Permanent Protection Areas: necessary integration of urban and environmental planning with water management in slum upgrading projects

Transcription

1 Permanent Protection Areas: necessary integration of urban and environmental planning with water management in slum upgrading projects Maria Teresa Diniz USP Cidades Rua da Praça do Relógio, 109 sala GR Butantã São Paulo, Brazil Antonico creek, Paraisópolis, São Paulo (2009). Photo credit: Maria Teresa Diniz. 1

2 ABSTRACT (max. 250 words) Recently passed legislation 1 in Brazil admits urbanistic and land-tenure regularization of social interest areas located alongside with water bodies, classified by environmental laws as Permanent Protection Areas (Áreas de Proteção Permanente APP). The concept had been introduced by a Federal Law 2 from 1965 aiming at the protection of the environmental functions of these fragile sites, having as a goal the preservation of water resources, landscape, geological balance, biodiversity, as well as the well-being of human populations, demanding a minimum of 30-meter setback from the margins of rivers and creeks. Regardless of the reasons why these communities have settled over the APP, they require upgrading interventions without being completely removed and resettled whenever technically possible and safe. The new regulation offers this possibility allowing for exceptions to the previously required setbacks in cases of consolidated social interest communities in urban areas. Technical studies must attest the proposed intervention would improve environmental conditions compared to the present state. Nevertheless, making these rules flexible doesn t necessarily mean they will be put into practice as the regulation demands prior approval from the environmental departments, which frequently stand for conservative concepts of environmental recovery. Therefore, the development of tools which could integrate the instruments of urban and environmental planning with those of water management would allow for transparent and interdisciplinary evaluation of the technical studies and design submitted to approval. The establishment of design criteria and the institutional organization of the evaluation process are next in line as legislation modernizes and governance issues become a new challenge. KEYWORDS (up to 5) slum upgrading; environmental legislation; resettlement; design criteria; practical challenges and solutions AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY: (short, not more than 5 lines) Architect, urban planner and MSc in Geography it was while concentrating her studies in water management that she discovered her passion for the interaction between environment and urban life. She has put to practice many of those theories during the eight years she worked at the municipality of São Paulo in slum upgrading and social housing projects and now she explores that expertise at the university as a professor, also exercising her discourse as the editor of Urbitandem. 1 Federal Laws n. 11,977 (2009) and n. 12,651 (2012) 2 Federal Law n. 4,771 (1965) 2

3 1 Introduction Although the interests in protecting the APP were multiple in 1965 and still remain at the present date the reality has changed a lot since then. The situation goes beyond any great intention that restricting interventions in APP might hold, as the occupation of these areas have occurred in formal and informal urban areas all over Brazil, an effect of the rapid urbanization which occurred in Brazilian cities during the last century (IBGE 1996). In the precarious settlements, the effects caused to the families and the environment call for urgent interventions. The problems associated with the suppression of vegetation and impermeable pavements coordinate with the ones related to geotechnical risk and lack of sanitation and drainage networks, as well as proper waste collection. The constructions along or on top of creeks, as well as the irregular disposal of solid waste (both domestic and debris), contribute to the obstruction of the valleys, interfering with the natural conditions of water flow and therefore causing frequent floods during heavy rain season. The extreme positions bring, on one side, those who fight for the recovery of natural conditions in the APP, demanding full removal of the families living in these areas and reestablishment of the vegetation. And there are the ones who believe that in urban areas the environmental impacts have reached such deterioration state that the recovery capacity of these areas isn t that relevant for the ensemble. There is little militancy half way, searching for the balance to be found in social, technical and financial criteria. 2 Permanent Protection Areas The Municipal Housing Plan in São Paulo adopts the following definition for the term favela: occupation, made in disregard to urbanistic legislation and building codes, of public or private areas, usually disorderly and lacking infrastructure, with self-built and precarious housing where low-income and socially vulnerable families live. In these situations, where urbanization processes are yet to come, the dwellings have been built in a spontaneous fashion, accumulatively and frequently having used no urban planning tools, lacking essential public services, such as water provision, sewage collection and drainage (Marques et al. 2007). Housing is one of the main urban challenges and it plays a fundamental role when structuring strategies for city management, besides the infrastructure necessary to promote it. Historically, in Brazil, providing housing has meant building houses, without the indispensable integration to urban planning. In São Paulo, the city government has been incapable of providing access to housing units at the same rate as new families appeared, by immigration or vegetative growth, and precarious settlements were the solution found by the dwellers themselves. As workers didn t have financial conditions to access the formal housing market and wished to live closer to work they created a solution to their problem, in their own mode. Favelas were then created, unplanned and occupying areas formally reserved as green in subdivisions or public areas with no specific use, better located than the fringes of the cities. During decades, the defavelization policy when eviction cleared many areas considered valuable to the real estate market has altered this scenario and nowadays most precarious settlements and social housing 3

4 projects are concentrated in the peripheries of the city, where there are practically no jobs and low-income workers have to face hours of commute everyday (Vieira and Haddad 2012). Many years have gone by so that the democratization process in the country evolved enough to create urban instruments that guarantee rights to these families and to include the slum upgrading program as a public policy in Brazil. Besides implementing infrastructure works and offering essential public services such as garbage collection, public transport and facilities (e.g. schools and health centers), land-tenure regularization is also part of the program. A Federal Law 3 called The City Statute establishes public order and social interest norms which regulate urban property use on behalf of collective good, of security and the well-being of citizens, as well as of the environmental balance. Representing an enormous advance in urban policy, the law introduces a series of urban instruments and legal support to land-tenure regularization, valuing if technically safe and environmentally justifiable the investments made by the dwellers throughout the decades while building their homes and communities. It is a unique ground-breaking legal instrument conceived by the widespread urban reform movement in Brazil (Carvalho and Rossbach 2010). Among the many changes necessary to face this urban issue in Brazil, revising the legal framework has been key. The so-called new Forest Code (Federal Law n. 12,651) is part of a great modernization process the legislation related to slum upgrading has been going through and not without passionate debates regarding its concepts and implementation. Those in favor of flexible criteria for analysis and intervention in APP argue for an important factor: the demand as a whole. Research made by the Housing Department Sehab in 2010 calculated the minimum necessary resettlement from the margins of water courses in the city alone: 28.5K families. If the previous legislation requirements were to be met, the number of families to be resettled only from APP would move up to at least 77K, in addition to the overall amount of 133K in the entire city, for the implementation of the Municipal Housing Plan (França and Costa, 2012). The additional costs of this resettlement, not considering the raise in urbanization costs, would represent an increment of 15%, or R$8.8 billion. Besides, land scarcity for the production of new housing units also represent restrictions in large urban centers, making it more difficult, time consuming and expensive to meet the demand in well-located areas. Construction densities reached by favelas aren t usually met by formal projects which must comply with urban legislation and building codes. Also, it is important to consider that resettlement represents not only greater costs but also other forms of social and environmental impact. Demolishing the existing dwellings, for example, generates large volumes of debris to be transported to a proper final destination and building new housing units frequently means cutting down trees and other specimens of vegetation, making more soil impermeable and using more raw materials. Therefore, we must account for the entire process, considering not only the benefits of the environmental recovery of the APP, but also the consequent impacts the resettlement might bring. 3 Federal Law n. 10,257 (2001) 4

5 Another argument to be considered involves the degradation condition of the water body versus its restoration potential. Establishing the preservation setback to be respected in each case should reflect on local particularities: topography; geomorphology; hydrology (precipitation index, flood risk, etc.); soil types and permeability in the water basin; and occupation conditions. There are various methodologies used for this kind of analysis, considering the sections of the creeks as part of a system and demonstrating that, from the environmental recovery perspective, intervening only in a smaller extension of the creek isn t very effective. Alternatives which don t guarantee connectivity and continuity in water bodies must have its recovery potential verified (Cardoso 2012). Finally, applying the same standards of the regulation to the territories of the entire country, regardless of the urban or rural nature of the occupation, ignores local specificities, natural or built, as well as the integration potential of planning tools and governance aspects. Focusing on the problem which is very severe makes it more difficult to adopt alternatives which have the solution as their central core. Federal Law n. 11,977, which regulates land-tenure regularization of urban settlements, has made a great advance in its article 54: the Municipality may, by motivated decision, admit social interest land-tenure regularization in APP, occupied before December 31 st 2007 and located in consolidated urban area, if technical studies demonstrate that such intervention results in improving environmental conditions compared to the present state. The technical study must present a number of elements, defined by article 61 of the law, and must be approved by the licensing authority. Although the minimum contents of the studies have been legally established, the analysis criteria are yet to be determined by each licensing authority, from each city or state government. The lack of transparent guidelines and criteria affects the decision-making process, which can become subjective, based on the technical knowledge or ideology of the professional in charge of each approval. Even though the Housing Department has published its design guidelines for slum upgrading projects (França and Costa 2012), that doesn t mean the Environmental Department from the same Municipality shares its concepts or that the instrument makes licensing any easier. The lack of consensus among public departments creates impediments to practice, being the citizens the most harmed by the unfruitful negotiations. The water and sanitation concession agreement signed with Sabesp in 2010 presents in its Annex I Goal- Setting Plan the water provision coverage index for the city (93.4%) and establishes the year of 2024 as a goal for universalization. If analyzed separately, the indexes in the formal city differ greatly from those of the informal city (96.9% and 79.3%, respectively). The situation of the sewage network is much more serious, with 89.5% for the formal city and only 53.9% in the informal city. The deficits are concentrated in precarious settlements, where the execution of infrastructure imposes various additional interventions, more complex and slower. The goals established by the contract, however, can only be met by the concessionaire if the Housing Department implements the actions defined at the Municipal Housing Plan, such as the slum upgrading program. 5

6 In order to face the challenges of integrating necessary interventions from different public sectors and concessionaires making sure the necessary budget wouldn t overwhelm one of them and, therefore, make execution inviable the city has demanded as a counterpart for celebrating the contract that Sabesp would destine 7.5% of its revenue to a municipal sanitation fund. These resources are to be used for slum upgrading and social housing projects, covering part of the program s costs. São Paulo still has a long way to go according to a recent study, raking in 22 nd position when compared to the 100 most populous cities in the country (Instituto Trata Brasil 2016). Choosing the drainage system to be implemented and the treatment to be given to the water bodies is also of great importance regarding the effects of urbanization, which can make them neutral or worse (Baptista et al. 2005). The predicaments only delay the execution of interventions and, consequently, the implementation of sanitation and housing plans, including the elimination of geotechnical risk situations. Not to mention one of the greatest objectives of the licensing authority: environmental recovery of APP. Integrating urban, environmental and water resources planning can contribute to the development of technical criteria as well as institutional organization of the evaluation process, specifically regarding projects in urban APP occupied by low-income families. 3 Conclusion The discussion in place is related to the recovery of permanent preservation areas within cities occupied by low-income families. However, due to the inherent complexities, this matter is rarely approached by those responsible for implementing the interventions in an objective and complete manner. There are many variables to be analyzed before searching for a solution, requiring extremely specific knowledge: origin and dimension of the problem, available resources, shared responsibility, potential of recovery, as well as solution scenarios and schedule for execution. Environmental planning, urban planning and water management are the fields of expertise to be explored, supported by social participation and control. Paraisópolis, the second most populous favela in São Paulo, illustrates perfectly well how governance alone can mean the success or failure when upgrading precarious settlements. There has been a lot of innovation during both planning and execution phases demanding, above all, political will and much has changed since The largest creek crossing its territory, Antonico, hasn t yet been urbanized and the families suffer from this tardiness. Geographic conditions must also be considered as there are specific norms established for different parts of the territory, such as the water reservoirs Guarapiranga and Billings or alongside the Tietê river, inside the perimeters of the Environmental Protection Area Várzea do Rio Tietê (Área de Proteção Ambiental APA). The projects developed for these areas must comply with additional and more restrictive legislation, which impose greater challenges when developing feasibility studies and construction documents. Cantinho do Céu and Água Vermelha are examples of communities located in such areas and they could become excellent study cases representing these specificities. 6

7 There is no interest in developing an intervention standard, since each situation requires for specific studies and design. Urbanism including all disciplines integrated to it by definition, are not to be standardized. It might be rational and desirable to categorize solutions and guidelines, but not the design. Attention must be given to the urban program established in partnership with the families; to the overall budget, so as to fulfill the goals defined by the Municipal Housing Plan; and to recovering the environmental functions of the APP, even if only partially and in connection with the rest of the urbanized water basin. Each project must analyze its limitations and set its priorities, respecting the preexistence and creating and interaction among all actors involved. By creating clear assessment rules which will guide the development of each design, one reduces the risk of lost work and, therefore, lost money and time. It is time designers are given the opportunity to put their expertise into practice, taking responsibility for their choices and demonstrating their technical knowledge on behalf of the clients who have needed them the most and for the longest: slum dwellers. Acknowledgement This paper represents a journey which started ten years ago and has yet a long way to go, during my PhD candidacy. Being involved with so many slum upgrading projects, in a period of very hard work in the public sector, has definitely changed the professional I am today, hopefully for the better, but certainly into an even more pragmatic doer. All the challenges the team faced at those times helped create a line of thinking, having the well-being of the families as the main objective of our everyday work, but also future practices. Having sat at many lectures and round tables, I realized how privileged I am for having acquired all this practical expertise, which makes me feel responsible for properly documenting and exercising the discussions on the complexities of precarious settlements and their relation to environmental issues. For that, I would like to thank the Sehab team with whom I worked so closely from 2005 through 2012, including construction companies, commissioned architects and engineers, lawyers, social workers and management offices. I am also grateful to the dwellers and community leaders who have also taught me a great deal, a daily exercise of humbleness and empathy. And last, but not least, I would like to thank my family, specially my husband Evandro and my son Bernardo, not only for supporting my career and moral passions but also for what is yet to come and all those hours to be dedicated to my PhD thesis in the near future. References Baptista, Márcio, N. Nascimento and S. Barraud Técnicas Compensatórias em Drenagem Urbana. Porto Alegre: ABRH. Cardoso, Adriana S., Baptista, Márcio Metodologia para avaliação de alternativas de intervenção em cursos de água em áreas urbanas. Revista Brasileira de Recursos Hídricos, v. 16. Cardoso, Adriana Sales Proposta de metodologia para orientação de processos decisórios relativos a intervenções em cursos de água em áreas urbanas. PhD diss., Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. Carvalho, Celso Santos and Anaclaudia Rossbach The City Statute: A commentary. São Paulo: Cities Alliance and Ministry of Cities - Brazil. França, Elisabete, Costa, Keila Prado O urbanismo nas preexistências territoriais e o compartilhamento de ideias: Sehab & ETH Zürich, UCLA, Berlage Institute (série Novos Bairros de São Paulo). 1. ed. São Paulo: HABI - Superintendência de Habitação Popular. França, Elisabete, Costa, Keila Prado Política Municipal de Habitação - Uma Construção Coletiva (série Novos Bairros de São Paulo). 1. ed. São Paulo: Superintendência de Habitação Popular. 7

8 Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística Anuário Estatístico do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, volume 56. Instituto Trata Brasil Ranking do Saneamento. São Paulo. Marques, Eduardo, Sandra Gomes, Renata Gonçalves, Demétrio Toledo, Encarnación Moya, Donizete Cazzolato and Maria Paula Ferreira Assentamentos Precários no Brasil urbano. Ministério das Cidades e Centro de Estudos da Metrópole. SABESP, Companhia de Saneamento Básico do Estado de São Paulo Plano de Metas para o Município de São Paulo. Abastecimento público de água e esgotamento sanitário. Vieira, Renato S. and Eduardo A. Haddad An Accessibility Index for the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo. Paper presented at the workshop A Economia Subterrânea: impactos socioeconômicos do metrô de São Paulo, São Paulo, June 7th Graphic Work, Images 5 to 10 (including copyrights) * In a separate file. 8