Peripheral parks in Rio de Janeiro show how communities sustain biocultural heritage

Two neglected open spaces on the margins of Rio de Janeiro’s metropolitan region are the focus of a new research article arguing that the resilience and sustainability of urban landscapes depend not only on legal instruments but on the recognition of socioenvironmental rights, the appreciation of local knowledge, and shared governance. The study, published in the journal Built Heritage, examines the Rocinha Ecological Park (PER) and the Nova Iguaçu Municipal Natural Park (PNMNI), both located in socially vulnerable peripheral areas, and asks how grassroots participation and university partnerships can reshape local governance where institutional coordination is absent or insufficient.

The author, Mônica Bahia Schlee, a landscape architect and urban planner with more than three decades of experience in municipal governments in Rio de Janeiro and Nova Iguaçu, adopts what she describes as an activist-researcher perspective. She has engaged as a participant-observer and collaborator with the Amigos do Parque Ecológico da Rocinha (APER) collective since 2022. The investigation uses a qualitative, exploratory, comparative methodology built on two case studies, combining a literature review, systematic direct observation, and document analysis of community and university outreach experiences, including management plans, academic theses, social media content, and volunteer programme materials.

The empirical output takes the form of qualitative analytical matrices that label and categorise field data under themes such as legal framework, governance, institutional coordination, community mobilisation, and territorial integration. Each table cell was populated with evidence drawn from at least two independent sources where available. The coding proceeded in three stages: labelling field notes, documents, and social media content; grouping labels into core categories; and identifying patterns cutting across the two cases. The author is explicit that this insider positionality unites expert analysis of documentary sources with a critical perspective on institutional biases.

The theoretical framework integrates the concepts of biocultural heritage, living heritage, and cultural decentrality. Biocultural heritage, an approach that emerged in Latin America, recognises the interconnections between the natural and cultural aspects of territories through synergistic relationships, flows, and tangible and intangible connections. Living heritage, as discussed in the article, grounds conservation in the continuity of use, the perpetuation of ongoing connections between communities and the sites they value. Cultural decentrality, a notion the author develops from Homi Bhabha’s concepts of third space, hybridity, and cultural difference, is offered as a strategy to recognise peripheral knowledge and reconfigure hierarchies of value in the heritage field, deliberately aligned with the geographic notion of spatial centrality.

The article situates these concepts against a structural critique of Brazilian heritage practice. Although the 1988 Federal Constitution broadened heritage definitions and the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage introduced a Cultural Landscape Seal in 2009, the author argues that prevailing practices remain shaped by criteria that historically prioritised the stylistic uniformity of colonial ensembles and the exceptional character of urban monuments. The seal’s creation process was suspended by IPHAN in 2014 and has remained suspended since. In the Rio metropolitan region, the contrast is stark: the coastal core concentrates most officially protected assets, including the UNESCO World Heritage site Carioca Landscapes between the Mountain and the Sea (2012), the Valongo Wharf Archaeological Site, and the Sítio Roberto Burle Marx, while favelas and peripheral territories remain largely excluded from preservation policies.

The exclusion extends into the documentation itself. According to the article, the nomination dossier and management plan for the Carioca Landscapes site identify the favelas within its buffer zone as one of the ‘urban pressures’ affecting the property, describing them as illegal occupations alongside transmission towers, pollution, hunting, deforestation, and waste accumulation. The author reads this as a structural stigma directed at predominantly Black and low-income communities. It is against this backdrop that the two case parks, both in socially vulnerable areas, are presented as potential spaces of socioenvironmental and cultural integration.

The Rocinha Ecological Park originated in a proposal by residents as an alternative to the state government’s 2004 plan to build a wall around the favela to contain its expansion towards Tijuca National Park. Envisioned as a buffer between the favela and the Atlantic Forest, the park was partially completed in 2012 with a tennis court, football field, outdoor gym equipment, amphitheatre, playground, and restrooms. It then deteriorated amid unresolved land tenure issues, jurisdictional conflicts between state and municipal authorities, limited maintenance funding, and the unresolved 2013 case of Amarildo Dias de Souza, a local Afro-descendant resident presumably killed in the park by military police. Since 2022, the APER collective, coordinated by a core team of eight volunteers, has organised monthly cultural ‘occupations’ called Superação, community clean-ups, artistic workshops in literature, drawing, and graffiti, environmental education activities, and community meals, aiming to reactivate the park as a community, cultural, and educational space.

The Nova Iguaçu Municipal Natural Park tells a different story. Its origins trace to 1985, when the city hall declared a privately owned plot of public utility for expropriation; the state government then purchased the land through what the article describes as a fraudulent transaction, intending a housing programme in an area designated as a water protection zone in 1951. After the purchase was revoked and resident families compensated, the park was established in 1998. It spans 1,100 hectares across Nova Iguaçu and Mesquita, preserving well-preserved Atlantic Forest over the Gericinó, Madureira, and Mendanha mountain ranges, with circular volcanic rock formations attesting to an extinct volcano. Its most significant achievement has been the partnership with the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ), which produced a digital library of more than 120 bibliographic references, volunteer programmes, reforestation projects, thematic maps, and a story map created by geography students in 2022.

The comparative results reveal a shared structural bias with contrasting pathways. At PER, governance is entirely absent: no appointed manager, no staff, no legal framework, and no management council, leaving the Atlantic Forest remnant vulnerable to real estate pressure, deforestation, and waste dumping. At PNMNI, governance is present but fractured: the park spans two municipalities yet only one manages it, the management plan is outdated, the advisory council has only ten appointed members, and seven employees and nine interns cover 1,100 hectares. PNMNI nonetheless attracts visitors, 63 percent of them male and mostly aged 16 to 28 according to a 2025 public use report, with nearly half of Mesquita’s visitors coming from the adjacent favela of Coreia. The author concludes that what distinguishes the cases is not the presence or absence of value but the pathways through which value is activated: community self-organisation at PER produces resilience from below, while university mediation at PNMNI produces resilience through knowledge infrastructure. Neither pathway is sufficient alone, and both parks remain excluded from cultural heritage policies, face armed territorial conflicts in their surroundings, and lack gender-sensitive mechanisms that would enable women to visit safely.

The discussion argues that participation does not merely influence governance but constitutes it, with civil society and academic networks becoming de facto comanagers of heritage landscapes in peripheral contexts. The study also frames its limitations: the analysis relied primarily on documentary sources, participant observation, and assessment of collective initiatives, and future research should incorporate interviews and oral histories to understand how residents, activists, educators, and park users experience these landscapes. Its concluding claim is that heritage values emerge through practices of engagement rather than legal designation alone, and that interpreting open spaces as biocultural heritage offers a framework for overcoming the nature–culture divide while recognising peripheral territories as active sites of knowledge production, environmental stewardship, and cultural innovation.

Subject of Research: Social participation and governance in the conservation of two peripheral open spaces in Rio de Janeiro's metropolitan region

Article Title: Open spaces as biocultural heritage: perspectives on cultural decentrality, resilience and sustainability in Rio de Janeiro’s metropolitan landscape

Article References: Schlee, M. B. (2026). Open spaces as biocultural heritage: perspectives on cultural decentrality, resilience and sustainability in Rio de Janeiro’s metropolitan landscape. Built Heritage, 10(1), Article 72. https://doi.org/10.1186/s43238-026-00315-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s43238-026-00315-2

Keywords: biocultural heritage, Rio de Janeiro, Rocinha Ecological Park, Nova Iguaçu Municipal Natural Park, cultural decentrality, socioenvironmental resilience, peripheral communities, governance, living heritage, university partnerships, Atlantic Forest, heritage management