Planejamento territorial participativo: tecendo a utopia de uma comunidade cuidadora

Abstract

Even though participatory territorial planning methodologies are not new, it is a fact that they have not been able to handle the needs that urban and rural communities in Brazil and other parts of the planet face because they are still guided by a vision of world that is limited by a linear and predominantly vocational paradigm. Aiming to expand an increasingly necessary dialogue, this research presents the participatory territorial planning methodology called "Comunidades Cuidadoras" (Caring Communities), developed with the communities Oitis and Catolé, in the rural area of the municipality of Milagres, in Cariri, Ceará. The objective was to contribute to the experience and systematization of a planning experience of participatory territorial planning in these communities, in the light of the constituent elements of Social Management and the concept/utopia of a caring community. Along the way, the encounter with other concepts – suchas sustainability, communitarianism, good living and management of common goods – was essential. Although it is not a question of fixed choices or prescriptions to be followed, the research exercise that resulted in the present work was guided by the principles of action research and, more specifically, by constitutive elements of ethnography. The Caring Communities methodology was experimented between May 2022 and January 2023. Dialogue as the guiding thread of the process, recognition of the knowledge and actions of the multiple actors and actresses who took part in the journey, acceptance of the territory's urgencies and a vision of wider world, based on collective reflection, referenced the journey and led to the results presented in the present work, which is also a critical-reflective record of the journey itself and the initial conception of the methodology. From a scientific point of view, the contributions of this work fall within the field of critical reflection, albeit briefly, on the limits of participatory territorial planning methodologies. Morover, it points out the need to problematize territorial planning processes, the starting from the questioning of the paradigm that brought us to where we are today, as a species and as a planet, without moving away from the dialogue with local contexts. In the technological field, this work presents a participatory territorial planning methodology which can be understood as a Social Management Technology that innovates by proposing ways that allow us to recognize the endogenous potential of each territory, welcome its urgencies and, at the same time, dialogue with broader agendas, such as the climate emergency. As for the social dimension, this work enabled the collective exercise of territorial planning, leaving a direct contribution to the Oitis and Catolé communities, where the research was carried out, a Communitary Territorial and Organizational Action Plan (Plano de Ação Comunitário, Territorial e Organizacional, PACTO), an integral part of the Caring Communities methodology. The Plan will last for two years (2023-2024) and, alongside the executive projects linked to it, represents the most concrete product of this path. However, it is worth highlighting the subjective aspects, the collective learning and the exercise of self-recognition of the powers of the two communities, especially from the generating question “what can we do for our-selves”.