the proposal of a discursive methodology, with language as an instrument of observation, this research may bring about new manners in which to formulate a phenomenon traditionally approached by the optics of social scientists and specialists of the city in general, in addition to reconsidering the question of consensus that is presupposed but not reflected in the domain of urban policies. Ultimately, our intention is to understand the functioning of the urban institutions, their effects on the lives of individuals, and to determine the paradoxes of the present discourse on democracy. (AU)