A hipótese otimista: dialética e utopia das áreas verdes, das áreas protegidas e da trama verde e azul

Abstract

The rule that establishes a green space also establishes a non-green one. The act which creates a protected area defines a much larger unprotected area around it. Considering these paradoxes, should we expect that the more green and protected spaces there are, the less green and protected the world will be? Or, on the contrary, should we believe that there will come a time when, due to a deep transformation in the human-nature relationship, all social space will fit into the current concepts of green and protected spaces? Concerns about the future of green spaces and protected areas are the main motivation of this thesis, which aims to build a dialectical and utopian reading of the history of the spaces that urban-industrial society creates to provide entertainment in contact with nature and to protect nature from exploitation. Having Henri Lefebvre's work, Marxist utopian thought and the dialectical method as conceptual framework, the thesis questions the existence of such spaces and suggests that they can be understood as transitory as expressions of an industrial society that is facing a critical stage, just about to go through a profound socio-spatial transformation that will consolidate it as fair, equitable, democratic and ecological. Assuming that when the transformation is fulfilled the ecological, playful and self-managed essence of the production of social space will have overcome the concepts of green spaces and protected areas, this possible-impossible future is referred to as optimistic hypothesis. Considering this optimistic hypothesis as an illuminating virtuality of past and present time, the thesis re-assembles the history of those concepts/spaces, pursuing its contradictions. In this movement, it recapitulates its modern origins, recalling the first European public parks and gardens and the first national parks in the US. The thesis also recalls the contemporary contradictions related to such spaces, concerning the tension between the capitalization and communalization of nature, and prospects their future, developing the utopian dimension inscribed in the green and blue grid (a proposal conceived under the Macrozoning Project of the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte). Thus, the dialectic utopia of this optimistic hypothesis contains both the critique of the contradictions of green spaces and protected areas and a path to overcome them. With this thesis, we intend to contribute to the development of a critical debate on those spaces/concepts and to concur to the rehabilitation of utopian thinking engaged in overcoming the obstacles that make the possible temporarily impossible.