Inclusive planning approaches aim at supporting active citizenship by generating capacity for collective action and taking responsibility for the future. They provide the ground for a continuous open dialogue of authorities, planning professionals and citizens – all of them entering the process with their diverse culture, knowledge, and expectations. Building mutual trust and encouraging the creative potential of all the participants are two key success factors for inclusive planning. The planning and governance of the urban environment are however complex processes, which require specific expert knowledge and policy-related decision-making with established strict formal rules and procedures – sometimes time-consuming or seemingly bureaucratic. Citizens not being fully aware of all the formal requirements rationale is among the major challenges in establishing a working partnership on the ground.
The session is expected to provide a meeting space for all the key actors and beneficiaries in the planning process, which is expected to contribute to the exchange of points of view and ideas as an important part of the capacity-building for inclusive planning.
The session will build upon a dialogue between scientific and empirical knowledge about concepts, approaches, and procedures in the urban planning process under varying context. The empiric research has identified numerous challenges at the border area between informal and formal action for urban regeneration. Some open questions need to be addressed: How to identify and address conflicts of interest? How to manage the variety of expectations on different sides? How to synchronize the time frames of activities? How to acknowledge and reward volunteering?
Target audience: researchers, urban practitioners and decision-makers, representatives of citizens’ organizations, city administration, etc.
A broad variety of contributions are welcome - scientific papers, case studies, policy briefs, storytelling, etc.
Topics to be addressed comprise:
Building trust, capacity for dialogue and a common language among urban experts, city administration and local communities;
Introducing innovative approaches and instruments то enhance the sensitivity of the formal planning process to the dynamics and variety of local needs and demands.
Ways to encourage and reward citizens’ volunteering in different stages of the inclusive planning process
This work is a reflection on practices inscribed in the cities, related to the artistic, political, and educational fields, aiming to cross the tensions and inequalities that the cities contain. This reflection is the result of the rapprochement with agents of the territory of Campanhã, in the city of Porto, which put us thinking about the rural integrated with the urban, in this time that calls for urgent transformations in terms of (re)organization of hybrid territorialities. Campanhã has become historically stigmatized and subjected to the prejudice of poverty, with effects that mark it to this day, but which stem largely from urban transformations of the past. The urban-rural unification movement, governed by capitalist logic, imposes a homogenizing dynamic. On the other hand, what is proposed in this writing is an analysis of the interactions arising from integrated identities that recognize the importance of new hybrid forms that emerge in this area. The concept of urbanities in the rural [1] is proposed as a form of resistance to homogenization and makes it possible to understand the interactions resulting from the multiple identities existing in hybrid areas. Recognizing and naming them is the beginning of a process of asking other questions. For this, it is necessary to find more sensitive ways of observing and coexisting in diversity, with the multiple landscapes and subjects who live there. In May 2021, we started a partnership with Associação Social da Cultura Ambiental A Soalheira, which simultaneously brought us closer to the Urbinat-Porto Healthy Corridor and the Forum, Cultura, Cidade: um Direito (i2ADS-FBAUP), based on hybrid practices that cross art-education-life. These provided complex intersections of social groups and triggered an interdisciplinary study. We are interested in thinking, in an inverted way, about the challenges to be faced to deal with the complexity of "collective and inclusive" planning. Firstly, we ask about our ability to recognize the incompleteness of the knowledge, methodologies, and concepts that we use with the intention of comment the complexity of everyday life, which requires a transdisciplinary approach. By stimulating experimentation, critical research, and artistic creation, at the local level, in this context of rural-urban hybridism, we seek to trigger the multi-scale exchange between specialized and popular knowledge in a dialogical and dialectical process based on mutual trust, so that the clash of ideas is productive for subjects with distinct views who share ethical-political principles [2]. The hybrid practices that foster the empirical context of this study demand an open attitude, which does not anticipate tools and methods, but proposes to follow processes from what emerges in the specificity of each event. These forms of knowledge-experience-transformation are engendered in co-presence and promote the transformation of the participating subjects, which configures the educational-creative power of this approach.
Referências:
[1] Rua, João (2006) Urbanidades no rural: o devir de novas territorialidades CAMPO-TERRITÓRIO, fev. 2006, Revista de Geografia Agrária, v. 1, n. 1, p. 82-106.
[2] Lago, L. Mello, I. Petrus, F. (2020) Da cooperação na cidade à cidade cooperativa, 1ª ed. Ed. Lutas Anticapital, SP.
OUAGADOUGOU in Burkina Faso is reclaiming a new metropolitan cultural framework and a structural matrix that holds its different city’s morphology together.
Today, new and ancient ways to use the territory resources are scaled in time among practices that date back to the three pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial phases.
Therefore, it is essential to structure an inclusive planning approach that aims to support citizenship by generating knowledge for collective action based on a city's narrative through maps. The MSLab ‘s innovative approach introduces an open-source mapping methodology: Metropolitan Cartography (MC). MC, linked to MGIP Glossary (Contin et al., 2020), can relate the geographic ground to the territorial organisation to manage its scarce resources.
In MC, the map is a non-verbal narrative presenting how the past and the present territory's elements coexist; a map allows enhancing the sensitivity of the formal planning process to the dynamics of local needs.
The narrative interpreted in the Ouagadougou project is based on the possible coexistence between the loti (planned urban morphology) and the non-loti (urban cellular expansion). The city claims to project a new growth model's infrastructure that could transform the non-loti without destroying it, tracing back to the territory structure in notable point of resilience.
Findings Notable Points through MC’s maps means studying the impacts of strategies defining formal and informal cities (Contin et al., 2022). Ouagadougou's large barrages and canal system are the Green-Grey Infrastructures (Galiulo, 2021) capable of forcing the Heritage of public space protecting the settlements by reinforcing the edges between ground/water, anthropic/nature.
Therefore, Metropolitan Cartography is a design tool to project signs of relationship among geography, remarkable points, roads and canals indicating places as mnemonic signs of the metropolitan mental map. MC's map strengthens knowledge of the metropolitan city epistemic structure to understand and accept its new dimension, structure and image.
In conclusion, MSLab’s project proposes to promote Cultural Heritage as the dimension of change. Tracing tangible and intangible Heritage and hybrid space on maps, MC guides projects to different metropolitan rhythms' comprehension, studying the influence of heterogeneous contexts on mapping grounds. The metropolitan cartographic project made it possible to design the relationships between times and global/local values, which are dynamic forms in space maps, such as spatial processes.
Our mapping tool allows us to define strategies toward a metropolitan African identity as a collective value that we can acquire through the regeneration of existing loti and non-loti settlements. Through Metropolitan Cartography, our city reading or inheritance is diachronic. Then, through the narrative infrastructure of maps, the cultural and spatial transformation of change deals with a process of inclusion and deconstruction to read multiple identities according to a systematic and multi-scalar vision.
References
Contin, A., Giordano, P. and Nacke, M. (Ed.). (2021). Training for education, learning and leadership towards a new metropolitan discipline. Inaugural book. CIPPEC
Contin, A., Ortiz, P., Galiulo, V. (2022). THE “UNEQUALS” INCLUSION. Hotspot’s Network Strategy for a Metropolitan Agriculture Revolution Eluding Informality. In Mrinic, Meninato (Ed.). (2022). Informality and the City. Springer Landscape
Galiulo, V. (2021). Envisioning Metropolitan Landscape through Metropolitan Cartography: Metropolitan Landscape dynamic interactions in the Milan case study. In Contin, A. (Ed.). (2021). Metropolitan Landscapes. Towards a Shared Construction of the Resilient City of the Future. Springer Landscape
The text discusses the role of Nature-based Solutions as socio-technical interventions within the context of social movements' struggles for housing and emancipated labour in informal settlements in Brazil. The discussion relies on concrete experiences of housing occupations in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro city, where worker's cooperatives led the implementation of multiple NBS with technical advice from university groups through outreach projects in which both authors were involved as master's students (2016-2019). Among the solutions adopted by the workers, we focus on decentralized ecological sanitation systems built collectively to treat sewage in neighbourhoods uncovered by public sanitation services. The inhabitants have grasped and replicated these ecological sanitation technologies, among other NBS for water management, food production, and civil construction, significantly impacting their settlements and unfolding solidarity economy initiatives.
In the main case presented in the article - the Solano Trindade housing occupation -the co-creation of NBS involved the leading social movement (Movimento Nacional de Luta pela Moradia - MNLM) and university groups from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). This partnership has forged learning processes involving 12 families, over 100 students, 15 technicians, and 5 professors. The action-research was the methodology adopted in the technical advice process, aiming to identify challenges and co-create socio-technical solutions that respond to the dwellers' needs. This approach reveals that while scientific knowledge is socially recognized as a promoter of development and social well-being, the materiality of popular territories exposes the technical capabilities of the working class in the self-production of their living space in a context of enormous needs. During the exchanges between both groups, university and social movement, it was possible to acknowledge that the confrontation between scientific and popular knowledge produced socio-technical innovation and constituted pedagogical processes for all subjects involved.
Furthermore, when looking at the possibilities of building the right to the city through the production of common spaces and infrastructure, we could reflect on the following questions: To what extent might NBS, led by workers cooperatives, create different roles in the urban services provision system? What were the tensions between self-managed initiatives, public policies, and university outreach projects? Could these processes promote citizenship through participation in decision-making spaces? Were NBS integrated into the agenda for the right to the city led by social movements in Brazil? Thus, relying on the empirical evidence, as well as on the literature about the co-production of urban services and the engineering for social development in Latin America, we aim to shed light on the potentialities and challenges of co-created NBSs in the production of the urban space.
Cruz, C.; Kleba, J.; Alvear, C. (Org.). (2021) Engenharias e outras práticas técnicas engajadas – Vol 2: iniciativas de formação profissional. 1st.ed. Editora da Universidade Estadual da Paraíba.
Lefebvre, H. (2009) Le droit à la ville. 3e édition. Economica.
Moretto, L., Faldi, G., Ranzato, M., Rosati, F. N., Ilito Boozi, J.-P., & Teller, J. (2018). Challenges of water and sanitation service co-production in the global South. Environment and Urbanization, 30(2), 425–443. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247818790652
Streule, M., Karaman, O., Sawyer, L., & Schmid, C. (2020). Popular Urbanization: Conceptualizing Urbanization Processes Beyond Informality. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 44(4), 652–672. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12872
THIOLLENT, M. J. M. (2011). Metodologia de Pesquisa-Ação. 18. ed. Cortez.
Urban green infrastructure (GI) and protected areas (PAs) are specific nature and cultural spaces in cities exposed to various negative transformations (Benedict, McMahon, 2006). These spaces have a wide range of ecosystem services which are crucial for the nature conservation and citizens at the same time. According to Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) and CICES (Haines-Young, Potschin, 2018), such cultural services as recreation, historic heritage, «sense of place» etc. are included in ecosystem services. However, matter, energy and information balances are rather complicated in urban spaces due to enormous technogenic impact on small areas. Thus, ecosystem and social aspects are in great contradiction in urban environment by now (Trzyna et al., 2014).
The total ecosystem value according to zoning established by law and restrictions of human activites (E1) was assessed. Besides, ecosystem value according to actual landscape deterioration through on-site surveys and ability to proceed ecosystem services through InVEST tools (E2) was evaluated (Sharp et al., 2018). Moreover, the cultural value (C) was assessed on the basis of functional zoning, government plans of investments and GI popularity among visitors through Strava data. Differences of E2 and E1, E2 and C were estimated through integral assessment maps in QGIS operations of weighted overlay. The case areas of study are three considerably large (330, 700, 1600 ha) PAs in Moscow (Russia), but it is possible to extend such method to other cities and green areas.
Estimated E2-E1 and E2-S values of PAs vary from -5.8 to -1.6 (possible values vary from -20 to 20), what pinpoints the prevalence of cultural services, including not only recreational, but also transport, utility, sport, science, education, sacral ones (Gowdy et al., 2010). The considerable spatial differences have been identified: riparian forests and grasslands, some parts of distant forests are under strong human impact and mild regulations, despite its high ecosystem value (insufficient restrictions). Besides this, a strong tendency of restrictions easing since the 2000s has been revealed – the area-weighted average dynamic parameters vary from to -5.4 to -2.9 (through the scale from-20 to +20).
The devised set of methods may be implemented in resolving a dilemma between protection and exploitation and defining the most of gaps in GI planning and management. The expanses of negative E2-E1 values should be thoroughly surveyed and the elements of landscape design should be transmitted to the less disturbing forms: elevated walkways with permeable pavements, construction of strictly limited number of benches, localization of the visitors’ influx in the narrow transport corridors equipped by convenient walkways, benches, litter bins, outdoor lightning. Moreover, all mobile retail objects must be conveyed to the main park entries, occupying biotopes highly transformed already. Besides, all downsizings of urban PAs with area compensation must be prohibited due to rapidly growing biotopes’ fragmentation. At the same time, the social needs of citizens should not be neglected, as total prohibitions on human activities are seemed to be impossible in the contemporary megapolises (Trzyna et al., 2014).