Notes on the occupation of the slopes of Tijuca massif, in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Mountains frame the landscape of the city of Rio de Janeiro and serve as support for the Atlantic forest and the urban fabric on its borders that gradually advances on it. This article analyzes the process of urban settlement on the slopes of the city of Rio de Janeiro, from a comparative analysis of landscape morphology. It focuses on the Tijuca Massif, whose slopes experience constant urban pressure from real-estate interests and territorial disputes around the edges of the Atlantic forest. This article describes occupation patterns found on the slopes of the city and specifically in the Tijuca Massif and points out the effects of local urban planning legislation on the landscape, linking them to the territorial appropriation processes and resulting environmental conflicts. The border between the Atlantic forest and the urban fabric on the slopes of Rio de Janeiro is an heterogeneous, unstable, and dynamic transition zone with different levels of occupation (strips), whose internal structural logic affect the configuration of the others, causing impacts, tension, and conflicts. These strips form a gradient of occupation, where the inner strips (mixed bands) are the ones that suffer the most dynamic changes, affecting and impacting the outer ones. Within these mixed bands, high income strata neighborhoods and favelas (slums) establish contiguous and complementary relationships among themselves. This picture demonstrates that urban planning, management, and the logic of urban occupation on the slopes of Rio de Janeiro need to evolve through a process of adjustment toward a regenerative urbanism, in which open spaces exert a structuring role to connect, articulate, and guarantee landscape resilience against geological hazards and mitigate the antithesis between the forest, formal settlements and the slums.