Green infrastructure as a component of (environmental) sanitation: an analysis of cases and recommendations for implementation in the Brazilian context
The model of global economic development, experimented since the end of the twentieth century, has induced, among several transformations, to a continuous population concentration in urban areas. The result of these transformations lies in the levels of environmental degradation at unprecedented levels, enhanced by the climate change scenario. Such a crisis has challenged academics, public managers, and planners to review concepts and conceptions forged by modernism in force in the mid-twentieth century, especially in the developed countries, overcoming the belief that technological advances at that time would bring comfort and development to all. The search for processes that attempt to mediate as anthropogenic changes caused by city-building with ecological processes is not new: it has been tried in centuries, but has gained momentum since the late 1990s, especially in cities in the Global North, usually from a broad spectrum of movements, methods and techniques that, in common, increase a radical expansion of urban green. Of these emerging concepts, a green infrastructure is the most studied and applied, brings a logic of landscape ecology to the urban environment, carrying them as resources of multifunctionality and multiscale approach, and through good design, seeking to mediate processes that have always been in opposition. However, this concept is not yet fully widespread among countries of the Global South, despite some isolated experiences that have certain characteristics specific to what is being developed in relation to the Global North. These experiences can provide important insights for future projects and programs, including as a support system or even as the sanitation infrastructure itself, especially with regard to drainage and sewage components. Based on these assumptions, this research develops the theoretical and conceptual review of the term “green infrastructure” in order to understand its meaning in the Global South, especially in Latin America, while analyzing based on this theoretical / methodological scope, experiences in small scale that were implanted in cities of the region known as Paulista Macrometrópolis, in the State of São Paulo, Brazil