AVALIAÇÃO DA QUALIDADE DAS ÁREAS VERDES URBANAS: uma abordagem com base nas suas funções

Abstract

The lack of natural elements is a relevant concern for nowadays urban environments. Green areas can improve urban spaces by increasing the quality of life of their habitants and users. However, they may face obstacles such as the real estate speculation resulted from urban growth. A way to handle that problem consists in integrating green areas as an element of the urban planning process by means of its different functions to enable a joint and equitable assessment of their quality in urban environments. Towards this goal this work proposes the Urban Green Areas Quality Index (IQAVU) which applies the geometric mean on the environmental, social and aesthetic functions of green areas. In IQAVU, each function is characterized by a set of corresponding indicators that vary from 0 to 1. With IQAVU, the equitable relevance of each function accounts for the fact that an urban green area can not be considered functional at all if it completely fails in at least one of its functions. Also, IQAVU is aimed to assess urban green areas regardless of their demographic, geographic or political particularities. In this sense this work also presents a case study to test IQAVU in two cities abroad namely Coimbra, in Portugal, and Ponta Grossa in Brazil. To enable the case study, this work relied on geotechnology tools to mapping, localizing and dimensioning urban green areas. Moreover, some indicators of the aesthetic and social functions (e.g. elements with water, urban furniture and flooring) required gathering data on the field. The results are presented with respect to two scenarios, the realist and the optimistic. The former case is based on the data collected in the study. In the latter case the worst indicators of each city were improved to the highest value to check how much they could impact the overall index of the corresponding function. In the realist scenario, Coimbra scored an IQAVU of 0.34. In that case, the functions with highest and lowest scores were the aesthetic and environmental, respectively. For Ponta Grossa, the IQAVU reached was 0.32 and the functions with highest and lowest scores were the social and the environmental, respectively. The presented methodology was shown as an an effective urban planning tool to assist comparison among cities and to identify which indicators need priotization for investment.