scholarly journals Water Scarcity in Brazil: A Case Study

Author(s):  
Denise Slater

Between 2012 and 2015, Brazil experienced one of the worst droughts in its history. A combination of natural and human-made causes—including climate change, environmental degradation, poor urban planning, a lack of maintenance of existing infrastructure, corruption, and the mismanagement of water resources—contributed to a growing water crisis. This article will focus on the effects of both the drought and the subsequent water crisis on the vast metropolitan area of the city of São Paulo, illustrating how both natural and human factors combined to create a crisis in Brazil’s largest city.

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1.4) ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
Francesco Alberti ◽  
Raffaele Paloscia

The upgrading of riverfronts is a theme that has long played a central role in the renewal programs of large, medium and small cities throughout Europe. The case study presented in this paper is Florence, whose Roman origins and development, from the Middle Ages to today, are closely linked to the Arno River, which runs from east to west. After briefly reviewing some salient moments in the history of the relationship between the city and the river, the paper illustrates some research and projects carried out within the Department of Architecture of the University of Florence, focused on the role that Arno can still play in the future of the Florentine metropolitan area, as a catalyst for interventions aimed at improving urban sustainability, livability and resilience to climate change.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 117862212091772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oscar I Vargas-Pineda ◽  
Juan M Trujillo-González ◽  
Marco A Torres-Mora

Water scarcity has increased in the last century due to the effects of climate change and the over-exploitation of anthropic activities that deteriorate strategic ecosystems in watersheds. This study quantified the water consumption of anthropic activities according to the water footprint (WF) and the water supply available (WSA) using the GR2M hydrological simulation model in the Quenane-Quenanito basin in Colombia. The objective of this study was to analyze the dynamic supply–demand of water and identify potential conflicts associated with the use of water. The results of this study show that the WF of the basin was 17.01 million m3/year, 79.97% of which was the green WF and 20.03% of which was the blue WF, and that the WSA of the basin was 272.1 million m3/year. In addition, potential conflicts over the use of water were identified due to water scarcity in 11 sub-basins during the months of January to March. In conclusion, analyzing the demand and supply of water in basins and taking into account their spatiotemporal distribution allows us to measure the impacts of anthropic activities on water resources, which can prevent potential conflicts associated with the use of water between sectors or the involvement of ecological dynamics.


Author(s):  
Barley Norton

This chapter addresses the cultural politics, history and revival of Vietnamese court orchestras, which were first established at the beginning of the Nguyễn dynasty (1802–1945). Based on fieldwork in the city of Hue, it considers the decolonizing processes that have enabled Vietnamese court orchestras to take their place alongside other East Asian court orchestras as a display of national identity in the global community of nations. The metaphor of ‘orchestrating the nation’ is used to refer to the ways in which Vietnamese orchestras have been harnessed for sociopolitical ends in several historical periods. Court orchestras as heritage have recourse to a generic, precolonial past, yet they are not entirely uncoupled from local roots. Through a case-study of the revival of the Nam Giao Sacrifice, a ritual for ‘venerating heaven’, the chapter addresses the dynamics of interaction and exchange between staged performances of national heritage and local Buddhist and ancestor worship rituals. It argues that with growing concern about global climate change, the spiritual and ecological resonances of the Nam Giao Sacrifice have provided opportunities for the Party-state to reassert its position as the supreme guardian of the nation and its people.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096466392110316
Author(s):  
Chloé Nicolas-Artero

This article shows how geo-legal devices created to deal with environmental crisis situations make access to drinking water precarious and contribute to the overexploitation and contamination of water resources. It relies on qualitative methods (interviews, observations, archive work) to identify and analyse two geo-legal devices applied in the case study of the Elqui Valley in Chile. The first device, generated by the Declaration of Water Scarcity, allows private sanitation companies to concentrate water rights and extend their supply network, thus producing an overexploitation of water resources. In the context of mining pollution, the second device is structured around the implementation of the Rural Drinking Water Programme and the distribution of water by tankers, which has made access to drinking water more precarious for the population and does nothing to prevent pollution.


2019 ◽  
Vol 06 (03n04) ◽  
pp. 2050009
Author(s):  
Jayne Lino ◽  
Guillaume Rohat ◽  
Paul Kirshen ◽  
Hy Dao

Climate change will impact cities’ infrastructure and urban dwellers, who often show differentiated capacity to cope with climate-related hazards. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are part of an emerging research field which uses global socioeconomic and climate scenarios, developed by the climate change research community, to explore how different socioeconomic pathways will influence future society’s ability to cope with climate change. While the SSPs have been extensively used at the global scale, their use at the local and urban scale has remained rare, as they first need to be contextualized and extended for the particular place of interest. In this study, we present and apply a method to develop multi-scale extended SSPs at the city and neighborhood scale. Using Boston, Massachusetts, as a case study, we combined scenario matching, experts’ elicitation, and participatory processes to contextualize and make the global SSPs relevant at the urban scale. We subsequently employed the extended SSPs to explore future neighborhood-level vulnerability to extreme heat under multiple plausible socioeconomic trajectories, highlighting the usefulness of extended SSPs in informing future vulnerability assessments. The large differences in outcomes hint at the enormous potential of risk reduction that social and urban planning policies could trigger in the next decades.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 238-251
Author(s):  
Barbara Roosen ◽  
Liesbeth Huybrechts ◽  
Oswald Devisch ◽  
Pieter Van den Broeck

This article explores ‘dialectical design dialogues’ as an approach to engage with ethics in everyday urban planning contexts. It starts from Paulo Freire’s pedagogical view (1970/2017), in which dialogues imply the establishment of a horizontal relation between professionals and amateurs, in order to understand, question and imagine things in everyday reality, in this case, urban transformations, applied to participatory planning and enriched through David Harvey’s (2000, 2009) dialectical approach. A dialectical approach to design dialogues acknowledges and renegotiates contrasts and convergences of ethical concerns specific to the reality of concrete daily life, rather than artificially presenting daily life as made of consensus or homogeneity. The article analyses an atlas as a tool to facilitate dialectical design dialogues in a case study of a low-density residential neighbourhood in the city of Genk, Belgium. It sees the production of the atlas as a collective endeavour during which planners, authorities and citizens reflect on possible futures starting from a confrontation of competing uses and perspectives of neighbourhood spaces. The article contributes to the state-of-the-art in participatory urban planning in two ways: (1) by reframing the theoretical discussion on ethics by arguing that not only the verbal discourses around designerly atlas techniques but also the techniques themselves can support urban planners in dealing more consciously with ethics (accountability, morality and authorship) throughout urban planning processes, (2) by offering a concrete practice-based example of producing an atlas that supports the participatory articulation and negotiation of dialectical inquiry of ethics through dialogues in a ‘real-time’ urban planning process.


2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Ricardo Serraglio Polucha

As pesquisas elaboradas para compreender a urbanização desigual em Curitiba enfatizaram o papel do planejamento urbano nesse processo. Entendendo que essa desigualdade é resultado da forma como se dá a valorização da terra e da apropriação diferenciada desta pelas camadas sociais, torna-se necessário compreender como a prática do planejamento urbano se articula a essa dinâmica. Considerando que o avanço dessa discussão deve procurar revelar as causas dessa desigualdade, e não apenas constatar sua existência, este artigo tem como objetivo compreender essa relação a partir da análise de um caso específico: o Ecoville. Originalmente concebido como uma nova frente de expansão urbana que evitaria a ocupação de áreas impróprias na cidade, sua implantação ocorreu de maneira totalmente oposta, produzindo um espaço com baixa densidade populacional voltado para camadas de alta renda. Argumenta-se que o estudo do Ecoville contribui para construir uma explicação sobre a prática do planejamento urbano em Curitiba, porque evidencia as contradições que são produzidas em torno da valorização da terra. Palavras-chave: Ecoville; Curitiba; planejamento urbano; urbanização; valorização da terra. Abstract: In order to understand the uneven urbanization in Curitiba, previous researches have emphasized the role played by urban planning on this process. Believing that this urban inequality results from the manner that land values and ways of occupation by different social classes are established, it urges then to understand the work extent of urban planning on this dynamic. The goal of this article is to move forward the debate on this field by revealing the causes of this inequality, and not only assuming its existence, through the analysis of a specific case study: “Ecoville”. Originally conceived as a new urban front that would avoid settlement at improper areas within the city, its materialisation followed a totally opposed path, producing a low density development only suitable for upper classes. The research of this case study – “Ecoville” – helps to build an explanation of the urban planning practice in Curitiba, as it reveals the contradictions that stir around land values. Keywords: Ecoville; Curitiba; urban planning; urbanization; land valorization.


TERRITORIO ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 39-43
Author(s):  
Chiara Tornaghi

This paper presents an English case of urban agriculture, the Edible Public Space Project in Leeds, contextualised in a context of urban agriculture initiatives committed to social-environmental justice, to the reproduction of common goods and the promotion of an urban planning which promotes the right to food and to the construction of urban space from the bottom up. The case study emerged as the result of action-research at the crossroads between urban planning policies, community work and critical geography. As opposed to many similar initiatives, the Edible Public Space Project is not intended merely as a temporary initiative hidden within the tiny folds of the city, but rather as an experiment which imagines and implements alternatives to current forms of urban planning within those folds and it contextualises them in the light of the ecological, fi nancial and social crisis of the last decade.


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