Osório: The citizen participation of Osório's children in the revision of the city's Master Plan

The citizen participation of Osório's children in the revision of the city's Master Plan ensured that the new land use and occupation law was able to highlight the humanising aspects of its guidelines and encourage socialising in public spaces.

Osório is a city of approximately 48,000 inhabitants located in the south of Brazil. The process of listening to the children involved pupils from all the schools in the municipal public network expressing their opinions on the city through drawings, texts and speeches - material worked on by the Technical Body of the Master Plan and which served as the basis for the diagnosis of the Plan's revision. There was an understanding that, in a post-pandemic scenario, children would bring different perspectives to those debated among adults, which would be valuable for the city in that the conversations would emphasise new aspects, the changing hierarchies of public space, and at the same time enable this debate to become a permanent channel for active citizen participation in all age groups of the population.

With the workshops held in the first half of 2022, the technical prognosis work carried out in the following months and the debates in the Master Plan Council and public hearings, the new Osório Master Plan Law was approved in September 2023.

In addition to updating the guidelines for active mobility, sustainability and green and blue infrastructure that the new text brought, as a guarantee of permanence and consolidation of the expansion of the democratic process, the new Plan creates the Osório Children's Committee as an ‘advisory body linked to the Master Plan Council and of government collaboration’ (article 176-A; Law No. 3.902/2006, revised by Law No. 6838/2023). In other words, it has been mandatory since last year for the city's management to also involve children through the institutionalisation of the Committee - which also guarantees that the right of children to participate in decisions related to them is being observed, as provided for in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

The Municipal Administration believes that, with the progress of these processes, the participating children already have and will continue to have the opportunity to develop citizenship throughout their development as people, which will have a direct impact on the management of the city insofar as this practice starts to promote a culture of citizen protagonism.