As planned, we have spent this week in meetings with local activists and visits to other gardens and gardening communities in Rio. The conversations and meetings we’ve attended have sparked interesting new ideas and debates about where our resources and energy will be most productive during our short time here.
Monday we met with Lea Rekow of Green My Favela (greenmyfavela.org), and her co-worker Michele. Lea spoke with us for a while about the difficulties and successes of her own urban gardening project, also located in the Valão region at the NGO Rocinha Mundo da Arte. The project was begun in January 2012 in an abandoned lot full of trash and bricks. Lea and an initial team of volunteers cleared out most of the trash, leaving an enormous banana tree, and built concrete terraces. Tomatoes have done well in the plot, as well as herbs, and they have made use of creative planting and watering techniques such as using plastic soda bottles as containers and running hoses through the soil in the containers to water from within.
Cool use of recycled bottles!
Lea in the garden!
Lea mentioned the challenges they have faced as well, including building community support for the project, changing leadership, dense clay soil, cats leaving fecal presents, and language difficulties. The project is now in the hands of the NGO, and Lea is on the search for new green spaces to cultivate in Rio. From talking to her, it seemed that a large part of the problem was coming in as an outsider to a community that had not explicitly expressed a desire for a garden.
After visiting her garden, Lea led us to a meeting on urban, organic agriculture downstairs in the NGO’s main building. Due to Rio+20 (UN and People’s conference on sustainable development, for more information see rio2.gov.br) happening right now, there is a lot of attention being paid to these issues, and this meeting was being led by an organic farmer to educate Rocinha residents about the importance of cultivating plants for personal and societal health.
Organic farmer Leonardo speaking about the importance of local, organic produce at Rocinha Mundo da Arte.
We spoke to him after the meeting to learn more about the organic movement in Brazil, and also spoke with leaders at Mundo da Arte to hear more about how they see the importance of the garden made by Lea and what role it plays in their work.
On Tuesday morning we met with George Howell, director of IcOS Cidadania, about a project he has been working on called Formiga Limpa, Formiga Linda. Within the informal community of Formiga (located about an hour by public transit from Rocinha) he and team members have researched and polled community members to form community-led initiatives on trash and waste management. He noted that many of the immigrants in this community are former agricultural workers from Minas Gerais, and have cultivated flourishing gardens around their homes. Attempting to grow fruits and vegetables for subsistence, however, seems less popular. Howell’s interest in making Formiga a model of sustainable favela development has caused him to begin to push for urban agriculture both for aesthetic value and as a source of food, utilizing available ground space but also rooftops and walls. He described important issues at stake in his approach to development, namely the idea that the future of urbanism cannot continue to be modeled upon American or European cities and will likely involve informal developments as in Rio or Lagos, Nigeria. He stressed the many collateral benefits of urban agriculture (which we were excited to hear) and noted that he hoped to make Formiga an example of where this worked. He cautioned us to limit the scope of our project to focus on a specific community, and noted that an issue with urban agriculture is how to sustain such a project without a huge cash injection. He suggested matching resources with participants, as well as beginning other sustainable practices like composting and seed saving. We thought it could also be smart to sell the produce within the community or in richer parts of Rio where people could afford to pay more, as well as selling plants to not only make money but also spread the practice of cultivating plants in homes. We made a plan to visit Formiga on Wednesday to observe and help a green space mapping project that another organization had planned.
After the meeting we went back to the palestra at Mundo da Arte to meet with Leonardo, the organic farmer. He gave us links to an organic seed company in Brazil that we have emailed about purchasing seeds.
On Wednesday, we left Rocinha early to get to Formiga. Unfortunately the green spaces mapping project had fallen through, but we went for a walk through the community with Luciano, one of George’s co-workers, to help put up signs advertising an upcoming meeting about their own forays into gardening and permaculture.
Courtney and Luciano at the beginning of our walk!
Courtney putting up a sign for Formiga Limpa, Formiga Linda.
We were amazed by the greenery of Formiga, as George had promised. Plants burst from rooftops, porches, and roadsides.
Evidence of Formiga Limpa, Formiga Linda’s work on recycling and waste management in Formiga!
At a school by the highest point in Formiga, Luciano showed us plants cultivated by the schoolchildren in old soda bottles. We also saw a government garden project that seemed to be doing quite well. The gardener had formed the hillside into terraces and made use of creative pots like an old toilet.
Hortas Cariocas, sponsored by the government.
After our visit to Formiga, we went to meet Marcio Mattos de Mendonça, coordinator of the urban agriculture program of ASPTA . Marcio described the history of this organization, from its beginnings developing agriculture in the more rural west of Rio, to current projects creating links between urban agriculture groups in Rio. He encouraged us to keep doing what we were doing, to continue to talk to people within the community of Rocinha and understand the logic of our surroundings. He noted that the best strategy was just to speak to people, and then to help people who are interested to work together by providing connections, resources and space.
On Thursday, following Marcio’s advice, we spent the day at i2i meeting the students and fellow volunteers. We went and spoke about our ideas briefly at the end of two of the afternoon classes with the older students, getting the sense that at least a few of them would be interested in being involved with growing plants at i2i. We also got a lot of helpful feedback from other volunteers at i2i who know the community of Rocinha better than us. Some of them questioned the necessity of growing food when cheap produce was relatively available in Rocinha, causing us to reflect and realize that the problem isn’t entirely the availability of fruits and vegetables, it is also the use that people make of them. Cooking and eating practices also need to be reevaluated, as the cheapest food is often the most unhealthy from our observations. We also reflected upon our own sense of the importance of organic and sustainable agriculture as something we didn’t want to impose upon people, but a component of individual and societal health that is really important to us even though it is more foreign in Rocinha.
On Friday we met with Daniel and Rogério, two of the leaders at i2i, and discussed a feasible project plan. Their ideas seemed to generally accord with what we had gathered from our week of research. i2i does not seem to be the ideal site for a permanent garden, lacking motivated community members to carry it on, but a temporary program of cultivation and education for the students will be much more feasible. We plan to offer our first group meeting next Wednesday, and to spend Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week working at i2i with a garden group dedicated to cultivating plants both at the institute and back at home. We hope that a lot of this project will be educationally focused around issues of health and nutrition, and as such that we will be cooking, eating and learning together often.
Through our conversation with Marcio and another talk with Courtney’s friend Paula, we have also identified a few sites and communities that would like to form permanent gardens. This upcoming week we plan to visit these sites to see if our resources and skills would be a match for their needs, and we may end up with another more permanent garden space as well.
Saturday we took a break from working, and went to the beach with a lot of the kids from i2i. It’s all about talking to people, right? I’d say that can extend to playing in the waves with people, too.
Cultivating Restorative Spaces 