NATAL CITY, STAGE OF TENSIONS, BACKSTAGE OF CONFLICTS: A political sociology of the current revision of the Natal/RN Master Plan
Master plan; Public sphere; Public arenas; Conflicts; tensions.
As well as in other Brazilian cities, Natal in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil currently passes through the revision of its Municipal Master Plan, which involves controversies in the local public sphere. Since the Master Plan is an instrument for urban territorial planning and ordering, assist in the formulation of public policies, the document in Natal is at the height of its review, a moment when different actors articulate themselves on many stages and backstage, giving voices to what they think is “good” and “fair” for the city. In this collective clash that surrounds economic and social justice issues, on prisms of divergent ideologies and interests, State and society are related and also have tension, taking the problem to the field of political sociology, more precisely to the agenda of the sociology of public problems. From the mobilizations of groups that seek to give voice to their concerns, the situation changes in a political process, which is not restricted to public discussion, but beyond, to an ecology institutional, legal and political to consider itself a public arena. The present empirical research is a qualitative methodology and based on ethnographic participant observation, also using face-to-face interview and documentary research. As a theoretical support, the foundation main research is the sociology of conflicts, focusing on the theories of anthropologist Daniel Cefaï and Francis Chateauraynaud, in particular in the sociology of problems also in the Sociology of Critical Capacity by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, in addition to the relationship between State and Society in studies on Habermas' public spheres, and in complementarity, bringing the concept of Subaltern counter public by Nancy Fraser. In this aspect, the public problem takes on the magnitude of a public arena, which is not delimits to social problems, since pragmatism expands it to an ecology of experience public.