Ilha de Guaratiba: Green Landscape for Whom?

Abstract

This research deals with expectations and conflicts concerning green/rural landscape images in the social imagination, which from the 1970s onward, led inhabitants from different parts of Rio de Janeiro, even those originally from wealthy neighborhoods, to  move to Ilha de Guaratiba, an area located on the built-up edge of the city. The first outsiders to move in during the 1970s and 1980s set up hobby farms and in the following decade gated residential areas 
appeared. This last kind of land development together with municipal government re-zoning the area as a middle-class suburb generated conflicting expectations between older residents who were more rural orientated but wanted urban improvements and the hobby farmers who wanted to preserve the green landscape which had originally attracted them to the place.