4.1. The Search for Indicators and Typologies to Characterize Metropolitan Areas
This research has demonstrated the complexity and challenges that emerge in addressing the MRSP through a system of established indicators. Which indicators are representative of the quality of the environment in urban areas? Are they related to sustainability? These responses are not consensual and depending on the methodological approach, different results are attained.
The quest for sustainability leads to strategic formulations that are aimed to result in public policy. These, in turn, must have measurement parameters so that the monitoring, overtime, is carried out, partly due to the use of indicators. Furthermore, defining a condition of sustainable development consists in operationalization of a concept and indicators [
31]. Regarding environmental issues, for Bellen (2006) [
32], the lack of consensus of a unified definition within this field of study creates a challenge when identifying indicators. The vast majority of existing and used indicator systems have been developed for specific reasons and cannot be considered indicators of sustainability per se due to their lack of interconnection. However, they often have representative potential within the context of sustainable development.
The set of indicators selected referred to the environmental quality of municipalities, reflecting their environmental health characteristics and their sustainability. Environmental quality contributes significantly to social welfare, public health, and urban sustainability. In this context, urban sustainability can be defined as a dimension of development, since it represents the possibility of ensuring sociopolitical changes that do not compromise the ecological and social systems in which communities are sustained [
33].
In addition to the social and economic indicators used in the analysis of health situations, the DPSEEA model allows the incorporation of environmental indicators related to the ecological integrity of the ecosystems, acknowledging the importance that environmental quality and services provided by ecosystems have to achieve health and well-being [
19].
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) [
34] defines services as the benefits that people get from the ecosystem. It is possible to include provision services such as food and water; service regulations such as preventing floods, severe droughts, soil deterioration and diseases; supporting services such as soil formation and nutrient cycling; cultural services such as leisure, spiritual, religious and other nonmaterial benefits. Therefore, the extensive vegetative coverage, especially the native forest located in regions of water sources or watersheds, is a provider of ecosystem services. In this study, to identify municipalities that provide ecosystem services, indicators of the percentage of areas of protected water sources and native vegetation were used. However, no indicator was used to identify ecosystem degradation. For indicators of carbon emissions that contribute to unsustainability, the indicator of CO
2 emissions in millions of tons was provided by the Secretary of Energy of the State of São Paulo.
4.2. Limitations
The use of indicators as support for the development of public policies carries some challenges and limitations that emerged throughout the development of this work. For instance, economic indicators such as GDP were not included in the statistical analysis given that they are not reliable for evaluating other dimensions that are crucial for social and environmental development [
35,
36].
Regarding economic indicators, the 1980s were the most widespread socially. Well-known indicators such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), interest rate, public deficit, and other macroeconomic statistics are widely used in decision-making in public and private instances. However, economic indicators do not respond to the need to measure and therefore assess other crucial dimensions of development, such as social and environmental, and may only represent economic growth [
25].
Veiga (2010) [
36], citing the "Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress”—by the Stiglitz–Sen–Fitoussi Commission (2009), notes that it is one thing to measure performance, another to measure quality of life (welfare), and a third is to measure sustainability. For the author, it is important to keep in mind the recommendations of the document on sustainability that assume that economic development and quality of life are measured by new indicators that have nothing to do with current GDP and HDI (Human Development Index). According to Martínez-Alier (2007) [
37], there is a great complexity when trying to reconcile economic expansion and conservation of the environment, as social and environmental problems arise as considerations of suggestion or third order when, in modern societies, the growth of Gross Domestic Product continues being the most used reference.
Finding values that encompass the environmental aspects of sustainability requires the search for nonmonetary indicators that approach the dangerous levels of environmental damage, such as those associated with climate change. According to Veiga (2010) [
36], well-calculated indicators for carbon emissions could be indicators of contributions to unsustainability, as well as similar measures for water resource impairment and biodiversity erosion. For the author, perhaps, these sets of indicators would suffice to show how far off the path of sustainability is.There is a difficulty in finding environmental indicators related to ecosystems and natural resources according to Freitas et al. (2007) [
38]. That is due to the scarcity of indicators for this area and the fragmented view of the relationship between health and environment expressed by the feeble scientific production that considers the interface between ecosystems and human health.
Regarding health indicators, the most traditional ones were selected, such as sanitation (water supply and sanitary sewage collection and garbage collection), and morbidity as hospitalization rates for infectious and respiratory diseases. As observed, many environmental indicators are still restricted to sanitation, which made it difficult to analyze the environmental situation of municipalities in the metropolitan area. Another challenge was the difficulty in finding indicators related to air quality, one of the world’s greatest environmental health challenges. The Environmental Company of the State of São Paulo’s (CETESB) monitoring network focuses on the center of the city of São Paulo but lacks air quality data for each municipality, limiting to general values for the MRSP as a whole.
Considering the period studied, the selected indicators mirrored the interval between the years 2005 and 2010 since most of the data adopted comes from the 2010 Census. Moreover, many indicators could not be considered because they did not have values for all. In this study, the DPSEEA matrix could be applied as an auxiliary tool for selecting environmental health indicators with a potential in the urban sustainability context to compose the typology. However, the interrelations of the matrix dimensions that determine and mediate the process of social production of health-disease could not be interpreted, since there are gaps in indicators, which prevented them from being considered in the analysis, making it impossible for the dimensions to be expressed in totality. Thus, as more and better information becomes available in public systems, these methodological gaps are expected to lower in the future.
4.3. Building a New Approach
Contrary to the frequent precarious overlap in socioeconomic, housing and public service quality, environmental conditions do not necessarily move in the same direction. There is spatial coincidence of urban precariousness and remnants of green areas, where the main areas providing ecosystem services are located. This could be observed in the case of municipalities of types 1 and 3 with indicators of smaller values for sanitation, but with the highest values for the indicators of water stock and native vegetation protected areas. On the other hand, type 2 municipalities have better values for sanitation indicators, but they reveal a larger social inequality and, in relation to the indicators of vegetation cover, have lower values.
The two indicators that represent the provision of ecosystem services in established clusters, percentage of stock of water areas protected by laws, and percentage of native vegetation are areas established by the public power with specific legislation.
The percentage of native vegetation cut in each municipality provided by the Forest Institute of the State of São Paulo (FI) provides a survey of the Integral Protection Units and Units of Sustainable Use that shelters categories as to the form of protection and permitted uses regulated by the National System of Conservation Units (NSCU) Law Nº. 9.985/2000 (National System of Conservation Units, 2011) [
39].
The fragmentation of the metropolis into administrative units based on political and economic principles differs from the spatial distribution of ecosystem characteristics. According to Steiner (2004) [
40], city limits can be natural, political, and administrative, thus political borders may or may not correspond to natural borders.This lack of correspondence between natural and administrative systems, however, entails problems of resilience of urban environments to ecological phenomena.
There is an environmental interconnectivity among the municipalities since the forest remnants and the water source areas are connected across borders. This may reverse the hierarchy of an economic centrality when we try to prioritize public policies for environmental preservation. We know that there is a flow of economic and social exchanges between the municipality of São Paulo—the main economic pole of the metropolitan system—and the other cities that constitute it. However, cities that have few environmental resources in their territories have an interdependence of environmental resources from other localities.
Interconnected municipal forest fragments allow gene flow between fauna and flora species, enhancing biodiversity conservation. In addition, they guarantee water resources and soil conservation, including the balance of climate and landscape. These remnants maintain the environmental balance of the metropolitan system and the survival of large cities that consume many resources to keep the economic system in operation. The applied analysis of a metropolitan region can contribute to expand the understandings over megacities, those that can be interpreted as socioecological systems in which there is a need to apprehend cross-scale interactions and a sort of dynamics and centralities characterizing a panarchy (Walker et al. 2004) [
41], in the sense of multiple domains of providing necessary ecosystem services as well as demands for natural resources.
4.4. Integrated Approach
In establishing the typology, we were able to obtain a general view of the MRSP by observing through the selected indicators the distribution of some of its social and environmental characteristics. Areas with better infrastructure and areas with urban precariousness in socioeconomic terms could be observed, but in the meantime, they have environmental resources. As there is an environmental interconnectivity among municipalities, identifying these characteristics is of strategic importance for metropolitan sustainability.
In Brazil, policies for public management are local and centralized with municipal autonomy, since the 1988 Federal Constitution decentralized municipal resources and competences prioritizing local autonomy. However, this political centralization can affect the sustainability of regional systems, as municipalities become increasingly interdependent. Using the regional scale as a planning and management unit offers the possibility of gathering answers beyond the municipal scale, especially because of the problems caused by economic integration of cities, such as environmental degradation, lack of basic sanitation, unemployment, lack of urban infrastructure, and violence arising from socio-spatial segregation have become more intense. The regional scale is one way of saying that the problems in restructuring these areas affect more than one city, thus fomenting the political discussion about municipal spaces integrated and marked by common institutional challenges.
Examples of environmental problems of metropolitan magnitude include the case of air pollution not confined to a municipality and water scarcity, since municipalities with larger water sources, which offer important ecosystem services, are mostly located in the periphery of the São Paulo Metropolitan Region. Disregarding these issues could lead to impairment of water production.
The discussion about the legalization of instruments that guide the planning and management of metropolitan areas is recent in Brazil, as can be seen from the publications of current legislation. The Metropole Statue, Federal Law Nº. 13.089 [
42] establishes the legislation and general guidelines for the planning, management, and execution of public functions of common interest in metropolitan regions and state-established urban agglomerations, and general rules on integrated urban development and other instruments of intercorporate governance. The Metropole Statute was sanctioned in 2015 and modified by a provisional measure Nº. 818 in 2018.
The Statute established an integrated development of metropolitan regions and urban agglomerations via the following instruments:
Integrated Urban Development Plan (IUDP);
Interfederative Sector Plans;
Public Funds;
Interfederated Urban Consortium Operations;
Zones for shared application of urban planning instruments provided for in Law Nº. 10.257, of 10 July 2001;
Public Consortia, pursuant to Law Nº. 11.107, of 6April 2005;
Cooperation Agreements;
Management Contracts;
Compensation for environmental services or other services rendered by the municipality to the urban territorial unit;
Interfederative Public–Private Partnerships.
Of all the mentioned instruments, the main one to promote integrated urban development are the IUDPs because they are responsible for making the City Master Plans compatible with the integrated urban development of the urban territorial unit to which they belong. The legislation required that all metropolitan areas and Brazilian urban agglomerations develop, until 31 December 2021, their Urban Development Integrated Plans (IUDPs). After its approval, the municipalities that integrate these territorial units must reconcile their Municipal Director plans with the new rules (Urban Development Integrated Plan of MRSP, 2016) [
43].
The MRSP IUDP establishes the guidelines to urban and regional development of the territory following three developmental axes: territorial and inclusive urban cohesion; territorial connectivity and economic competitiveness and metropolitan governance.
Among the strategic guidelines proposed by the IUDP is the structuring of a network of metropolitan poles to improve the quality of life in areas more distant from the more consolidated urban centers. With respect to the physical-territorial dimension closely related to the sustainability of the ecosystem services of the regional territories, the IUDP mentions that the orientation of the urban occupation, the intensification of the use of the idle urban areas, the improvement of the distribution of the activities in the territory, the guarantee of supply of water for future generations, the promotion of ecological corridors to maintain biodiversity and preserve water sources, and the guarantee of a collectively constructed legal framework are guidelines of the plan as a whole. This demonstrates how important the environmental dimension is in issues involving the planning and management of regional territories to ensure the sustainability of natural resources and the quality of life of populations (Urban Development Integrated Plan of MRSP, 2016) [
43].
The typology in Environmental Health is in line with the integrated development instruments established by metropolitan legislation as it considers indicators related to two important issues of the IUDPs: the preservation of the environmental heritage and the ability to produce ecosystem services alongside with the reduction of inequalities. The typology allows a visualization of the plurality of characteristics of a heterogeneous development that can be found within the municipalities that compose the MRSP.
Using as a territorial unit of analysis a metropolitan region contributes to draw the attention of the relevance that the metropolitan agenda has for the country considering that the municipalities are interdependent both socioeconomically and environmentally and the importance of this level for the formulation and planning instruments for territorial management. This study showed how the typology allows the identification of municipalities with great environmental heritage and social vulnerabilities, directing priority actions to these areas.
Once identified, the municipalities that are natural resource providers, but that have infrastructure deficits and greater inequities, are priorities for thinking about programs and direct actions that involve different levels of government and social actors. Elaborating a statistical instrument that allows the public power to visualize these areas can facilitate actions to reach out to municipalities that are more vulnerable. Lack of sanitation infrastructure (precarious sanitation, water management, and solid waste) is associated with degraded water supply areas resulting in poor quality of distributed water, exposing the population to water shortages and diseases.
Results from this study suggest that the metropolis management, particularly in regards to sustainability, must be conducted in an intermunicipal and integrated approach. Disregarding the heterogeneity of conditions in each locality of the metropolitan system may result in the failure and unsustainability of public policies when cities and its surrounding municipalities are considered in isolation.
The typology approach used in this study provides support to encourage the formation of cooperative political arrangements between municipalities. Clusters formed by their similarities share common issues and deficits, constituting areas with potential for the organization of intermunicipal cooperation groupings.
In Brazil, the Constitution regulates and provides for the formation of cooperative instruments via the municipal public consortia regulated by Federal Law Nº. 11.107/2005 [
44]. Cooperation between the federative units is an alternative to promoting the development and quality of municipalities in order to solve problems and obtain joint results of a nature superior to the individual political, financial, and operational capacities of the municipalities, without losing the capacity of local governments to make their own decisions.
This association could allow better provision of social services to the entire population and preserve natural resources. However, this study has seen that as municipal consortium systems are a possibility for the formulation and management of public policies at the regional level, there are still limits to the efficiency of these arrangements. In practice, only interested municipalities adhere to intermunicipal management for some specific urban issues (e.g., solid waste management, sanitation, and water sources). Another challenge is the discontinuity of the programs and political arrangements with public management changes.
The methodological approach of this work is an innovation in terms of thinking about a metropolitan region in an integrated, decentralized way. It prioritizes the environmental dimension as the fundamental guide of urban planning to provide quality of life of its inhabitants beyond economic development. Few academic studies focus on the regional territory as a planning unit [
9]. Generally, studies are more local and centralized in the administrative limits of the municipal autonomy.
Integrated regional approaches are increasingly fundamental to encompass the question of the sustainability of large metropolitan regions and their adjacent areas of influence, as they are beyond the domain of isolated administrative capacity of municipalities, necessitating regional and global political articulations.