Urban nature and landscape: a sociocultural approach to Frogner Park, Oslo-Norway and Quinta da Boa Vista, Rio de Janeiro-Brazil
BOOK PRESENTATION
Knowledge is a mix of both creativity and curiosity, where the researcher seeks new discoveries, or even new ideas about a given topic, contributing to different perspectives about our human reality. Based on this reflection, in 2016, I had the honour to be a volunteer intern at NIMA (Interdisciplinary Centre for the Environment; Núcleo Interdisciplinar de Meio Ambiente da PUC-Rio), in which I was able to work together with students and professors to reformulate the university’s Environmental Agenda, in terms of spaces for coexistence and on-campus mobility.
This gave me the opportunity to observe and think about what made our university campus such a nice place to be. What aspects made me spend most of my free time outside in the woods? (And with the research, I could constate that other students did the same). Then, together with my fellow colleagues at NIMA, we identified the importance of the green area inside the university’s campus for both leisure activities, and academic ones as well. The woods were a great place for students and staff to relax, or even read a book. There were many students who had their lunches in the woods, while others used the space to study there too. Sometimes, there were also yoga classes happening there, and not to mention the many friendships that started in the woods! So, we can argue that the nature inside PUC-Rio provided us with a marvellous environment to develop our activities, being an important part of our university lives.
After NIMA, I continued to research the importance of urban nature, but in other surroundings… In this context, 2018 was a cornerstone year in my academic life, as I had finished my work at NIMA, and obtained a bachelor’s degree in Geography at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, where I defended research on the morphology and symbology of Campo de São Bento, an urban park located in Icaraí, Niterói-RJ. The research dealt with the identity of this park as a significant place in the city, considering concepts such as place and public space, as well as its historical importance for the neighbourhood of Icaraí.
Just a year later (in 2019), I had the opportunity to participate in the summer course on Energy, Environment and Social Change, offered by the International Summer School at the University of Oslo, Norway. Together with other students from different countries and fields of study, we dialogued about the relationship between human beings and nature, biophilia, and about techniques for more efficient energy consumption, as well as green and blue infrastructure in cities around the world.
This experience in Oslo also gave me new insights about urbanism and landscape. How could a city integrate nature in such a way that I felt immersed by urban nature every time I went outside? I felt connected to nature when I had to take the T-bane (metro line); when I went shopping in the streets, when I went to the lake Sognsvann… Urban nature such as lakes, rivers, parks, and forests were just 10 min away by metro, and just some more minutes away on foot. I was amazed.
Having these issues as a basis, upon returning to Brazil, I became interested in knowing the socio-spatial dynamics in the city of Rio de Janeiro, more specifically regarding urban green spaces, as we can perceive a great disbalance in the city, concerning the access to urban nature, which can be considered as an urban/ social inequality. In this way, I applied for a master’s degree at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the Fluminense Federal University (Niterói, RJ), as I thought that the dialogue with professors and other colleagues would be of great relevance for my reflection on socio-environmental issues from the point of view of urban practice (as Architecture and Urbanism is in the field of Applied Social Sciences). I think that the master’s allowed me to see the urban space from another perspective, in relation to the praxis of urban and environmental planning, which complements the more theoretical geographical perspective (my original training).
In this sense, the case of Quinta da Boa Vista’s park (RJ, Brazil) caught my attention, due to its structural and social change in the neighbourhood of São Cristóvão (where the Quinta da Boa Vista is located), throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In parallel, inspired by the experiences in Norway, I believe that investigating the process of urbanization of the city of Oslo, in the 19th and 20th centuries, specially Frogner neighbourhood, where Frogner Park is located, as part of a history of public policies that proposed to integrate green spaces into the urban landscape in the 20th century, is relevant for a parallel analysis of the socio-spatial reality of the Brazilian context.
Therefore, this book was based on researches developed in the scope of my master’s degree at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF-2020/2022), supervised by professor Eloisa Carvalho de Araújo (PhD Professor, PPGAU/UFF), in which we aimed to reflect about nature as a relevant concept to understand the socio-environmental dynamics of contemporaneity, as the presence of natural elements in the urban area, the so-called urban nature, also implies the cultural position of nature in contemporary societies’ mindset.
Finally, we hope that the informative content covered in this book can contribute, in the near future, to foster the understanding of nature in the context of urban design in Oslo, located in Norway and Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, considering the following timespan: the end of the 19th century until the current 21st century. Throughout this volume, the reader will get an overview of some aspects about management and public narratives about urban nature in those two cities. Thereafter, it will be presented the thematic of the urban park, in which the book will contextualize how the socio-environmental aspects located in Frogner Park (Oslo) and Quinta da Boa Vista (Rio de Janeiro) intervene in the perception of urban well-being at the local level.
Clara Maria Santos de Lacerda
Clara Maria Santos de Lacerda
