A ÁGUA NO ESPAÇO URBANO: UMA ABORDAGEM SÓCIO-AMBIENTAL E SUA APLICAÇÃO À GRANDE TIJUCA – RIO DE JANEIRO (RJ)

Abstract

This research objects to contribute in the construction of a methodology that can integrate the boarding of the presence and the circulation of the water in urban environments, detaching the case of floods, with the creation of a mapping that obtains to specialize in detail the phenomenon. Besides, it aims to realize an analysis that allows to an integrated vision of the water its circulation, storage, and its socialenvironmental interactions, that were established through the history, relating it to the urban transformations which were derived also by the governmental interventions. This perspective of analysis was inserted in the area of the “Grande Tijuca” North Zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro densely inhabited, with description of water’s use shows problems since the initial occupation process. Nowadays, the problems related to the water supply by the general net of the city and the ones related on to the superficial circulation of waters at times of intense rains (that causes frequent urban floods) devastate the population. This work searches to identify the intensity of the changes that happened in the environment concerning to the problems related to the water: the increase in the demand for supplying of the general water net; the basic sanitation; the inputs of sewage effluent on the main canals of draining and the general net of sewer; beyond the superficial draining of the pluvial waters, which causes the floods. It was used as methodology: a historical review of the urban evolution and the presence of the water in the quarters, as well as the review of the physical characteristics of the environment, the analysis of public politics and as the way that the circulation of the water in the quarters of the “Grande Tijuca” integrates in the space. In order to study the presence and the use of the water resources it was used the census data of the IBGE, aiming at an evolutionary analysis from1991 to 2000 that they had resulted in mappings. Moreover, an unpublished Flood’s Chart of 2006 was realized, which specializes the phenomenon in a 1:8000 scale and allows a rich analysis in details, as the extension and the variability of the level of floods on the street by street of the quarters. The many urban floods in the “Grande Tijuca” would be the reply of the environment to the transformations that occurs for long time. With the reduction of the quality of life, the “Grande Tijuca” and the city of Rio de Janeiro as a whole – will be white of politics aiming at the control of this operating process. However, these do not seem to glimpse the totality of the system, and they present themselves as disconnected and pointed repairs, because they don’t object the control and elimination of the floods. The example of the Tijuca, not only evidences the necessity of a more including vision of the planning and management of the water resources, as well as the urban space as a whole, inserted in a management that has led to a real integrated local development.