outubro, 01 2024

By Leandro Steiw, Insper 

For a year, Insper's Center for City Studies – Arq.Futuro Laboratory 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. 

For Professor Paulina Achurra, who coordinated the project, the successful partnership reinforced three pillars of Insper's Center for City Studies: the use of data and evidence, the participation of professionals from different areas, and the inclusion of local actors in the project construction process. “We are often asked how we differ from other centers working in the same field in Brazil and abroad. This project is a good example to answer that question,” says Paulina. 

In fact, it is possible to detect in the partnership with WWF-Brazil 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 aim of contributing to cities becoming more efficient, inclusive, sustainable and fair, transforming the lives of their inhabitants, especially those living in the most vulnerable areas. 

The project began with a question: what kind of vegetable garden is appropriate for a densely populated area where there are hardly any open spaces? This question was answered by combining a survey of the literature on urban agriculture with listening to local leaders and mapping the territory's strengths and challenges. 

In the joint mapping with the community actors, the strengths and challenges were identified, which made it possible to draw up metrics for the project, as well as choosing as the location for the pilot implementation the context that presented the greatest synergy with the proposal. Listening to the leaders revealed the school facilities dedicated to early childhood as potential and available areas for setting up educational gardens and the local desire to bring greenery closer to the children and the school community. 

The participation of professionals from different areas such as engineering, nutrition, pedagogy, health, and urban planning made it possible to design solutions that leverage strengths and address challenges. “We included the perspective of those who will use it and have direct needs in the design of the project. We develop and satisfy users' basic needs, such as food and nutritional security, and other capacities, such as autonomy and creativity,” explains Paulina. 

Data and evidence from the literature were incorporated through a bibliographic survey of metrics on the positive social, economic, and environmental impacts that urban agriculture can promote, informing which type of agriculture was possible to implement in the region. “The characterization of the territory based on Geosampa data and interviews with local actors revealed the potential of school gardens to bring greenery and health to Heliópolis,” says Samantha Orui, the researcher responsible for implementing the project. 

For Paulina, the project with WWF-Brazil clearly empowered the communities in Heliópolis, who took ownership of the knowledge about urban gardens and, as a result, strengthened their relationship with the Green and Healthy Environments Program (Pavs), run by the São Paulo Municipal Health Department. Pavs, by the way, was already working with community vegetable gardens and nutritional security and breastfeeding initiatives in the same area, carried out in Early Childhood Education Centers (CEI). “That's why it's important to work in harmony with the territories,” says Paulina. 

Full cycle 

The pilot project by the Center for City Studies – Arq.Futuro Laboratory and WWF-Brazil was implemented at CEI Margarida Maria Alves, one of the daycare centers run by the Union of Nuclei, Associations of Residents of Heliópolis and Region (Unas) and affiliated to the city government. Throughout the project, thematic capacity-building workshops were held for the staff of CEI Margarida and UBS Sacomã. Community health workers, together with the environmental promotion agent from UBS Sacomã, for example, learned how to build a worm farm, which is a nature-based solution that transforms organic waste that would otherwise go to landfill into compost. 

Paulina says that the community has also built low-cost phreatic pots to minimize dependence on watering and increase the space available for planting inside the school. The children planted, cultivated, and harvested various species of vegetables, including unconventional food plants (Panc). “After the harvest, the food arrived at the nursery kitchen, was prepared and served, and the waste went back to the worm farm, composted, and returned to the garden,” she recalls. “So the children got to know the whole cultivation cycle.” 

It didn't take long for the project to spread to other nurseries in Heliópolis. “Some coordinators started writing to ask how they could go about setting up a vegetable garden and if we could support them too,” 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 is common for similar programs to survive while the partnership is active and disappear at the end of it. We were very careful to build an ecosystem that would allow the project to continue.” 

Given this concern for continuity, the approach to Pavs was relevant. “Pavs has an incredible capillarity in the city,” says Paulina. “They know all the streets and people and enter every house. And they have an agenda which is to promote these gardens in educational facilities. Pavs has a lot of technical knowledge, and the schools, in turn, have a huge need for this knowledge – all that was missing was getting closer and strengthening the bond. Because we helped strengthen the link between the schools and Pavs, which are now working very closely together.” 

Another challenge of this type of project is to recognize the specificities of each CEI, says Ana Carolina Bauer, conservation analyst at WWF-Brazil. This requires an understanding of the routines of the teachers, caregivers and children, as there will come a time when external partners will no longer be making regular visits. “We've seen that there's a demand for vegetable garden maintenance during the vacation period, so we try to advise that the plants grown during this time should be of species that don't need as much watering and to check who can provide support during this break,” says Ana Carolina. “One of the biggest challenges is to understand, from previous experiences of other gardens and also from the reality of the territory, how we can perpetuate a garden after we leave as a supporter.” 

Transformation 

CEI Margarida was chosen strategically, because it is next to a Municipal Early Childhood Education School (Emei) and an Elementary School (Emef). “We thought about how the pilot project would continue to catalyze other transformations in the territory,” explains Paulina. “If we were able to bring about some transformation at Margarida, we could also transform the schools next to it, so that the students would have and share this contact with greenery throughout their studies. And it was very nice, because at the end of the project the principal of Emef Gonzaguinha approached us to start reproducing the work there. So, they really began to catalyze local transformations.” 

WWF-Brazil is 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 social and environmental issues in cities. São Paulo is a hub with almost 10% of Brazil's population, it has a whole logistics dynamic to bring in food. So, we need to think about 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's symbolic to start this movement in a school, creating an environment favorable to environmental and food education.” 

According to Ana Carolina, school vegetable gardens can contribute to the habit of eating in a diversified way and to the choice of organic food. “People understand that they can also produce food in their backyard, in a pot, for example. We already had experience of vegetable gardens in other places, but Heliópolis was the first in a major capital. Now we have an experience that we have identified as replicable and that will bear good fruit for other CEIs where it is possible to implement it.” 

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

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