Urban environmental quality and wellbeing in the context of incomplete urbanization in Brazil: integrating directly experienced ecosystem services into planning

The benefits of urban greenspace to residents are increasingly recognized as important to planning for sustainable and healthy cities. However, the way that people interact with and benefit from urban greenspace is context dependent and conditioned by a range of social and material factors. This paper applies and expands the ecosystems services based approach to understanding urban environmental quality and the way in which greenspace is appropriated by residents in the context of incomplete urbanization in three peri-urban target areas in Brazil. We develop and employ the notion of indirect (scientifically detected) and directly experienced ecosystems services, and undertake a science based ecosystem services assessment and a qualitative analysis of interviews, walking narratives and images captured with a smartphone application to understand what functions urban greenspace serves in the daily life of the studied neighborhoods. Findings demonstrate how elements of urban greenspace and what can be termed ecosystem services serve both material and signifying functions and produce subjective and collective benefits and dis-benefits that hinge on aspects of livability such as quality of urban service delivery, housing status and perceptions of crime and neighborhood character. We identify factors that enable, hinder and motivate both active material and interpretative interactions with urban greenspace. The findings suggest that the relationship between ecosystem service provision and wellbeing is better understood as reciprocal rather than one way. Although at the neighborhood scale, fear of crime and poor access to urban services can hinder positive engagements with urban greenspace and experienced benefits form ES, urban squares and fringe vegetation is also being appropriated to address experienced disadvantages. Presently however these local interactions and ecosystem service benefits are overlooked in formal planning and conservation efforts and are increasingly compromised by growing population density and environmental degradation. We make recommendations for a nuanced assessment of the material and interpretative human-nature interactions and associated ecosystem services in an urban context, and discuss the potential for planning initiatives that could be employed to articulate and nurture these important interactions in our target areas

Medidas saneadoras na gestão do estoque

Com a iminente conclusão das obras remanescentes da Itaipu Binacional, e atendendo a orientações da nova administração, foram realizadas mudanças em práticas e procedimentos internos da gestão de estoques, que possibilitaram a redução do valor do estoque em 15,7% (redução de US$8 milhões) em dois anos, sem prejuízo do nível de atendimento aos clientes internos (atendimento de 99medidas administrativas resultaram na diminuição da área de pátio em aproximadamente 90$1,4 milhões ao ano, relativo ao custo de não manter o carregamento do estoqueNúmero de páginas: 5 p.InovaçãoIniciativa premiada no 10º Concurso Inovação na Gestão Pública Federal sob responsabilidade de Moacyr Ribeiro da Silva Jr., Gerente do Departamento de Gestão de Estoques. Ações premiadas no 10º Concurso Inovação na Gestão Pública Federal – 2005. Áreas temáticas: implementação de melhoria contínua; melhorias dos processos de trabalh