Urban environmental quality and wellbeing in the context of incomplete urbanisation in Brazil: Integrating directly experienced ecosystem services into planning
Introduction
It is now broadly acknowledged that urban greenspace can significantly contribute to the wellbeing of city dwellers (Ravez, 2015, WHO, 2016) and some have suggested that access to good quality public greenspace is particularly beneficial for disadvantaged communities (e.g. Mitchell, Richardson, Shortt, & Pearce, 2015). But visiting urban parks and water bodies is not just conditional on physical access but mediated by a complex range of factors meaning that ‘available’ benefits may not be experienced by all (Wolch, Byrne, & Newell, 2014). In this paper, we examine how the benefits of urban greenspace are conditioned by a range of social and physical factors in a disadvantaged urban periphery in Brazil. In areas where urban inequalities are chronic and structural – such as the context of incomplete urbanisation in Brazilian cities – lack of urban infrastructure and services often converges with poor environmental quality (Costa & Costa, 2005). Incomplete urbanisation, referring to the lack of urban infrastructure and services not only in areas of informal ‘favela’ settlements but also in areas of lower and middle income housing has complex drivers (Costa and Costa, 2005, Fernandes, 2007). It is seen as a means of providing affordable housing to the very poor but also as a deliberate omission of infrastructure investment on the part of local authorities who do not want to invest in areas of low returns. The spread of informal housing and processes of incomplete urbanisation have created often quite evident spatial hierarchies between and within settlements, and our proposition in this paper is that the way urban greenspace is not just distributed but also engaged with and experienced differs along this hierarchy as do its positive contributions to wellbeing and liveability. We employ the ecosystem services (ES) framework to examine how urban greenspace is engaged with to yield benefits and dis-benefits (e.g. Lyytimäki, Kjerulf Petersen, Normander, & Bezák, 2008) in the context of incomplete urbanisation and the gradual formalisation of land and dwellings that has been either informally appropriated or donated to displaced communities in three peri-urban areas in the municipality of Contagem, Brazil. Our analysis provides an insight into the politics of urban ES and we provide recommendations for ES based urban planning efforts that align with a broad interpretation of the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1996, Lefebvre, 2001).
While material inequalities such as those associated with income and access to infrastructure and technology impact people's ability to benefit from ES (Andersson et al., 2015), literature increasingly also acknowledges the role of ‘culture’ in our engagements with nature and the interpretation of these as services, goods and benefits (Díaz et al., 2018; Fish, Church, & Winter, 2016). The role of cultural interpretations and practices in modulating interactions with nature sits less easily within the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA, 2005) categorisation of ES, and like the IPBES community (Díaz et al., 2018), we suggest that the conventional categorisation of ES into four groups affords only limited access to the multiple relations of agency that humans foster with nature (Latour, 2004, Murdoch, 1998). For example, urban greenspace is engaged in highly politicised processes of ‘green gentrification’ and other more subtle ways of differentiation (Wolch et al., 2014). Moreover, ES research is beginning to identify contextual and subjective factors, such as social cohesion and self-identity, that affect how urban nature is engaged with and interpreted (Fischer and Eastwood, 2016, Fish et al., 2016, Juntti and Lundy, 2017). Juntti and Lundy (2017) suggest that we need to recognise how particular urban ES and the biophysical features that these are derived from therefore serve a broad range of highly context dependent material and signifying functions as a part of urban everyday life (e.g. De Landa, 2016). In order to embrace the complex and hybrid socio-material interactions that constitute everyday life in an urban context, we employ a framing of ES that distinguishes between ES that are directly experienced by people, and ES that are made present through scientific detection and therefore termed ‘indirect’. Viewing ES that are directly experienced as based on a hybrid relational ontology of co-production and co-construction (Barnaud and Antona, 2014, Fischer and Eastwood, 2016, Latour, 2004, Murdoch, 1998) provides analytical access to the variations that are likely to occur in how directly experienced services and benefits or possibly dis-benefits are accrued and mediated by both subjective and contextual factors including the formal planning context and the politics of urbanisation.
We persist with the ES based approach to understanding urban environmental quality because we believe that there is value in the interdisciplinary scope that it affords. This paper integrates findings from a science led scalar assessment and quantification of services provided by ecosystems and their potential benefits at the metropolitan and local scales in the Belo Horizonte metropolitan area, as well as in-depth interviews and a walking methodology employing a smart phone app (the UrbanApp, Juntti, Lundy, & Athiappan, 2015) aiming to understand how people at neighbourhood level engage with urban nature as a part of their daily lives. Our empirical research focuses on three closely linked target areas in the catchment of the Vargem das Flores reservoir in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The qualitative analysis focuses on the situated processes of engagement through which people create and assign meaning to the features of their environment with a specific focus on the scientifically identified ES providing units such as green urban squares, street trees and urban fringe vegetation. This interdisciplinary analysis enables us to arrive at a contextualised understanding of indirect and directly experienced ES and associated benefits and dis-benefits and to consider these in the specific socio-economic context of our target areas. All three target areas have formal and informal housing and are situated in the catchment of the Vargem das Flores reservoir that serves as a significant source for metropolitan water provision. The paper responds to the following research questions:
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What role does urban greenspace play in the everyday life of residents of such disadvantaged peri-urban neighbourhoods?
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How do subjective, material and social factors such as gender, availability and quality of greenspace, urban service delivery, housing status and livability variables such as perceptions of crime and neighbourhood character mediate the functions of and benefits from greenspace?
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What kind of scientifically detected ES are there in the target areas, to what extent do these reflect the experienced ES among local residents and what implications does this have for urban environmental justice and the use of ES based approaches in urban planning?
The paper is structured as follows: first, we develop the constructivist approach to urban ES. We suggest, that in order to really understand ‘access to ES’ in urban environments, we need to study experienced ES in the context of spatial practices and representations that constitute the everyday life of the city. We acknowledge that the interactions through which ES are co-produced and co-constructed are contingent on the broader urban context, in our target areas characterised by the notion of incomplete urbanisation (Costa & Costa, 2005). In the methodology section we introduce our target areas, the peri-urban settlements of Nova Contagem, Tupã and Solar do Madeira in the municipality of Contagem, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. We provide a formal representation of ES in the area, based on a science led ES assessment, in order to understand the sustainability assets and challenges that the catchment area is faced with. The Vargem das Flores reservoir serves a significant water provisioning function at the Metropolitan scale, and there is an ongoing Metropolitan Plan-making process that has brought to a head a scalar conflict between municipal and metropolitan authorities concerning the environmental zoning aiming to protect water quality in the reservoir. In section four we examine the directly experienced, lived and interpreted ES in the target area making reference to the service providing units (SPUs) produced by the ES assessment. We explore how in our target areas, ES are appropriated by residents to mark an informal hierarchy of settlements and to subvert undesired activities such as anti-social behaviour and crime. Although the formal planning conflict is not acknowledged in our interviews, its impact is felt in the form of the absence of municipal intervention and speculative land purchases in the target areas. Though the interviews portray a lack of agency among residents who have little influence over the quality of municipal services, high crime rates and low mobility, it is evident that urban greenspace and the reservoir are engaged with in a range of ways that contribute to wellbeing and quality of life. We outline contextual factors that support, hinder and motivate engagements with urban greenspace and underpin the provision of experienced ES. Presently, experienced ES do not always align with the scientifically identified ES potential, particularly the ES that are central to the reservoir's water provisioning function, but there is potential for reconciling local and metropolitan scale ES based benefits through progressive planning approaches in the target areas. There is a long tradition of social movements and their vicinity to formal planning institutions in Brazil, which is also manifest in our target areas (Monte-Mór et al., 2016). In section five, we comment on the kind of analytical and empirical methods and planning approaches that can be used to integrate a more contextualised and contingent understanding directly experienced ES and their role in urban liveability and wellbeing into policy and planning. Finally, we draw conclusions on the ability of the relational ontology and the notion of experienced ES to expand the scope of ES based approaches to embrace the significance of urban greenspace in residents daily lives and the role of the broader urban context – including the politics of urbanisation – in mediating this. We recommend objectives for policy and further research.
Section snippets
The ecosystems services approach as an integrated and dynamic representation of environmental quality in urban areas
The idea of ES was first introduced to global policy in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 2000) aimed at the protection of species and habitats. The CBD advocates an ecosystems approach, from which 12 management principles are derived. These attempt to respond to the fault lines identified in the conventional efforts of biodiversity conservation, based mainly on a focus on species rarity and scientific value. The notion of ES integrates many of these principles by embracing the
The target areas and their planning context: disadvantaged peri-urban settlements
The target areas pictured on the map in Fig. 4 are situated in the municipality of Contagem, the main industrial area of the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte in the Minas Gerais state. Ferreira and Ávila (2018) suggest that the State of Minas Gerais has been particularly proactive in securing tenancy conditions, estimating the percentage of informal dwellings at just over 20% of all housing provision. The majority of the informal occupations are however concentrated in Belo Horizonte, the
Lived, experienced and interpreted environmental quality
The interviews with local residents reveal a range of engagements with local environmental features that mostly mirror those provisioning, cultural and regulating ES outlined in the vast literature on urban and peri-urban ES (e.g. La Rosa et al., 2016). The respondents describe both passive knowledge and appreciation (or dislike) of, and active physical engagements with the SPUs identified in the above ES assessment. The interview data demonstrates how SPUs are assigned functions and these
Need for context sensitive ecosystems services assessment
Our qualitative analysis of directly experienced ES and EDS highlights two things. Firstly, that context matters not just to whether urban greenspace is accessed and engaged with by urban residents but also how, and towards what ends this is done. Accessibility and extent and quality of greenspace influence experienced benefits and benefits decrease with housing density. But the socio-material context of urban neighbourhoods also conditions what greenspace is used for, such as waste disposal,
Conclusions
In disadvantaged peripheral urban areas like Nova Contagem, the aspiration to advance the right to the city through the recognition and formalisation of informal land acquisition and housing development is tempered by what can be termed incomplete urbanisation, serving to perpetuate socio-economic and environmental disadvantage (Costa & Costa, 2005). Our analysis of residents’ engagements with urban nature and the processes through which they create and assign meaning to the natural features of
Acknowledgements and potential conflict of interest declaration
This research has received funding from the Newton Fund (jointly funded by RCUK and FAPEMG). Two of the authors have been involved in the Metropolitan Plan making process that is featured in the discussion of findings and recommendations.
Dr Meri Juntti is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Development and Sustainable Environmental Management in the Department of Law and Politics in Middlesex University. Her research focusses on environmental governance, policy decision-making and implementation. She has worked on both EU and domestically funded research projects focusing on a number of EU member states and has authored publications on the discursive construction of environmental policy, the role of the socio-material context in
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Dr Meri Juntti is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Development and Sustainable Environmental Management in the Department of Law and Politics in Middlesex University. Her research focusses on environmental governance, policy decision-making and implementation. She has worked on both EU and domestically funded research projects focusing on a number of EU member states and has authored publications on the discursive construction of environmental policy, the role of the socio-material context in differentiating rural policy outcomes and the nature and role of ‘evidence’ in the policy process.
Professor Heloisa Costa is an architect, and a professor at the Department of Geography of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil since 1993. She has coordinated and participated in several research projects leading to publication of journal articles, book chapters and editing, conference papers and lectures on issues related to urban and environmental politics and planning, housing and public policies. She is a member of the Editorial Board of several journals. She was in the coordination team of the Integrated Master Plan and the Macrozoning of the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte.
Professor Nilo Nascimento is a full professor at the Department of Hydraulic and Water Resources Engineering of UFMG. He has 22 years of research experience on urban drainage, with focus on flood studies, sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) and more recently on blue green infrastructure. He has lead researches on those topics funded domestically, by EU and by bilateral cooperation frameworks (France, the UK, Argentina). He has been member of the IWA/IAHR Joint Committee on Urban Drainage (2006–2012). He is member of the editorial board of the Urban Water Journal.