Environmental justice and landscape: Urban rivers in question

Ivaldo Lima

ABSTRACT: The overall objective that guides this paper is clarifying the strategic relevance of landscape integration for environmental management that takes into consideration the territorial justice as its ethical-political horizon. In this sense, we address the tension between limits and potentialities of renaturalisation of rivers in the urban context. To do so, we specify the environmental justice as the clipping theoretical and methodological framework guide of our approach. It is proposed the urgency of impact studies and landscape integration in its condition as a strategic resource for the management of the landscape. From this standpoint, the river basin shall constitute visual basins, as set of points each other visible, having in perspective the premise that the observer is part of the system of observation. Through the landscape integration strategy, tactically specified as (re)naturalization of rivers, we can identify focal points of observation – called doors – which work as landscape d connectors essential to public ownership of the river/ visual basin. The empirical case analyzed is the Jacaré river basin, connected to the Iagoon system of Piratininga, located in the city of Niterói, state of Rio de Janeiro. It is a basin extremely varied from the point of view of both the impact on the landscape, historically accumulated, how much of the impasses in the territorial justice/ environmental. We are dealing with a critical urban neighborhood, using the criterion of impacts and the environment it presents. Thus, restore values of the culture of the landscape leading to complement the overall goal pointed out, from the analysis of the testimonies of local residents, based on river etnogeomorphology.

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