Material #8: Frontrunner cities in Brazil and Honduras
IIED (Intl. Institute for Environment and Development) has published an inspiring collection of stories about “frontrunner” cities: cities that are combining climate action with transformational benefits for people. Throughout there are references to the materials with which buildings and places are made.
In São Paulo, Brazil, social movements have worked for many years to contest speculative development and secure adequate housing. They are also combining this work with efforts to address climate and environmental challenges in the city. The IIED feature on São Paulo shares three ways that this is happening:
Through “autogestão” forms of housing, residents have control over the planning, construction, maintenance and management of their housing, for example through cooperatives, community land trusts and mutual housing associations. These processes have enabled residents to: “negotiate and address contentious issues about affordability, density, quality of construction material, and environmental sustainability.”
Initiatives to occupy and retrofit apartment buildings in the city centre are countering the process whereby low-income residents are pushed to the city’s peripheries, which in turn increases transit congestion and pollution given the long journeys that people have to take to get to their places of work.
And housing movements are advancing energy justice. For example, Mutirão Paulo Freire is a development housing 100 families which was already known for its innovative use of construction materials and architectural design. It is now installing solar panels, aiming to reduce dependency on the grid, make energy cheaper for residents, and increase the budget that families have available for food.
In Tegucigalpa, Honduras, an adaptation initiative funded by Nordic Development Fund through the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) worked with two informal settlements to strengthen adaptation to climate change. It used a framework based on the assets held and managed by the residents, defining assets as encompassing physical resources like housing and infrastructure, financial resources, human resources including health and education, social resources such as community ties, and natural resources, which collectively are “acquired, developed, improved and transferred across generations".
Taking the priorities and ideas of residents as a starting point, the project established several new approaches to strengthening climate adaptation in the two settlements: particularly the ongoing impacts of heatwaves and droughts, as well as short spurts of very heavy rainfall.
It turned out that the strategies also brought benefits in mitigating climate change, i.e. reducing emissions. This is an important outcome given the fact that mitigation and adaptation are so often seen as separate endeavors. Two examples are:
Green infrastructure projects for planting trees, that serve as carbon sinks while also preventing mudslides in neighborhoods with steep slopes
And the use of recycled tires to build retention walls, which prevent landslides and reduce the burning of tires (a process that contributes to greenhouse gas emissions).
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Read stories from additional cities, including Quito, Santo Domingo and Freetown, in the IIED frontrunner cities collection.
And I have added the insights from São Paulo and Tegucigalpa to the Building Transformation StoryMap, which is updated on an ongoing basis with examples of built environment innovation around the World.
Through 2024, It’s Material is sharing one use of the word “material” each week, on Tuesdays.