Since the last decade, urban and peri-urban agriculture has been designated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as a fundamental strategy to provide means of subsistence. Following this trend, since 2006, Rio de Janeiro’s City Hall has been developing the Hortas Cariocas Program (PHC), aiming to encourage urban agriculture and extract the various social and environmental services inherent to the practice. Inside an urban scenario of extreme inequality, and legitimized by the public powers for centuries, we discuss how the Hortas Cariocas Program, with the efforts of its founders, contributes in a practical way to the improvement of the quality of life to the citizens of Rio.

Since the last decade, urban and peri-urban agriculture has been designated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as a fundamental strategy to provide means of subsistence that are resistant to economic disruptions and increasing food prices, as well as contribute to the social and ecological development of cities, bringing up important issues in environmental preservation and food safety. In Brazil, the practice was ranked as one of the Landscape Guidelines for Brazilian cities in the 21st century, at the XIII National Meeting for the Teaching of Landscape Architecture in Architecture and Urban Planning Schools in Brazil (ENEPEA), which happened in Salvador (BA), in 2016.

THE HORTAS CARIOCAS PROGRAM (PHC)

Following this trend, since 2006, Rio de Janeiro’s City Hall has been developing the Hortas Cariocas Program (PHC), aiming to encourage urban agriculture, and extract the various social and environmental services inherent to the practice. Created by the Municipal Secretary of Environment (SMAC), the program specifically targets underprivileged areas, thereby providing work opportunities, reducing irregular occupation rates of vacant lands, boosting social inclusion, offering food genre of higher quality, and paying closer attention to social groups in situation of food un-safety (O’Reilly, 2014). 

According to Júlio César Barros, an agricultural engineer who founded the project, the initiative currently covers about 40 vegetable gardens distributed throughout the city, partly located both in socially vulnerable areas and public schools. In an interview for Green My Favela, Barros highlights that one of the main objectives of the initiative is to popularize the consumption of organic foods by low-income populations, and give them access to the benefits embedded in the consumption of these foods. 

Image 1: Spatial distribution of the vegetable gardens in Rio de Janeiro. Map: PAISA-PROURB-UFRJ

PROJECT GUIDELINES

The initiative — which has lasted through different municipal administrations — predominantly helps to institute social practices. Therefore, to get help from City Hall, citizens from a certain area in which the urban and community garden could be implemented and managed must demonstrate an interest in cultivating food or getting help for an already-initiated production unit. The idea is that the protagonist would be the average citizen, and the vegetable gardens would then follow a “bottom-up” structure, started first by the community and with posterior technical and financial subsidies from City Hall.

The team that develops the tasks in the gardens is mostly composed of members from the community or by students and staff, when in the case of gardens located in the public school network. The size of the team varies according to the size of the unit and it is necessary that each group has a person in charge with previous knowledge in horticulture (Silva, 2019). 

The PHC initiative posits that the gardens associated with the project gain autonomy with time and, therefore, can be emancipated from government funding when ready. Being untied from the support given by City Hall, the emancipated gardens subsequently give space so that other initiatives can be assisted by the project.

For Barros, a particular strength of the program is the existence of financial help to the garden workers. The work developed in the production units is stimulated by City Hall with compensations according to the function performed by the worker. “Volunteering actions in poorer communities tend to get emptier, because people need to supply basic needs,” he said in a statement to Green My Favela in 2015.

In addition to the financial aid given by City Hall, the workers also benefit from the resources generated by the commercialization of food produced in the gardens. The project establishes that half of the production must be donated to daycare centers, nursing homes, shelters, or families in need. The production units are free to commercialize the other half; however, the project orientates the reinvestment of the partial profit, overseeing that the organic produce be sold for accessible prices. But in the case of gardens inside public schools, there is no commercialization of produces: all food is utilized in school meals or donated to students, staff and teachers of the institution.

THE MANGUINHOS GARDEN

Designed in 2013, one of the most emblematic units of the project is the Manguinhos Garden, which exists in a community in the city’s Zona Norte, or North Zone. According to O’Reily (2014, p.49), the space was known as the biggest crack-consuming area of Rio de Janeiro, marked by the presence of drug abuse, insalubrity, and violence. Yet today, it houses Latin America’s biggest urban vegetable garden, with more than 300 vegetable beds. It produces organic vegetables and reconnects people to the processes that involve production and consumption of food.

Image 2: Manguinhos Garden Layout, implanted under the transmission lines in the Manguinhos Favela. Image: PAISA-PROURB-UFRJ

CHALLENGES

Inside an urban scenario of extreme inequality, legitimized by the public powers for centuries — as revealed by the history of the urban evolution of Rio de Janeiro (Abreu, 2013) — the Hortas Cariocas Program, with the efforts of its founders, contributes in a practical way to the improvement of the quality of life to citizens of Rio who have been historically unassisted by the government. However, there is still much to be done, in regards to structuring these spaces in order to expand the social ecological services that urban agriculture can offer (Silva, 2019). It is important to highlight the necessity of multidisciplinary and collective construction of these spaces, in a way where architecture and urbanism can fulfill a number of other functions, may they be educational; environmental; of cultural recovery; or, of promoting positive sociabilities in the city (Santandreu & Lovo, 2007). The absence of a multi-functional and fluid landscape design, for example, as a part of the institutional support given by City Hall, ends up reflecting a spatial and programmatic rigidity that restricts the services offered by the Hortas Cariocas gardens to the city.

To accompany the project, follow their page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/HORTAS-CARIOCAS-146283172142134/)

Douglas dos Santos Silva is an architect and urbanist and a Master in Landscape Architecture by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Currently he is linked to the research group PAISA (Paisagem, Investigação e Sistemas Ambientais) of the Post-Grad Program in Urbanism (PROURB) in the same university.

References: 

Abreu, Maurício.  Evolução urbana do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Pereira Passos, 2013

Barros, Júlio Cesar. Hortas Cariocas, Rio de Janeiro. Entrevista concedida a GlobalCAD/Green My Favela. GMF, 2015. Disponível em: www.greenmyfavela.org. Acesso em: 19/09/2019.

O’REILLY, Érika de Mattos. Agricultura Urbana – Um Estudo De Caso Do Projeto Hortas Cariocas Em Manguinhos, Rio De Janeiro. Projeto de graduação do Curso de Engenharia Ambiental, Escola Politécnica/UFRJ, 2014.

Organização das Nações Unidas para Alimentação e Agricultura – FAO. Horticultura Urbana e Periurbana, Cidades mais verdes, 2015. Disponível em: www.fao.org/ag/agp/greenercities/pt/hup/meios_de_subsistencia.html.

Programa Hortas Cariocas. Prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro, 2019. Secretaria Municipal de Meio Ambiente - SMAC. Disponível em: www.rio.rj.gov.br/web/smac/hortas-cariocas. Acesso em: 19/09/2019.

SANTANDREU, Alain & LOVO, Ivana Cristina. Panorama da agricultura urbana e periurbana no brasil e diretrizes políticas para sua promoção. Belo Horizonte: IPES/Rede RUAF/MDS, 2007. 

SILVA, Douglas dos Santos. Alimento, cidade e desenho: a poética do projeto paisagístico na agricultura urbana. Dissertação de mestrado em Arquitetura Paisagística, FAU-UFRJ, 2019