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Nature-based solutions can make urban infrastructures greener and more resilient

Urban infrastructure and nature – Posts Categorized, urbanization was the enemy of the environment. But the reverse is not true: nature is an important indicator of the quality of urban life. Cities must make peace with nature, for the good of people and for their own sustainability and resilience. Urban landscape artist Cecília Polacow Herzog has dedicated the last two decades to researching paths for this reconciliation.

Cecília is one of the references in the study of solutions based on nature in Brazil. currently, in addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate classes at PUC-Rio, the landscape artist works as a consultant on projects that seek to rescue biodiversity in cities and integrate nature-based solutions to urban planning and projects. It's a field that won momentum in recent years, with nature-based solutions – like rain gardens, linear parks and filtering gardens – being implemented in some Brazilian cities.

The recognition of nature as a fundamental part of cities is not new. One of Cecilia's inspirations, landscaper Frederick Law Olmsted designed New York's Central Park and Boston's Emerald Necklace, both of us United States, to counteract the loss of quality of life and water pollution in the industrial metropolises of the century 19. “Also at that time, there was the replanting of the Tijuca massif forest, because there was no water in Rio de Janeiro, and targeting this essential ecosystem service, the planting of 100 thousand seedlings”, tell the landscaper, who lives in Rio but is removed from her farm during the period of social isolation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Recovering and connecting natural systems is critical to protecting water, the green and life both outside and inside cities. The environmental infrastructure ofappears as part of the recovery path of global economies that suffered a new shock with the Covid-19 pandemic. “Europe is ahead with its Green Deal, which became one of the focuses for the continent to get out of the crisis. Thereby, nature-based solutions are gaining much more potency”, affirms.

Biodiversity was the year to celebrate Environment and, in this challenging time, we have the chance to include in the economic recovery the unavoidable reconciliation with the environment of which we are also part. In the following interview, Cecília shares some of her knowledge and points out ways for cities to return to seeing nature as an ally, and not as a challenge (Interview granted to WRI Brazil).

What consequences the disconnect from nature and the prioritization of gray infrastructure, based on channeling and straightening of rivers, asphalt paving, big viaducts, brought to today's cities?

Cecilia Herzog – not just the cities, our entire system is based on works heavy engineering. US United States, engineers channeled the river Mississippi, and they've been blowing up the dams they made for a long time., because they killed the rivers and this has many consequences. All spring, when the thaw occurs in the north, is a disaster in the areas around the Mississippi, because the river covers a very large landscape and was rectified so that the banks could be occupied with cities and agriculture. A part of the city of Memphis was flooded because it was always lost, every year the losses are huge.

The century 20 is marked by this type of development. the american economy, whose model has expanded to the entire world, is a highway driver and a hygienist. this comes from the century 19, with sanitary doctors, passes to the city and to engineering. It started with the aim of controlling diseases, but it ended up causing a major planetary disease, because it eliminated ecosystems and transformed the natural flows in which people had contact with nature.

Human health depends on the environmental quality of cities: you need clean air, clean water. Mortality due to pollution is very high, aside from other impacts that are more difficult to account for. It is not just a matter of making the city more resilient to the challenges brought by climate change, with increasingly heavy and intense rains, frequent heat waves, water shortage, food problem. Several studies show that when you reintroduce nature to the city, reduces stress, crime, you improve the quality of life in general.

Which is to say that nature-based solutions are cross-functional and safe to fail?

vegetação
Effluent treatment through filtering gardens in a cosmetics factory in Rio de Janeiro (Photo: Cecilia P. Herzog)

The urbanization of the century 20 is monofunctional, or she takes a car, or she conducts water. do you want to be free of water, but just a little rain is enough for you to have problems.. Nature-based solutions are cross-functional, offer diverse ecosystem services. For example, water accommodation: we are going to open spaces such as rain gardens to accommodate water whose main ecosystem service is water management. At the same time, recharges aquifer and improves water quality, do ar, captures carbon, solves diffuse pollution. There are multiple co-benefits that come from these solutions.

This vision of the “services provision” is very anthropocentric, but it's a way that was found to have a valuation, so that nature is not destroyed. We completely depend on nature to live, and we depend on the trees first. No tree has no water, desertification occurs. The tree offers us food, energy, shadow, sequesters CO2 and releases the oxygen we breathe, filters or gold, it's sound barrier. It has several benefits that, if well used, reintroducing trees in the city, actually transform the urban environment.

Now, over the “safe to fail”. When thinking about multifunctional solutions, with several solutions applied in the same area, systems are sought that are redundant, in which, if a part of the system fails, enter another component that keeps the system running. This requires integrated and systemic planning and projects. Thinking about rain garden reservoirs, as it fills with water, one reservoir passes to the other, conducts the water to an accommodation area, a retention lake. A green roof will hold more water, at the time of overflowing, the water will be led to the sidewalk, that has a rain bed. So you will have several components that will cause redundancy.

In Brazilian cities like São Paulo, built in a disconnected way, gray and waterproof and that today face recurrent problems with flooding, what can you do now that the environment is already built?

photo of Cheonggyecheon stream in Seoul
Seoul before and after Cheonggyecheon stream renaturalization (Photo: NACTO/Global Street Design Guide)

It's a matter of prioritization. I love the case of Seoul. South Korea has been renaturalizing the four river basins for a long time, is a country with 51 millions of inhabitants and small space of land. Only has been transforming since the decade of 1980. I was in Seoul at the beginning of the 1990 and hated, I went to work and had to change hotel because the traffic was unbearable – São Paulo was fun near Seoul.

When I started researching nature-based solutions, I came across Seoul as an emblematic case, because they took a viaduct and uncovered a stream that was under the viaduct, an amazing project of 5,84 kilometers long, which involved interdisciplinary work. They made a mega-construction that changed the city at a ridiculous cost compared to our works, which are the most expensive in the world and leave no legacy. Rio de Janeiro is an example: the city is in a very complicated situation, nor World Cup, not even the Olympics left any legacy.

Seoul took advantage of the Olympics, made a huge Olympic Park in a degraded area, that was the result of his period of growth at any cost. In the World Cup, made five parks, planted over abandoned dumps on the riverbank. Today there are five parks, a tremendous lake on the riverbank that filters the water with vegetation. What took me back to Seoul was the removal of this viaduct. It was concluded that viaducts have a useful life of 50 years old. All heavy engineering work ages and requires a lot of maintenance. Seoul then started to remove the viaducts, disable, turn into park. And the first park was this, that leaves the city center and extends to a more natural area, where there is a gigantic built swamp and the wetlands that were recovered.

man drinking stream water in seoul
Man drinks water and children play in Cheonggyecheon stream: major green infrastructure project transformed the Seoul region (Photo: Cecilia P. Herzog)

the original stream, which is a landmark of the city, dried up due to urbanization, that's why a water collection system for the main river was developed., They have. The park starts in the heart of the city, a more urbanized part. Get out of this more urbanized part, mineralized, dura, and it becomes more natural as it leaves the center. I photographed a man drinking water in this stream, the children playing in the water (see on the side). the stream stays 5 meters below street level, accommodates water from heavy rains, there is no more flooding in the city, and there they have typhoons, torrential rain. So it has incredible value. Seoul went from a hellish city to a heavenly city.

You commented that nature-based solutions are cheaper than conventional infrastructure. What are the main barriers to systemic adoption of nature-based solutions in cities?

There is a gigantic cultural barrier. I started as an activist but I went to teach because I saw that it was no use talking if people didn't understand what I was talking about. I trained several people in this area., I coordinate a graduate course. Of course there are other people doing, there is Labverde, on USP, who has been doing this for a long time. Today there are ecological engineers, engineers trained with another vision, of work with nature and not for control the nature. It's the first base for us to solve problems, because we are not going to solve the problems with the same techniques that caused them. We have to have other knowledge, and today there is.

Years ago, I was in Campinas and went to see what the city was doing well. We went to visit linear parks in a deprived area of ​​the city, a torrential rain came. when it passed, we go out to visit, the city full of water. They showed me the work and I spoke, “you are on the bank of the natural stream putting gabion, why?”. When we go down a little more on the work, they were burying the stream! this same year, I collaborated in the organization of a seminar on nature-based solutions at the National Front of Mayors Congress in Niterói. It had Environment Secretaries from several cities in Brazil. At the time of discussion, I asked the secretary of Campinas about what I had seen. He said that the channeling had been a decision of the Department of Works. So you have a Secretariat for the Environment doing a barbaric job and renaturalizing, bring nature to the city, improve parks in underserved areas, reconnect streams and rivers and on account of water security, and has a Department of Works plumbing the river. it's crazy.

One of the possible solutions is what Barcelona has today: an urban ecology agency that coordinates city secretariats. Because urban ecology is what determines the quality of life. It's a change of vision of the city: it is necessary to understand the city as a system composed of several subsystems that have to be working together. There has to be a coordination that understands the city as a great system, and that if you mess with one thing here, it interferes with another there, or better. How to make this reconciliation? it's complex? IT'S. Need to have skilled people, who can navigate through different systems to understand how they interact.

The pandemic has highlighted the challenge of inequality in cities. How to reconcile qualification with nature-based solutions and access for the most vulnerable people?

It's a fundamental aspect. In Campinas, mapped the most vulnerable areas and crossed with what had green areas. Obviously, saw that areas with less income have fewer trees. So they privileged the parks in these areas. Take people out of risky areas on the banks of streams, make the parks and relocate people nearby.

There are legal instruments, such as setting aside a percentage for social housing. In Paris, each neighborhood must have 20% of social housing. The city takes areas with potential, buildings that can be converted into social housing with incentives from the city, so that all neighborhoods have people of different incomes.

Of course there are areas with a high concentration of immigrants, even because many people will live where the people they relate to live. Years ago, when Barra da Tijuca began to expand, growing, many people from less favored areas who went to live in Barra couldn't stand it. Because it wasn't their environment, I didn't have her friends. The northern area of ​​São Paulo is now full of towers just like those in Jardins, for people who didn't want to live in Jardins because they didn't identify with that environment. It's no use wanting to insert the person in the environment that is not theirs. It doesn't have a single answer, you have to give people an option, and not define by them.

One of the bases for working with nature-based solutions is co-creation, the co-participation, the co-production. If it doesn't, you can't make projects really sustainable. When you enter people, you find solutions from the inside out. Necessarily, the decision made within the cabinet, inside the urban planner's office, it's a failed decision, because she won't solve the local issues. You have to call people to the table, you have to educate people to be able to choose. If the stream that passes by her door is full of sewage, faith, brings disease, she will want to cover the stream. So you have to give the option of having clean water at the door of the house, taking the sewage out of there.

What Brazilian cities can do now to connect with nature?

square with lots of vegetation
square da nascent (SP), recovered by the Occupy and Embrace collective (Photo: Cecilia P. Herzog)

There's a lot going on from the bottom up. São Paulo is a case that I love, I often take students on study trips. There is a growing movement of leaders who have started to transform public spaces, visiting hidden rivers, and this has called the attention of a lot of people. Pocket forest planting, mow lawn and plant forest. This was gaining acceptance and increasing people's connection with nature. Because there is another important barrier, the real estate market-based system, big contractors, bus cartels that dominate cities. It is very difficult to get out of the model that we are, have lobbies mighty, with great influence in the elections. It's much harder to have people at the top who decide [work for nature-based solutions], because of this system that has profit above all.

original content wribrasil.org.br. For more information, questions or suggestions, contact us.

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