A new concept for urban park in Brazil on the 21st. century

Abstract

This article has the objective to show that urban parks established between 2000 and 2017 in Brazilian cities are different from the parks of the twentieth century and have created new design and management challenges. The great parks of the twentieth century were intended for the leisure of the urban masses and were made in central or housing areas of higher income segments. The new parks, largely, were made with less emphasis on leisure provision but, above all, on environmental conservation and are located in less-central neighborhoods or lower-income camps. The article develops from the work of Sakata (2018) that identified the existing parks in 14 cities and highlighted those established between 2000-2017. The parks were allocated on income distribution maps and data were collected on the latest parks on city hall websites, GoogleEarth images, newspaper articles, the reports of the workshops conducted by the Quapá-SEL research group and other surveys. Although the large traditional parks are the reference for the designers and the population, most of the new parks, established mainly from demands for environmental preservation, are inserted in contexts that are very different from those of the traditional parks and, therefore, they present other demands of uses. It is appropriate to review and extend the concept of urban park to cover these new figures, but mainly, it is necessary to re-evaluate the design criteria for the new parks and to increase the management of old and new ones.