Os Perímetros Irrigados do Baixo Jagurige no estado do Ceará [Brasil]: uma experiência referencial de projeto territorial sustentável

• Main Authors: André Munhoz de Argollo Ferrão, Luci Mehry Martins Braga, Carlos Eduardo Pozzer
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Confins 2014-08-01
• Series: Confins
• Subjects: River basin planning; water resource management; project planning; heritage and landscape; regional development; territorial planning
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/confins/9725

Territorial planning, including urban or rural areas, must free itself from administrative, legal or historical limits to face the conditions of socioeconomic, cultural and environmental dynamics within regional context. Considering watersheds as basic units for water ressources planning and management, and as the essential focus of sustainable territorial projects, allows to appreciate them as part of regional identity, their heritage and their resources resulting in their cultural landscape. Development plans or water conservation may be allies for programs that enable projects to generate employment and income for the people involved. If rivers are vectors that connect regional areas, their preservation should be seen as a natural link to the implementation of sustainable territorial projects. Regional planning is faced with a complex territorial context in which overlapping thematic layers that identify a region from its assets converted into resources. To promote development in certain regions of Brazil, the state printed different policies employing public capital and attracting private capital. As with the implementation processes of the Lower Jaguaribe Irrigated Perimeters (state of Ceará, in Northeastern Brazil), where references and conceptual strategies of urban thought can be recognized. We can observe, for example, reflections of deployment model of Owen cooperative villages, the Howard system of cities, the concepts of Geddes, among which those taking the basin as the basic unit of regional planning, and strategies of urban RPAA and TVA. Therefore, the Lower Irrigated Perimeters of Jaguaribe constitute a referential experience of territorial sustainable design in Brazilian context, and its deployment is due to a partnership between the Study Group on Jaguaribe Valley (GEVJ) and Northeast Development Superintendency (SUDENE), in cooperation with French government through French Institute of Scientific Research for Development in Cooperation (ORSTOM) in the early 1960s.