2023 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

Mogi das Cruzes, São Paulo, Brazil

With the mission of building a better city with and for the people, the mayor-elect in 2021 Caio Cunha and the co-mayor Priscila Yamagami created the Strategic Planning and Management Secretariat, which initiates city planning based on social participation, in data and indicators and in strategic planning. The secretariat's social participation team, in line with the mayor's ideals, creates the social participation platform, Participa Mogi.

The platform makes room for the population to send comments and vote on projects they would like the Municipality to prioritize during the mandate, but, concurrently with its emergence, public hearings and meetings are promoted. The meetings took place in two types: the first was divided by topics of interest and the second divided by regions. The thematic meetings were centralized and broadcast live, while the regional meetings were distributed in the 11 districts that belong to the municipality of Mogi das Cruzes. This process was repeated in 2022, expanding the regions from 12 to 20, reaching from the most central neighborhoods to the most peripheral neighborhoods. The action, innovative in the context of the city, yielded important results.

When the City Council starts to attend the neighborhood with some frequency (43 meetings were held in total), it starts to understand the important actors in the region and, mainly, the agendas they defend. These guidelines were major demands that had been ignored for years. With the knowledge of this reality, the City Hall starts to act in an integrated way to supply demands in a decentralized way and to act together with the population to build really effective public policies, which now carried not only the technical look, but also the regional look of its importance.

The regional meetings provided the necessary opening for the Municipality to begin to inhabit the regions and establish a dialogue with the population that lives there, which led to the expansion of the public policy of social participation in the municipality, which today provides spaces for: citizen training, construction neighborhood plans, listening processes with children and even long-term planning for the city. All these policies were possible thanks to the presence in the regions and the feedback received from the population about their true demands, including the main one: to be heard.

Through the work carried out, participatory planning mobilized: 3606 registrations on the website, 1553 contributions online, 43 regional meetings distributed in 20 neighborhoods, 26 thematic meetings, 1623 participants in the meetings, more than 6000 views on YouTube in the videos of the PPA, LDO hearings and LOA and in thematic meetings and 4 public hearings. The participating public ranges from youth to old age.

https://participamogi.mogidascruzes.sp.gov.br/#/ (External link)