Together We Make Santa Marta Home: Fostering Community Ownership and Environmental Stewardship in Vila Santa Marta, Brazil

Abstract

Santa Marta is an informal settlement in São Leopoldo, a city approximately 30 kilometers north of Porto Alegre, Brazil. São Leopoldo has a conglomeration of informal and formal settlements, which include regularized neighborhoods and public housing projects. Santa Marta faces a host of environmental challenges that result from trash dumping in public spaces, trash burning, animals opening trash bags, and inadequate sewage, water systems, and road infrastructure. These issues stem from systemic inequalities within the governmental structure that provides waste management and infrastructure resources, as well as the lack of public participation in the participatory budget process. Our project partners have already combined efforts and have begun working with the municipal government of São Leopoldo to address these issues. This report is a continuation of their efforts.

During our site visit in March 2015 we gathered information from interviews, surveys, participatory mapping exercises, and visioning sessions. In addition, we established relationships with the students and teachers from the Santa Marta K-9 Municipal School, the São Leopoldo Prefeitura (Municipal Government), and the Santa Marta Neighborhood Association. These efforts have shaped the content of our recommendations for intervention and have been invaluable in determining the underlying factors that enable the identified issues to persist.

In this report we provide a number of different recommendations and initiatives that can be used and implemented in the local community; these initiatives will encompass and improve environmental stewardship and communication between the local government and the community at large, activate public spaces, and create a greater sense of community pride and community ownership. The success of our project depends directly on meeting the needs of our community partners and better understanding the interactions between the municipality and the community.

This report is a guidebook for leaders in Santa Marta to use to address the key issues and problems identified herein. We carefully compiled it by using Santa Marta’s history and natural environment as the initial stepping stones toward creating initiatives that not only address the identified issues in a comprehensive manner, but also instigate recommendations that are holistic and wide-reaching. The report begins with an introduction that provides background information on Santa Marta to provide context for the targeted issues and problems in the community. The second part of the report discusses the different types of research methods we used to better understand the Santa Marta community and the underlying issues at hand. The third part of the report synthesizes the data gathered and analyzes the core issues we identified. The final two sections detail the recommendations we propose and the visions we see for activated public spaces in Santa Marta.

The community of Santa Marta has a history of strong collective action among residents and the capacity to re-envision and redefine what it means to be a proud resident of Santa Marta. Using this report as both a learning and advocacy tool, we hope that it can help bring more community cohesion, inspire environmental stewardship across the different generations living in the community, and serve as an example for other informal settlements.

Muito obrigado pela sua consideração, The University of Michigan Urban and Regional Planning International Capstone