Abstract The 1990’s marks a period of transformations in urban planning in Belém. The Development company of the Metropolitan Area (CODEM), the main institution, starts to play a reactive role, consequence of the urban planning crises, but also the result of the political and institutional transformations. Despite the changes, there is no traditional planning, but there is an ambiguous scenario, which is characterized sometimes by reformist profile changes, other times the hegemony of sectoral and fragmented management perspectives. In this sense, one starts from the hypothesis that the destructuring of the institutions of urban planning does not mean, necessarily, the complete absence of planning and management processes. The exhaustion of these institutions is related to a context of flexibility of the administration, which means withdrawing the decision-making power of the old structures. In the Metropolitan Region of Belém, reference of analysis, CODEM has followed the local reality and macro-structural national policies. The methodological course of this research followed the procedures of: i) bibliographical survey of theoretical and empirical character; ii) survey and collection of documents about the role of urban policy implementation in different periods; iii) semi-structured interview with relevant agents of the Company’s activities.