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This practice-based research examines platforms and encounters that have a participatory character as a strategy to create lived and shared experiences where new forms of appropriation of the city can emerge. The selected case studies propose and initiate certain urban experiences that induce changes in perception, the exchange of perspectives, and that denaturalize habits and patterns of behavior. I suggest that when these sensitive experiences become imprinted in body memory, they can empower citizens to have more active, creative, and/or critical attitudes towards their environments. Searching for new repertoires of everyday practices that contest commodification of both the body and the city, this thesis is oriented towards open-ended processes of constructing mentalities rather than those of planning changes on the material conditions of public space. It uses forms of academic investigation that merge intellectual debate and experimental practice, joining art, urbanism and social engaged practices in an extradisciplinary (Howes 2007) attitude towards the city. Based on the materials generated by the case studies (combining theoretical knowledge with artistic sensibility), the affective and corporeal involvement of researchers in the situations they analyze and co-create, is sustained in opposition to the traditional academic critical distance.
The present study analysis the environmental benefits of urban vegetation within the municipal boundary of a megacity through multi scale integrated modelling to estimate its benefits approximately. The advantages (and challenges) that Nature, inserted into cities, offers to the population are observed from different viewpoints. As geographical reference the profile of megacities located in low (tropical) latitudes was observed, in a case study on the city of São Paulo/ Brazil. Commonly, urban vegetation is overlooked by local people, governments and economical structures. Although sparse vegetation exists, it is hardly recognized. Along the brief history of rapid urbanization which is accompanied by massive environmental degradation, urban green becomes, in the dispute for space, a true luxury in cities like São Paulo. Not as retrogression but as advance, it demonstrates that the integration between nature and city would be desirable. The approximated quantification of the variations which occur between actual scenario and greened scenarios shows the need to rethink the urban biome as a man-dominated ecosystem. The benefits of the urban vegetation are diverse. This work details plants as agents of climatic and ecosystem balance and performance. It also approaches current issues like climate change, energy efficiency and thermal comfort, as well as the purification of natural resources, through the treatment of water, soil and air. Especially because at present no efficient technical solutions exist, that could substitute the environmental services of the vegetation. These benefits contribute to quality of life and increase socio-environmental equity especially important in high-contrast megacities. The vegetation assumes two important roles in cities. The functional dimension brings concrete and measurable benefits to the environment. From a symbolic vision, vegetation represents Nature in cities, approximating humans to their origins. Conclusively the study defends the importance of the valorization of Nature and of the united efforts for literally green cities because it proves that financial investment in urban vegetation has direct effects on the costs destined to the areas of health and infrastructure. The City of São Paulo, invested in 2008 about US$ 180 million (one hundred and eighty million dollars) in urban green (and environment) which tends to save US$ 980 million (nine hundred and eighty million dollars) of expenses annually. In other words, for each US$ 1 invested in planting and maintenance of urban green, the society saves at least US$ 5 of expenses in health, construction of French drains, energy etc.