THE URBAN-FOREST INTERFACE AND WATER RELATED NATURAL DISASTERS AT TIJUCA MASSIF: CHALLENGES FOR URBAN PLANNING IN A SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

This paper focuses on the environmental changes induced by the city expansion in a coastal mountainous geoecossystem within the natural domain of the Atlantic rainforest. Attention is driven towards  the social-environmental problems related to natural disasters triggered by extreme rainfall events, in order to subside reviewing of current public policies particularly related to the spreading of human settlement onto slopes. The problem here focused emphasizes two fundamental questions: 1. How to avoid or lower down the current (high) deforestation rate at specific sites under critical vulnerability at the urban-forest interface? 2. Where and how to apply priority and integrated urban and reforestation projects for recovering geohydroecological functions, slope stability and the forest-urban landscape rehabilitation? One proposes that a new urbanity model has to give special attention to the immediate forest neighborhoods, by establishing green belts and buffer zones to reduce environmental impacts over the forest ecosystem. The buffer zone width may vary as a function of the presence of natural barriers or according to the environmental impact caused by different neighborhoods typologies as given by their potential edge effects through the forest ecosystem. Reviewing this landscape architecture should  include green corridors among urban quarters and specific housing sites to provide relevant biogenic fluxes and connectivity among the remnant forest patches. It involves, therefore, the recovery and conservation of ecological, hydrological and mechanical functions that controls both soil and slope stability. These measures require (re)ordering and (re)functioning the urban-forest frontier zone, without neglecting control of the main causes of deforestation and the urgent need of increasing the offer of popular housing.