Urban planning: what for and for whom?

The article intends to analyze urban planning from its historical trajectory; presenting, to each contextual change, the actors who had carried out its elaboration and concretion. Thus, it explains the conjunctures that made the sanitary doctor, the architect, the lawyer, the privare entrepreneur, the residents of the city, and more recencly the City, influenciai actors in the urban planning and management. It analyzes, social, the changes of the State's role in the public politics implementation, emphasizing, in the Brazilian experience, the consequences and perspectives of the constitutional recognition of the local power and the sprouting of innovative territorial arrangements that are not limited to the federative organization and that allow the formulation of planning directed to other territorial scales. Finally; it invites the reflection the new challenges of the urban planning dueto the State's budgetary insufficiency and to increase of the performance of the Market in the execution of urban policies, opposed to affirmation of the participative democracy.