Urban forests and forest urbanities in Rio de Janeiro – A Historical Geography

• Autor(a) principal: Cabral, Diogo
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Solórzano, Alexandro, Ribeiro de Oliveira, Rogério
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Ambientes (Francisco Beltrão)
• Texto Completo: https://e-revista.unioeste.br/index.php/ambientes/article/view/25279
• topic: Florestas tropicais; Rio de Janeiro; urbanização; parques urbanos; história ambiental.

Rio de Janeiro’s urban forests are one of the utmost expressions of the more-than-human character of so-called ‘cultural landscapes.’ Far from untouched nature, Rio’s forests are plant communities that developed on land previously used for agriculture, energy production, water supply, and human housing, among other purposes. Traces of such activities can still be spotted in all corners of these forests, which are currently protected areas. While some of these marks - such as water tanks, stairs, and banana plantations - are easily noticeable by anyone, others are so organically integrated into the landscape that only a trained eye can discern them. Examples of these features are jackfruit-dominated sections of the forest, and small plateaus carved into hillsides with strangely blackened soils. In this article, we investigate the origins of these two landscape features using fieldwork, primary written sources, and iconography, in addition to the relevant historiography. This historical reconstruction reveals the inextricable interpenetration between socioeconomic and cultural processes such as the expansion of mercantile agriculture and urban expansion, and ecological processes such as secondary succession and biological invasion. We argue that both types of processes are part of the same evolving lifeworld, undergirded by a network of more-than-human relationships that generate city and forest at the one and same time. It is this socio-natural dialectic that explains why Rio de Janeiro is nowadays a city full of forests that, if carefully inspected, reveal themselves full of urban history.