Urban water environment intervention: Analyses of the urban-environmental interaction

Francisco José Cardoso

Laura Bueno de Melo Machado

ABSTRACT: Water environments are spaces with important physical-environmental characteristics, interacting with several natural processes that occur in our planet. But, with urbanization, its degradation has been quite common, resulting in a physical, social and cultural estrangement of the population in relation to urban watercourses. Architecture and urbanism have developed several theories along time, methodologies and proposals of actions to solve spatial problems due to the process of urbanization, including water environment intervention projects. The objective of this project is to research contemporary experiments in water environment intervention in the area of landscape architecture and urban design, verify the typologies and theoretical trends of these productions and analyze the solutions in relation to environmental, urban and human dimension. The focus of the analyses is to the formal-spatial question, adopting a systemic and dialogic method, developed in a procedural and diagrammatic form in three steps, being: researching urban water environment intervention, selection of paradigmatic experiments and detailed analyses of the selected experiments. 101 projects were researched in water environment intervention which show a dissemination of new paradigms, selecting the projects developed for the cities of Velenje (Slovenia), Denver (USA) and Belo Horizonte (Brazil). These projects show that it is possible to change the reality of degradation and inadequate treatment of water environments, adopting solutions which consider their contexts and the systemic relations between the environmental, urban and human dimension.

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