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Nature, urban life and the deep structures of urban belonging: a retrospective on leverage points in Porto, Portugal
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Resumo(s)
Some images stay with us long after the fieldwork ends. An elderly man sitting alone beneath a plane tree in the Jardim da Corujeira; a homeless person sheltering in the bandstand of Arca d'Água; a couple silently reading in the shade of the Cordoaria. Four years after concluding doctoral research on urban green spaces (UGS) in Porto, Portugal, these scenes continue to inform how I understand the city. They speak of something that ecosystem service metrics and resilience indicators rarely capture: the quiet, embodied, and deeply human work that urban nature performs in sustaining the very possibility of inhabiting a city. Contemporary urban governance, dominated by the languages of optimization, smart infrastructure, and techno-managerial efficiency, tends to reduce nature to a functional instrument. This perspective article argues that such framings, however necessary, operate at the shallowest levels of systemic intervention. Drawing on the methodological triangulation of my doctoral work—an ecosystem services assessment grid, a user survey, and human behavior mapping of 979 users across four contrasting spaces—I revisit the empirical evidence of a "two-speed city" marked by profound environmental injustice. From this retrospective vantage point, I propose the concept of deep structures of urban belonging to argue that UGS are relational infrastructures that mediate coexistence, memory, and ecological consciousness. The deepest urban leverage point, I suggest, is neither technological nor infrastructural. It is the slow transformation of how we collectively imagine, inhabit, and share the city with the living world.
Descrição
Palavras-chave
Affordances Environmental justice Heterotopia Leverage points Relational ecology Urban green spaces Urban sociology
Contexto Educativo
Citação
Vidal DG (2026) Nature, urban life and the deep structures of urban belonging: a retrospective on leverage points in Porto, Portugal. Front. Sustain. Cities 8:1903445. doi: 10.3389/frsc.2026.1903445
Editora
Frontiers