The dilapidation of public lands and the resignification of the public interest in entrepreneurial government: the case of the State of São Paulo

Abstract

The article proposes the analysis of recent privatization practices of the government of the
State of São Paulo. Nowadays, increasingly sophisticated ways of making public land available as assets take ownership of the concept of public interest as a strategy to establish a social consensus for such practices, either in their submission to the logic of the profitability of capital or in the use of collective goods as levers in the transformation of urban space. Taking as a cut of the study the State of São Paulo from 2016 to 2019 and two ways of making public assets available, the direct alienation of public lands and the creation of real estate investment funds, were analyzed the draft bills and their explanations of reasons, legislations, legal opinions and other documents, seeking to identify the discussions about the public interest. Considering the context of the neoliberal movement and its repercussion in the Brazilian State, the documents found were interpreted, comprehending the discourses of privatizing practices based on studies that deal with entrepreneurial governments. It can be affirmed that there is a dispute for the resignification of the concept of public interest in the case studied. In the use of this concept that refers to the collective good as justification for making public land available in the private market, there is a dilution of public law in favor of private law.