Box 5.7: Case study – Building a rights-based approach into local planning in Rosario, Argentina


Since 1989, successive mayors in Rosario have built upon the core principles of progressive municipalism. Over the years, the democratization of municipal governance has involved the decentralization of resources and decision-making capacities to the district level. With over one million inhabitants living in the city’s six districts, each district undertakes a robust and grounded participatory process to develop urban projects and allocate municipal resources, and also to develop the strategic plan for the whole of Rosario and its update every 10 years (Steinberg 2005). Outcomes of this approach include a comprehensive climate change plan that seeks to integrate urban agriculture, food security and greening, temperature mitigation and stormwater management strategies, while promoting cost-effective solutions to building insulation and drainage infrastructure improvements.


An essential component of Rosario’s long-term approach to equitable and sustainable urban development has been the Rosario Habitat programme. Created in 2001, the programme focuses on improving living conditions and tenure security, while promoting physical and social integration in the estimated 91 informal settlements that house approximately 155,000 people in the city. Despite facing difficulties in relation to land-use rights, the programme set an important precedent through showing that the upgrade of settlements (rather than the relocation of communities) is a viable strategy for cities. By 2008, the Rosario Habitat programme had been implemented in 11 informal settlements, rehousing over 1,000 families in safe relocation sites and allowing twice as many families to stay in their original settlements through a wide range of upgrading measures. The programme ended in 2012, having invested almost $72 million during its first phase. Since then, the rehabilitation of informal settlements has continued under the national Neighbourhood Improvement Programme (PROMEBA), which works across other municipalities (Almansi 2009).


A second key component in Rosario’s strategy has been its Urban Agriculture Programme (PAU). Launched in 2002, to supplement the city’s food donations to people living in poverty, PAU gradually became aligned with the national programme Pro Huerta, with its scope expanding to integrate urban agriculture into land-use planning. This included the systematic identification of vacant land and the official recognition of farming carried out on peacefully usurped vacant plots, a practice that emerged in Rosario during periods of economic crisis, but which is also frequent in other cities in the Global South, even during normal times. Granting use rights for urban agriculture gave urban farmers the certainty to invest, while PAU became responsible for monitoring and controlling the use of vacant land for farming throughout the city. Farmers were also encouraged to work on plots of land alongside roads, railroads and streams, where they were permitted to farm indefinitely as part of greening within the city. Enhanced access to land and tenure security also led to the creation of communal gardens with access to water made available through new wells and water pumps installed by the municipality (Rosenstein 2008). The programme has a strong gender focus and benefits disadvantaged women through the creation of new livelihoods along the full food chain (Guénette 2010). By 2020, PAU had secured 75 hectares within Rosario for agroecological production and urban gardens and preserved over 700 hectares for food production in peri-urban areas. Over 2,500 tons of fruit and vegetables produced annually benefit more than 2,400 families.


The third component of Rosario’s strategy is its participatory budgeting. First introduced in 2003, participatory budgeting has become a key redistributive mechanism, a rights-based governance instrument, a communication tool and a vehicle for citizenship capacity-building (Lerner and Schugurensky 2007). Between 2003 and 2011, the annual participatory budget amounted to roughly $9 million, representing around 22 per cent of the municipal budget for investment (Cabannes and Lipietz 2015). Rosario’s participatory budgeting promotes gender equality through women’s parity in political participation, along with the prevention of domestic violence against women and children, and has earmarked part of the budget available to initiatives to support youth. In 2013, Rosario introduced a voting system in Braille and translated the participatory budgeting manual into an indigenous language, becoming the first city in Argentina to adopt a multicultural approach to planning spearheaded by participatory budgeting (Corbetta and Rosas 2017).


Through adopting a rights-based approach, Rosario has explored a full reinvention through various planning mechanisms, such as a clear set of rules and processes to guide public and private urban development through land reserved for public and community spaces, the preservation of historical and natural heritage, density controls and a land-value capture policy. Of course, this and similar redistribution mechanisms are not without challenges, so the fact that they have remained operational throughout the city for many years is remarkable.


opportunities for equity considerations to be more closely aligned with substantial environmental improvements.


As seen in the pathways and cases examined, producing environmentally sustainable and equitable outcomes not only requires initiating change in the city, but simultaneous processes of interlinked changes, as well as


the establishment of accountable governance systems to ensure that social and environmental benefits flow across diverse social groups, over space and time (Andersson et al. 2019). This means tackling the lock-ins discussed in chapter 2, which will otherwise prevent transformative change from taking root due to the political economy, urban planning and governance barriers that currently exist at the city level.


Achieving Urban Transformation: From Visions to Pathways 117


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