The city of about 1.4 million is divided into 17 regions that group its bairros, from Ilhas (the archipelago, about 5,000 people) to Centro with 18 bairros and nearly 300,000. The first meetings in 1990 used the five planning regions of the 1979 master plan; government and community actors negotiated them into 16 regions in 1991, drawn, as Magalhães puts it, one central and fifteen designed to value the demands of the poorest areas, and Ilhas, a microregion of Humaitá-Navegantes in the 1990s, became the seventeenth region by the 2010/2011 rulebook. Since 2017 each region also has a sub-prefecture, so the OP map became the City's administrative map. Inside the regions, communities organised microregions where associations rank their own demands; the rulebook recommends the same point system there, but Santos found in 1998 that only four of sixteen regions used it and the rest negotiated. The six thematic plenaries, created in 1994, are citywide and anyone may register and vote in them; since 2016 residents may also attend any regional assembly, voting in one. The rulebook weights the distribution among regions by need (weight 4), population (weight 2) and the region's own priority (weight 5), with the result that in 1997 Extremo Sul got 9.9 percent of the paving money and Centro 4.2 percent; but in 2022 and 2025 the City and council split the pot equally per region, and the themes share their 20 percent equally. The equity weighting is therefore in the rules, not in recent practice.