Over the course of a year, the Center for City Studies – Arq.Futuro Laboratory at Insper worked with WWF-Brazil on the project “Promoting food security, sovereignty, and sustainability in urban communities,” in Heliópolis, the largest favela in the city of São Paulo.

 

To professor Paulina Achurra, who coordinated the project, the successful partnership reinforced three pillars of the work the Center for City Studies at Insper has been conducting: the use of data and evidence, the collaboration of professionals from different areas, and the inclusion of local stakeholders in the development of the projects. “We are often asked what sets us apart from other centers that work in the same field in Brazil and abroad. This project provides a good example to answer this question,” observes Paulina.

 

In fact, the partnership with WWF-Brazil showcases each of the bases that guide the work and mission of the Center: the idea that knowledge about cities requires considering them as a multi and transdisciplinary field of action, in which academic science, in an innovative way, joins citizen science with the objective of contributing to making cities more efficient, inclusive, sustainable, and fair, thus transforming the lives of their inhabitants – especially those who live in the most vulnerable areas.

 

The project began with a question: what type of garden is appropriate for a densely populated territory, where there are almost no open areas? This question was answered by combining a survey of academic material on urban agriculture with the input of local leaders and the mapping of the strengths and challenges of the territory.

 

The mapping, carried out jointly with community stakeholders, identified the strengths and challenges which allowed us to draw up metrics for the project, in addition to choosing the location for the pilot implementation that presented the greatest synergy with the proposal. The consultation with the leaders revealed that school facilities dedicated to early childhood were potential and available areas for the implementation of educational gardens, and the local desire to bring green spaces closer to children and the school community were equally promising.

 

The collaboration of professionals from various areas such as engineering, nutrition, pedagogy, health and urban planning made it possible to design solutions that leverage the strengths and address the challenges. “We included in the design of the project the perspective of those who will use the project and directly need it. We developed and satisfied the basic needs of users, such as food and nutritional security, and other capabilities, such as autonomy and creativity,” explains Paulina.

 

Data and evidence from academic literature were incorporated through the bibliographic survey of metrics on the positive social, economic, and environmental impacts that urban agriculture can promote, thus revealing which type of it was possible to be implemented in the region. “The characterization of the territory based on data from Geosampa and interviews with local stakeholders revealed the potential of vegetable gardens in school facilities to bring greenery and health to Heliópolis,” comments Samantha Orui, researcher responsible for implementing the project.

 

 

To Paulina, the project with WWF-Brazil made clear the empowerment of the communities in Heliópolis, which acquired knowledge about urban gardens and, as a consequence, strengthened their relationship with the Program for Green and Healthy Environments (from the original, Programa Ambientes Verdes e Saudáveis - PAVS) of the Municipal Health Department of the capital of São Paulo. It is worthy of note that PAVS was already working with community gardens and nutritional security as well as breastfeeding initiatives in the same location, carried out in Early Childhood Education Centers (from the original, Centros de Educação Infantil - CEI). “That is why it is important to work in harmony with the territories,” says Paulina.

 

 

Full cycle

 

The pilot project of the Center for City Studies – Arq.Futuro Laboratory and WWF-Brazil was implemented at CEI Margarida Maria Alves, one of the daycare centers of the Union of Centers, Residents' Associations of Heliópolis and Nearby Regions (from the original, União de Núcleos, Associações dos Moradores de Heliópolis e Região - Unas) in partnership with the city government. Throughout the project, thematic workshops were held to instruct the CEI Margarida and UBS Sacomã teams. Community health agents, together with the environmental promotion agent of UBS Sacomã, for example, learned how to build a worm farm, a nature-based solution that transforms organic waste that would otherwise go to landfills into fertilizer.

 

Paulina says that the community also built low-cost water tanks to minimize dependence on irrigation and increase the availability of space for planting inside the school. The children planted, cultivated, and harvested various species of vegetables, including non-conventional food plants. “After the harvest, the food arrived at the nursery kitchen, was prepared and served, and the waste returned to the worm farm, was composted, and returned to the garden,” she recalls. “So the children learned about and experienced the entire cultivation cycle.”

 

It did not take long for the project to have an impact on other daycare centers in Heliópolis. “Some coordinators started writing to us to find out how they could do the same process of implementing a vegetable garden and whether we could support them as well,” says Paulina. “When we started, we were very clear that we needed to think about what would happen after the year planned for the project. It’s common for similar programs to survive while the partnership is active and disappear at the end of it. We were very careful so we could build an ecosystem that would allow the project to continue.” Given this concern for continuity, the approach with PAVS was important. “PAVS has an incredible reach in the city,” says Paulina. “They know every street and person and go into every house. And their agenda is to promote these vegetable gardens in educational facilities. PAVS has a lot of technical knowledge; the schools, in turn, have a huge need for this knowledge. All that was missing was for them to get closer and strengthen that bond. Therefore, what we did was help to strengthen the connection between the schools and the PAVS, which are now working very closely together.”

 

Another challenge of this type of project is to recognize the specificities of each CEI, emphasizes Ana Carolina Bauer, conservation analyst at WWF-Brazil. This requires understanding the routines of the teachers, assistants, and children, since there will come a time when external partners will no longer be making regular visits. “We saw that there is a demand for maintaining the vegetable gardens during the vacation period, so we try to advise them to grow species that do not require as much watering during this period, and to check who can provide support during this interval,” says Ana Carolina. “One of the biggest challenges is to understand, based on previous experiences with other vegetable gardens and also the reality of the territory, how we can perpetuate a vegetable garden after we, as a supporter, leave.”

 

 

Transformation

 

The choice of CEI Margarida was a strategic one, as it is located next to a Municipal School of Early Childhood Education and an Elementary School. “We thought about how the pilot project could continue to catalyze other transformations in the area,” explains Paulina. “If we could bring about some transformation in Margarida, we could also transform the schools next door, so that the students could have and share this contact with nature throughout their academic careers. And it was really cool, because at the end of the project the director of the Elementary School Gonzaguinha approached us with the intent of starting to reproduce the work at that institution. So local transformations really were catalyzed.”

 

WWF-Brazil has been increasingly trying to change the curve of environmental degradation, says Ana Carolina. “We usually work less in urban areas, but we understand that we need to intervene everywhere. We believe that the agenda related to food waste, food security, and food sovereignty is a great way to approach socio-environmental issues in cities. São Paulo is a hub, with almost 10% of the Brazilian population, and it has a whole dynamic logistics system for bringing in food. Therefore, we need to think of ways of producing our own food, considering social and environmental inequality and the possibility of food diversification. A vegetable garden is a small thing to solve a structural problem like this; but at the same time, it is symbolic to start this movement at a school, creating an environment that is favorable to environmental and food education.”

 

According to Ana Carolina, school gardens can contribute to the habit of eating a variety of foods and choosing organic foods. “People understand that they can also produce food in their backyard, in a pot, for example. We had already had experiments with gardens in other places, but Heliópolis was the first one in a major capital. Now, we have an experiment that we identify as replicable and that will bear good fruit for other CEIs where it can be implemented.”

 

The ability to enhance changes in the lives of the population is due to the variety of partners who collaborated on the urban garden project. In addition to people from academia and the local region, as previously highlighted, the initiative had the participation of members of non-governmental organizations, civil society, local government, and public institutions, which expanded the pillar of multiplicity of agents involved. “This combination of identifying the strengths of each stakeholder and working together is powerful, because in vulnerable territories, funds are always a necessity,” Paulina points out. “Identifying existing government programs that we can build on to catalyze local transformation is an efficient strategy, but not always an obvious one.”

 

The continuity of the agendas opened by the project “Promotion of food security, sovereignty, and sustainability in urban communities” — which had resources for only one year — will be guaranteed for some time to come by the financing from the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies at San Diego State University, in the United States, obtained through a public notice, for the project Environmental Education from 3 to 30. According to Paulina, the experiment at CEI Margarida can now be scaled up to other educational facilities in Heliópolis — and has already opened up doors for future collaborations among all partners.