Cultivating the City: Infrastructures of abundance in urban Brazil (original) (raw)
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Amsterdam Academy of Architecture Thesis of Landscape Architecture, 2012
Landscape architecture has much to bring to the study and creation of urban agriculture. It seeks to spatially materialize design concepts. Landscape architects are designers whose preoccupation is with transformation and problem solving. The profession brings together aspects of urbanism, planning, and an understanding of agricultural and ecological processes. By gathering the needs of stakeholders, the knowledge of experts, and the critical parameters of a project into a coherent spatial vision, the landscape architect can also help manage complex urban processes such as the creation of interconnected urban agriculture in the city. ‘Fruto do Rio: connected urban agriculture along the Avenida Ipiranga, Porto Alegre’ is a study and design proposal that embraces this challenge. The design thesis asks if urban agriculture typologies can be adapted to the neighbourhoods along the Avenida Ipiranga and then connected, along a renewed Arroio Dilúvio channel, into a new “slow” green connection through the city. The project employs a network of urban agriculture typologies based on traditional and alternative agricultural practices to create a living green fabric through the existing urban structure. These connected foodscapes will create a network for the production, transformation, and sale of foods, also influencing the social landscape of the city. The goal of the project is to materialize a vision of a sustainable green city. Sustainability is a main motivation; however, there is not one precise definition of sustainability for landscape architecture. One side of sustainability focuses on quantitative analysis and measurement systems, while the other side favours a holistic approach. In order for landscape architecture propositions to engage with the challenges of the coming decades, sustainability should be more clearly defined. This line of questioning presents a critical view and in conclusion suggests new terms of engagement relevant to the proposal.
Challenges of the urban peripheral landscapes
urbe. Revista Brasileira de Gestão Urbana, 2015
The peripheral regions of Sao Paulo reveal a profound contradiction in their landscapes-on the one hand, remnants of their original biophysical basis and, on the other, increasing pressure for the territory's occupation. The northwest sector of the periphery, for example, presents environmentally sensitive areas which are at the same time under great pressure for occupation by those who do so by choice (the property market) and those who have none (irregular and high-risk occupation). The poor inhabitants of these regions have increasingly organized themselves to achieve basic rights through community associations, social movements, and cultural groups ever since the recent re-democratization process in Brazil. It is precisely in these urban spaces, which are precarious in many ways, that significant subjectivities have emerged in participatory processes, expressing an awareness of environmental issues with an implicit desire for more humanized landscapes. These processes often include children and their teachers as protagonists. For thirteen years, the Landscape, Art and Culture Laboratory (LABPARC) of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU) at USP has been working with educators and children from municipal public schools, developing projects, research, and university extension work in the region. This article aims to discuss this experience with the objective of showing the gains achieved and the challenges that may arise within the perspective of a collective construction of the city, where urban interventions can be harmonized with water sources, streams, steep slopes, forests, and fauna.
The Instrumentalization of Landscape in Contemporary Cities
Today, cities are redefining their relationships with the natural world, spurring a new dynamic between the built environment, man-made landscapes, and nature. Nature is no longer seen as the antithesis of the city and civilized life, or as something simply to support urban dwellers’ social life, but also as a means of fighting challenges such as climate change, urban health and well-being within the city. This approach to landscape and nature in cities has evolved as a response to the human–nature crisis and the need to limit urban development in open areas of ecological importance. In terms of planning, this approach called for the preparation of pre-development surveys, including a comprehensive land survey that relates to climate, geology, hydrology, flora and fauna as means to better planing the built environment. In addition, and in parallel, to the discussion on the conservation of land resources outside urban space, there was also recognition of the need to address the natural systems in cities (Scheer, 2011). This recognition led to investigation of flora and fauna in the city and examination of the city’s ecosystems, which in turn led to new design strategies viewing landscape as a key component in creating new hybrid ecosystems (Mossop, 2006). At the beginning of the twenty-first century this ecological emphasis in cities is associated with two prominent concepts: landscape urbanism (Waldheim, 2006) which emerged from architecture and planning, combining design with ecological approaches, and urban ecology (Mostafavi and Doherty, 2016; Steiner, 2011) whose roots are in ecological positivist studies. Viewing landscape and nature as a means/tool that can ‘solve’ some of the major challenges of contemporary urbanization also contributed to their presence in our daily life. Recycling, greening and rehabilitating nature in the city have not been merely theoretical-utopian ideas but rather translated into practice through policy documents, designated campaigns, and legal initiatives. This condition contributed to the centrality of landscape in our daily city life and also, as suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell (2002), contributed to the use of landscape as a verb. As he further argues, landscape is not just an object to be seen, or text to be read, but a process by which social and subjective identities are formed; as such, landscape is not merely signifying power relations; it is an instrument of cultural power, perhaps even an agent of power that is independent of human intentions (Ibid., p. 1).
Architect and Urbanist, masters in architecture and urbanism from the School of Architecture of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, university professor and inspector of the city's means of occupation and production, and the relationship between body and space. She has developed, throughout her professional career, a variety of projects in the fields of architecture and urbanism, and landscape studies of Brazil and abroad. She is a professor of Projects at the Izabela Hendrix Methodist University Center. Personal interests include research in the microplanning field, landscape planning and participative project processes and space production. Abstract Introduction: This study aims to reflect on the participatory methodology applied in landscape design based on the experience of the Fluvial Park on the San Francisco River in the city of Januaria, Brazil. The main objective is to look for new forms of designing and participation based on local knowledge and cultural practices. Methods: Considering that through dynamic interaction people have altered their environment by cultural practices, which have in turn themselves been fundamentally shaped by the particularities of that environment, I raise the following hypotheses: the participation of the population involved is central to a successful practice and to projects most relevant to the empowerment of participants with regard to the public good and citizenship. Results: I analyzed the design process and the results of workshops, community biomaps created in the project and in the process, and these results reflected by the local population. Conclusions: From a detailed analysis of the project and meetings it can be concluded that the participation of the population has created a design more relevant for a place that needs to be legitimized; a place where people can synergize all their positive energy into working towards their future, rather than battling against a system by which they are deemed illegal. By a system that doesn't collaborate with the residents to understand who they really are. In fact, a system that wants to use the 'tabula rasa' approach and force them to start from zero all over again.
The LINK Landscape Architecture and Ecology Doctoral Degree Program, a partnership between three universities (Lisbon’s Técnica and the universities of Oporto and Coimbra), was launched in 2009 with Lisbon hosting its first year before Coimbra took over in 2010 under the direction of Helena Freitas with Oporto running the 2011-2012 academic year supervised by Teresa Andresen. Sixteen doctorate holding professors form the program’s educational core combining to ensure the highest standards in landscape architecture and urban ecology research. The international scope of the LINK teaching program and its staff reflects our intention to endow the program with a global reach, with English as the common language, while nurturing its roots in Southern Europe. As from 2008, the contribution made by by Professor Carl Steinitz, a researcher and Professor at Harvard University throughout four decades, towards launching and running the program has underpinned the doctoral program’s approach to theoretical and practical teaching in the fields of landscape planning and design.
Landscape as medium and method for synthesis in urban ecological design
a b s t r a c t "Landscape" refers both to a conceptual field that examines how humans affect geographic space and to real places, and the word has both analytical and experiential implications. Pairing the analytical and the experiential enables landscape to be a catalyst for synthesis in science and for insight in urban ecological design. Emphasizing that science is fundamental to ecological design, this essay broadly interprets urban ecological design to include intentional change of landscapes in cities, their megaregions, and resource hinterlands. The essay offers two laws and two related principles for employing landscape as a medium and a method for urban ecological design. The laws observe that landscapes integrate environmental processes and that landscapes are visible. Two related principles explain how these inherent characteristics can be used to effect sustain ability by using landscape as a medium for synthesis and in a method that invites creative invention.
This paper presents two current problems the city of Rio de Janeiro faces. On the one hand, is the environmental issue caused by the fragmentation of the native restinga, a coastal plain native ecosystem, occurring because of urban development processes. On the other hand, the food shortage suffered by communities with low economic resources. A proposal for edible landscaping applied to Rio's west side public space that tackles these issues is presented. This work used different methods, including theoretical framework analyses, which explore landscape and ecosystems issues, historical urban processes, and the edible landscape concept. In addition, geo-technological tools and local visits to apply biophysical, urban, and architectural analyses to the study area were applied and made. This research project and process allowed the researchers to choose public space areas in which the edible landscape proposal would be applied.