Intra-Metropolitan Inequalities in Rio De Janeiro and the Guanabara Bay Cleaning Programme

Sustainable Development and Planning II, Vol. 2 1319

Intra-metropolitan inequalities in Rio de Janeiro and the Guanabara Bay Cleaning Programme

V. A. Carneiro da Silva & G. Ribeiro School of Architecture, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of the Guanabara Bay Cleaning Programme (GBCP) on the urban development process of the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area. Based on the magnitude of the budget of the programme (US$ 860.5 million) and its relevance to the improvement of the life quality of urban dwellers, the main focus of this paper is on the role of GBCP in the context of the Rio de Janeiro urban trends and intra-metropolitan inequality dynamics. We present here an analysis of GBCP’s role in Rio de Janeiro’s current urban development process, identifying its influences on the dynamics of socio- environmental inequalities. It can be affirmed that the GBCP plays an important role in improving the existing infrastructure of low-income areas in the Rio de Janeiro, but on the other hand several management and implementation problems counteract its positive impact and contribute to reaffirm the current spatial segregated pattern. Keywords: Guanabara Bay Cleaning Programme, urban planning, environmental management, sustainability, Rio de Janeiro, urban development.

1 Introduction

The socio-economical and environmental inequalities in Brazil are well publicized facts and one can state that spatial segregation has been a defining factor in its urbanization. Brazilian metropolitan areas, such as Rio de Janeiro, are increasingly characterized by the presence of wealthy neighbourhoods provided with top quality services next to poor communities with extremely limited infrastructure [4, 5, 9].

During the last two decades the Brazilian Government has launched several policies and urban interventions in an attempt to minimize urban inequalities [4]. In this context, the Guanabara Bay Cleaning Programme is the biggest urban infrastructure project developed in Brazil in the last thirty years. That programme has mainly aimed at contributing to the improvement of living conditions of urban dwellers in low-income neighbourhoods through the provision of water supply and sewage services [6]. Implementation has been very slow and despite the important amount of financial support provided by international agencies GBCP has not achieved many of its goals [1, 3, 4, 10]. This paper focuses on the role of the Guanabara Bay Cleaning Programme (GBCP) in the current urban development process in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area. The question we are interested in is: what are the current environmental conditions of a metropolis with twelve million inhabitants, with accelerated demographic growth of the poor areas, heavily polluting industries, continuous generation of urban substance, notably through the growth of informal settlements, and the absence of good governance?

2 Background

The Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area had a population of approximately of twelve million people in the year 2000 when the last demographic census was realized [4]. Comprising nineteen municipalities, it is considered the second largest urban agglomeration in Brazil. The metropolitan area comprehends five hydrographical systems namely: Guanabara Bay, Zona Sul, Jacarepaguá, Sepetiba and Maricá (figure 1). The Guanabara Bay Hydrographical System (GBHS) is the largest one in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area. The GBHS accommodates 2/3 of the entire metropolitan population (approximately eight million people), the commercial and financial metropolitan centre and the second largest Brazilian industrial park. Thus the GBHS could be said to include incompatible land uses, namely dense residential areas side by side fourteen thousand industries, sixteen ports (fourteen ports pertaining to the oil industry and two trade ports), two oil refineries, a large and dense transport system of industrial and chemical loads and many garbage and harmful waste landfills [4, 7]. Currently, the social and environmental status of the Guanabara Bay area is marked by serious problems and the local ecosystem is at this stage extremely degraded. This has been caused through neglect by the State of Rio de Janeiro in a number of spheres, namely: (a) land use planning and urban policy, (b) pollution control, (c) housing and infra-structure policy and (d) mobility planning. The Guanabara Bay Area receives 17m3/second of domestic sewage – that is 465tons per day, only 68tons of this sewage has had some kind of treatment and most of that treatment is just primary. In addition, it receives a large volume of industrial waste: 64tons/day of organic material and 0.3tons/day of oils and heavy metals (chrome, lead, zinc, mercury, etc). On the whole, 7tons/day of waste are released by oil refineries and ports [7].

Other sources of pollution are the rivers belonging to GBHS that have been contributing with 4,000,000tons/year of waste. In addition, there are many garbage landfills, official and unofficial, that have a large environmental impact and release 800litres/day of chorume (extremely toxic liquid that leaks from solid waste landfills) in the Guanabara Bay. Another type of intervention with a large environmental impact are landfills covering an area of 91km2 which was previously integrated in the Guanabara Bay – that amounts to 29.1% of the Bay’s total area. These landfills have contributed to a pronounced depletion of the Bay’s ecosystem, mainly due to the destruction of mangroves – an essential feature of the Guanabara Bay. Mangroves that originally covered an area of 260km2 are confined today to only 82km2 [2, 7].

2.1 Metropolitan planning

Large metropolitan areas in Brazil such as Rio de Janeiro are characterized by a high level of complexity and fragmentation. Complexity is related to a scale of the intervention which has to deal with a number of quantitative and qualitative variables as well as several autonomous administrations inside the metropolitan area. Fragmentation is directly correlated to a high level of complexity where officials deal with fragments of the metropolis, usually confined by administrative borders, and execute piecemeal metropolitan planning, intervention and management. Such set-up does not provide a platform for dealing with urban problems on a metropolitan scale or in the context of local ecosystems, notably hydrographical systems [12]. Urban management on a metropolitan scale constitutes one of the main challenges for the states of the Brazilian Federation. A prevalent condition is that of a complex network of administrative bodies and an absence of a metropolitan sphere to guide comprehensive approaches to environmental management. In the case of Rio de Janeiro there are nineteen municipalities (local governments) which integrate the metropolitan area. Above these local governments is the Rio de Janeiro State Government with jurisdiction outside the metropolitan area. Castells [6] describes the emergence of metropolitan areas of a new kind, which fittingly characterize Rio de Janeiro – so-called metropolitan regions: “without a name, without a culture, and without institutions…”, “urban constellations scattered throughout huge territorial expanses, functionally integrated and socially differentiated, around a multi-cantered structure”. [6] Several challenges emerge through such fragmented urban management. First, there are problems in communication between governmental institutions of similar status (like for instance inter-municipal communication or exchanges involving Rio de Janeiro State agencies) or between different layers of government (e.g. between state and municipalities). Such fragmented communication is caused by lack of appropriate management and also through political differences. Second, there are pronounced inequalities between Rio de Janeiro’s municipalities which tend to aggravate the metropolitan segregation process. And finally, there is no metropolitan authority in a position of coordinating planning and intervention by the different spheres of government.

3 Spatial analysis

With the above considerations in mind, the present paper introduces a spatial analysis on 3 levels (figure 1): Municipality: The municipality is the smallest unit of administration of the Brazilian political system (local government) and the lowest level of physical planning and urban policy making. Metropolitan Area: The metropolitan area refers here to a spatially diffuse congregate of municipalities non-coincidental with the built-up areas. Hydrographical System: The hydrographical system is constituted as an official unit of environmental management in accordance to the new Brazilian Constitution promulgated in 1988; notwithstanding the fact that its status as a unit of planning is in practice both peripheral and mired by diverse political barriers [12]. Neder [12] points out that the implementation of an integrated management of hydrographical systems in metropolitan areas is one of the major challenges in Brazilian metropolitan areas. He puts forward the argument that reference to hydrographical systems as spatial units in metropolitan planning is of primordial importance to the development of comprehensive land use policies. Such comprehensive land use policies would be an important step towards minimizing present and future environmental impacts of human settlements. A major challenge to that model is posed by the diversity of political-administrative spheres - municipality, state and federation. How could hydrographical systems as units of planning be developed in such complex political-administrative territory? Especially in the Brazilian context where municipalities present deeply rooted inequities at social, political, administrative and economical levels.

Figure 1: Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area and its hydrographical systems divisions and the municipalities included in the Guanabara Bay system.

The implementation of the Guanabara Bay Cleaning Programme (GBCP) is seen against the background of these 3 levels (figure 1).

4 The Guanabara Bay Cleaning Programme (GBCP)

The GPCP was launched in the wake of the Rio World Summit in 1992. Against the backdrop of this world spectacle, the Rio de Janeiro State Government announced that it would clean-up the Guanabara Bay. That initiative was formulated as the GBCP. Newspaper headlines touted the program as one of Rio de Janeiro’s hopes for a better future, a key to break the downward spiral of environmental decay and economical demise and an important asset in city’s bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games [10]. GPCP’s initial budget of US$860.5 million was a combination of loans by the Inter-American Development Bank (US$350 million) and Japan’s International Cooperation Agency (US$236.7 million) as well as funds from the Rio de Janeiro State Government (US$273.80 million). The initial loan was later renegotiated with an extra amount of US$ 300 million financed by the Inter- American Development Bank [7]. Provision of sanitation infrastructure is the main area of intervention of the GPCP and absorbs the largest chunk of the budget (88.19%). The proposal is to create a sanitation belt around the Guanabara Bay – through the construction of five new sewage treatment units, remodelling and extension of three existing sewage treatment units, and extension of sewer system pipelines, collectors and underwater emissaries – and the implementation of a water supply system [4, 7].

5 GBCP’s Role in Rio de Janeiro’s urban development

As a component of the GBCP project design, Japan’s International Cooperation Agency produced a report in 1994 identifying three key preconditions for the success of GBCP: (a) empowerment of the environmental governmental agencies, (b) improvement of management capacity and (c) development of communication between different levels of government in Brazil – Federation, the Rio de Janeiro State and municipalities [8]. Throughout the implementation of GBCP it has become clear that these preconditions have not been fulfilled and instead, as argued below, we can ascertain precisely the opposite conditions, namely: (a) lack of empowerment and ineffective environmental governmental agencies, (b) lack of capacity in management, and (c) lack of communication between governmental levels. In addition to these limitations, local environmentalists and NGOs have pointed out that: (a) GBCP problem formulations and decisions have been made in a top-down fashion with the Rio de Janeiro State and International Funds managing the programme without the involvement of the local governments (municipalities) and representatives of civil society; and that (b) GBCP has narrowed its scope to become a sanitation programme with limited comprehension of the Guanabara Bay as a complex ecological system [2].

5.1 Institutional background

A central reproach of GBCP is that its implementation has been effected mainly by a sanitation institution instead of an environmental agency. The public company called CEDAE is the main responsible for the decisions guiding the implementation of GBCP. In addition to CEDAE, there are a number of environmental agencies that have a secondary role in the implementation of GBCP [2, 4]. The prime environmental agency under Rio de Janeiro State Government, FEEMA, was created in the 1970s and quickly became a national reference in the environmental scene before it went bankrupt in the late 1980s [11]. Other public environmental institutions in the Rio de Janeiro Government such as IEF (Forest State Institute) and SERLA (Lakes and Rivers State Secretary) followed a similar a course. Notwithstanding the fact that these three institutions have had a role in the GBPC, their activities have been seriously hampered by their poor technical infrastructure (such as outdated equipment), technicians lacking in capacity, and political inertia. FEEMA came recently to the public eye when it was revealed that a significant number of its technical reports were fictional [11].

5.2 Management challenges

The Guanabara Bay Cleaning Programme highlights several contradictions in the current metropolitan development of Rio de Janeiro. These contradictions can be expressed through two main aspects which pull urban development in opposite directions. On the one hand, the public sector has implemented several interventions whose main goal has been to expand and improve infrastructural services, notably in low-income neighbourhoods - the most prominent of these initiatives being the GBCP. On the other hand, despite efforts by the public sector to minimize intra-metropolitan infrastructural discrepancies, there have been several management challenges and political-administrative barriers undermining achievement of GBCP goals. Indeed, the Rio de Janeiro State Government has not succeeded in dealing with management challenges and political and administrative barriers in the implementation of a project of the scale of the GBCP [1, 10]. From the beginning of GBCP there have been several examples of poor management that have hampered the implementation of the programme. The tender phase was highly problematic due to (a) the excessive time that the State Government took to put the programme out to tender, which delayed the whole GBCP schedule [10] and (b) the existence of several irregularities [3]. A particularly revealing piece of data is that 80% of the contracts drawn between the Rio de Janeiro State Government and developers were subject to amendments and ratifications [3]. Another example is that of implementation of water pipes in the Municipality of Sao Goncalo. The initial diagnosis of infrastructure requirements completely underestimated the demands of the area, construction proved to be far more comprehensive than initially forecast and the budget was largely exceeded [3].

One can also point to the existence several irregularities, where developers won construction contracts that were not put out for tender [3]. Furthermore, the implementation of GBCP was severely delayed, leading the Rio de Janeiro State Government rescheduling the completion of the programme on five occasions. These delays meant that the Government had to renegotiate its loans with international financial institutions (the Inter-American Development Bank and Japan’s International Cooperation Agency) and that the overall cost of the programme shot up to more than US$1 billion – that is a significant increase to the original budget by approximately US$300 million to be pay by the citizens [3]. The GBCP irregularities and delays became so critical that the Rio de Janeiro State Legislative Assembly set up a parliamentary commission in February 2003 to investigate allegations of illicit appropriation of the GBDP financial resources. From its inception in 1995 to 2003 GBCP had spent more than US$855 million (that is, 82% of the loan provided by the international funds) in a number of infrastructural projects; but despite the magnitude of that figure, the programme did not fulfil many of its central goals [1]. According to GBCP implementation schedule, by 1999, 58% of the sewage released in the Guanabara Bay would be treated sewage. By 2003, the actual figure for that particular parameter was 25%. Based on that parameter alone, it was estimated that GBCP was running with a delay of 6 years [3]. In cases where sewage treatment units were built and financed with international loan funds, pipes to connect the domestic sewage to those units, to be funded by the Rio de Janeiro State Government, were not implemented. The ten water reservoirs planned under GBCP have all been built but only one is functional because the State Government has not provided water pipe connections to those reservoirs [3]. In 2005 most of the budget had been spent, with limited benefits to the Rio de Janeiro low-income inhabitants.

5.3 Spatial development

In the above account, there is a particular emphasis on the political and institutional environments in which GBCP has been developed, but the physical environment of Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area is just as important in this analysis and just as complex and ambiguous. The dramatic landscape of Rio de Janeiro has become a powerful iconographic image depicted on postcards and tourist brochures. But besides this appeal, such landscape has also been associated with an occupation by informal settlements, favelas, in the left-over spaces after planned urban development was implemented. This describes the pattern of urban occupation of Guanabara Bay’s South Zone – concentrated within the Rio de Janeiro and Niterói municipalities (Figure 1). The high quality of urban design found in the South Zone – best exemplified by landscape architect Burle Marx’s Aterro do Flamengo park, and Oscar Niemeyer’s monumental urban complex, Caminho Niemeyer, which includes buildings such as the Museum of Contemporary Art – is intimately related to

WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, Vol 84, © 2005 WIT Press www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3541 (on-line) 1326 Sustainable Development and Planning II, Vol. 2 land use and occupation patterns that those areas have presented throughout history. Here are located a number of wealthy neighbourhoods by sandy beaches. An analysis of the bay side urban development in the South Zone reveals thus a consistent trend to create high quality leisure areas or panoramic belvederes by the water front. In those neighbourhoods residents are spatially connected to the Guanabara Bay and the bayside is qualified as an amenity. This high quality of urban design found in the South Zone is intimately related to land use and occupation patterns that those areas have presented throughout history. On the other hand, the Guanabara Bay South Zone has also been exposed to the decay of the Bay’s ecosystem, given the scale and extent of environmental degradation. Thus, the wealthy South Zone neighbourhoods have to share the polluted waters of the Guanabara Bay with the low-income neighbourhoods of the North Zone. Beyond Corcovado Hill and Tijuca Forest, to the north we enter an amorphous and diffuse urban spread – a mix of poor neighbourhoods, with names like Gaza Strip, notorious for narcotics gang warfare, located in the vicinity of industries, ports, oil refineries, landfills, etc. That is the Guanabara Bay’s North Zone – the peripheral municipalities (Figure 1). The bay side of the North Zone has had a completely different type of urban development from the South Zone. Here there were few sandy beaches, but mainly mangroves, which were not socially constructed in connection to leisure activities. As mentioned earlier, that fragile ecosystem has been depleted and replaced by landfills. Most of the North Zone’s bay side was developed for industrial purposes or infrastructure. An example of the latter is the Red Line expressway, which links Rio de Janeiro municipality to the international airport and physically disconnects local neighbourhoods from the Guanabara Bay. While the wealthy municipalities of the South Zone tend to concentrate culture or leisure related land uses, the North Zone “peripheries” tend to be occupied by land uses such as industries, ports and treatment plants. This pattern of land occupation has a huge impact on the Guanabara Bay landscape and reaffirms an urban development process that has been implemented throughout the history of the metropolitan area, where peripheries are burdened with industrial production and heavy infrastructure, while centralities are provided with high quality design and cultural and environmental amenities. In peripheral municipalities, most of the GBCP proposals sever the inhabitants from the bay side [7]. In that connection, Amador and Lima [2] highlight the lack of a more comprehensive environmental approach in the GBCP that would promote connections with the Guanabara Bay. Faced with the implementation of sewage treatment units on mangrove areas in the North Zone by the GBCP, we can observe that that programme perpetuates the existing pattern of urban development, despite the fact that the discourse of sustainability has provided elements to recast the Guanabara Bay in a new light as an ecosystem of prime importance for the entire metropolis, and to re- conceptualize natural elements such as the mangrove in urban development proposals.

That example is representative of the absence of commitment to the potential development of the bay side in the North Zone. The construction of these units has incurred in the destruction of significant mangrove areas and has created a physical barrier between local neighbourhoods and the bayside. GBCP has therefore reaffirmed the spatial disconnection of peripheral neighbourhoods to the bayside and has perpetuated an approach to urban water- front design which fails to recognize the potential of forging new urban identities by recasting the environment through connections with leisure landscapes.

6 Conclusion

The analysis presented here points to a direct correlation between land use, occupation patterns and the bay side urban design. In that light, the GBCP can be characterized as a programme that reaffirms the segregated spatial patterns between the North and South Zones of Rio de Janeiro and as programme of limited environmental scope. These disparate spatial patterns are representative of the unequal urban conditions of the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area and the GBCP proposals have important consequences to the future of the Guanabara Bay urban development. The implementation of GBCP further reveals that the large scale environmental degradation and related risks, seen in terms of the spatial unity of the Guanabara Bay, have a scope which comprises both the North Zone and the South Zone. The hydrographical system thus emerges a prominent spatial element in the urban development of Rio de Janeiro, which is both at the basis of a juxtaposition between favelas (shantytowns) built on the hills and wealthy neighbourhoods by the beaches, and as a system which is central in an account of Rio de Janeiro’s environmental amenities and degradation cutting across social and economic status. If on the one hand, GBCP has played an important role in improving the existing infrastructure of low-income areas in the Rio de Janeiro, on the other hand, its impact has been severely hampered by a number of political, institutional and managerial problems. But besides underlining such political, institutional and managerial complexities and fragmentation, the implementation of GBCP highlights the magnitude of environmental degradation in the Guanabara Bay and brings to the fore the monumental task of managing a metropolis of twelve million inhabitants subject to dynamic spatial relationships. Even though we identify political and institutional fragmentation as serious shortcomings in the implementation of GBCP, it does not follow from the above analysis that some form metropolitan planning would provide a solution to the urban problems discussed here; but a metropolitan government would no doubt offer a platform to frame such problems in a more comprehensive scale and arguably support levels of urban identity and representation across municipal and neighbourhood borders.

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