ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the relationship between political culture and citizenship, based on the recent experiences of urban popular movements in Porto Alegre as well as in other Brazilian cities. It explains a revised analysis of these movements as strategic spaces wherein different conceptions of citizenship and democracy are debated. Urban popular movements are understood as the conjunction of forms of action and the construction of collective identities involved in struggles for access to the city and to citizenship. Despite the embryonic character of urban popular movements in Porto Alegre, their unequal distribution of experience, and the gap in strategic information, the experience of the Participatory Budgeting (OP) points to the emergence of a new ethical-political principle. The construction of popular interests has begun to occur in some regions mostly in the spaces of coadministration, in the public sphere of control of the municipal budget.
