2014 Urban Affairs Association Conference

Since the Constitution of 1988, metropolitan management in Brazil has been under construction. Its greatest difficulty has been to overcome the dichotomy between functional metropolis and institutional metropolis. As the metropolitan areas are not managed as territorial units, what prevails is the segregated metropolis logic, either from a social, cultural or political view. Within this thematic field, as Brazilian metropolitan management is frail and there is significant development of territorial association practices engaging in managing sectorial policies, our aim in this doctoral research is to give an answer to the following question: Have the experiences of territorial associations in the metropolitan region of Curitiba contributed to the construction of metropolitan management practices? How? Why? We examined Conselho Gestor dos Mananciais (CGM) and Gestão dos Resíduos Sólidos Urbanos (CONRESOL). For this, we raised some major specific questions to this study, such as: 1) How much cooperation is there in both experiences?; 2) Why is there inter-municipal cooperation? (their aims); 3) How the process of generating and mobilizing knowledge for problem identification was established in order to offer alternatives and a solution decision-making?, and 4) Is there metropolitan management? If so, why or why not? This research work consists of some narratives obtained through open interviews, records (produced by several institutes and research centers - IBGE, IPARDES and Observatório das Metrópoles) and from documents and literature review on the topic. In building the plots on the stories of Região Metropolitana de Curitiba (RMC), CGM and CONRESOL, we found that, although there is no metropolitan management in RMC, these experiences have contributed to its construction by establishing inter-sectorial policies, constituting inter-municipal links and spreading some metropolitan territorial unit awareness.